The British Blues Network: Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity 0472036998, 9780472036998

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The British Blues Network

The British Blues Network Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity Andrew Kellett

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Kellett All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-­free paper 2020 2019 2018 2017  4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­13052-­8 (Hardcover : alk paper) ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­03699-­8 (Paper : alk paper) ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­12320-­9 (E-­book)

Acknowledgments

This book began life as my doctoral dissertation in modern European history, which I earned from the University of Maryland-­College Park in 2008. The research, writing, and revision process has thus been quite a long one, and as a result I have incurred debts of gratitude for the assistance of literally dozens of people. I should like to thank the numerous professors, colleagues, and friends at the University of Maryland-­College Park for their support and helpful feedback at every stage of the project. Special thanks are due to my graduate advisor, Jeffrey Herf, for being among the first to see the potential contributions to European and transatlantic intellectual and cultural history of a dissertation on British blues and rock music and for being a continued advocate of my work. I have been the beneficiary of generous funding to see this project through to the end, and for that I must thank the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland-­College Park, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of Popular Music at Case Western Reserve University, and Harford Community College. I was extremely fortunate to have had the assistance of the archival staff at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum Library and Archives, particularly Jennie Thomas, the head archivist. These archives are a wealth of useful information, including rare publications and other important ephemera, and I could not have navigated and made use of them without her or her staff. I would also like to thank three friends and colleagues who provided absolutely crucial assistance in the latter stages in proofreading and editing the book: Kurt Doan, Kelley Fann, and Chas Reed. This book is much more fluid, well written, and concise than it was as a dissertation, and they played no small part in that.

vi  •  Acknowledgments

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Julie Mancine, for her support, her encouragement, her thorough critical feedback, and her enthusiasm for the subject matter. To everyone I have left unnamed, rest assured that I also owe you my deep gratitude. This book could not be what it is without your help, support, and advice.

Contents

Introduction1 1  •  Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation: The Socioeconomic

and Cultural Background

2  •  Trying to Make London My Home: Introductory

Encounters with the Blues

3  •  But My Dad Was Black: Masculinity, Mobility,

and Blues Culture in Britain

4  •  Blues Brothers: Camaraderie, Collaboration,

and Competition in the British Blues Network

5  •  I Just Can’t Be Satisfied: Between Authenticity and Creativity

24 49 74 106 142

Conclusions176 Notes187 Selected Bibliography

223

Index249

Introduction Since the early 1960s people in the States have seemingly depended on the British to chew our meat for us . . . well, we shouldn’t hold a grudge against our cousins just because they appreciate American blues music more than we do! —­Chris Douring and Chip Stern (1981)1

This book is about the blues and its impact in Great Britain, and it is also about the rock music made in the 1960s and 1970s by young, mostly male British musicians who were inspired by the blues. It is, at heart, a way of making sense of two distinct yet related historical statements about that music. The first is cultural historian David Christopher’s assertion that “by the mid-­1970s all the major [rock] bands in the world were British.” The second is music critic and historian Robert Shelton’s argument that “musical developments” made by British groups such as Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin were “more imaginative” than those made by their American counterparts. Christopher’s statement is misleading; of course there were popular and important American bands during this period, and there had been for a decade or more. But one can make the less strident, but more accurate, argument that by the 1970s popular musical expression was dominated by British groups and the music they had been recording since the previous decade. Christopher’s and Shelton’s claims are all the more striking when one considers that the United States is the place where rock ‘n’ roll was invented, and yet by the 1970s British bands were arguably outpacing their transatlantic counterparts with more imaginative and innovative musical expression. The British Blues Network will explain how and why this happened.2 In order to do so, it will be first necessary to explain the unique methods by which some young, white, mostly middle-­class British men consumed and appropriated African-­American blues music. The British Blues Network relates how and why, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a subset of these consumers formed a more or less cohesive social network and attempted to emu-

2  •  The British Blues Network

late the blues by forming their own bands. It examines how these young Britons became what blues historian Francis Davis has called “hands-­on preservationists,” that is, devotees who strove, by performing the blues and publicizing its merits, to spread what they felt was the “gospel” to an outside world that seemed not to know or care much about the music, its messages, or its most important practitioners.3 However, groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and Cream were not content merely to churn out covers, however earnestly respectful, of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. If they had, it is likely that the world at large would no longer find the music they made worthwhile. So, while the first story being told here is one of admiration and emulation, the second is one of synthesis, recombination, and innovation. The British Blues Network examines how the members of this network used the tropes, vocabulary, and mythology of the blues to create a new form of popular music that was clearly influenced by the blues while also building on that template with other musical and artistic statements. This rock music would dominate popular cultural expression and consumption on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s well into the present day. The British Blues Network is a work of transatlantic intellectual and cultural history. It uses the development of popular music and youth culture to address issues that have traditionally been central to the study of ideas and cultures. The cultural exchange between African-­American blues and British rock music is bound up with issues such as the role of interpersonal relationships in facilitating the exchange of ideas and culture, the integration of multiple cultural traditions (often from multiple national contexts) into a new cultural form that is derivative of both but unique, the impact of distance and proximity in impelling cultural innovation, the question of why bursts of creativity happen in distinct places at distinct times, and the performance and negotiation of gender and sexual identities using mass consumer culture. These are classic issues with which intellectual and cultural historians have dealt for decades, whether at the level of Freudian psychoanalysis, French Impressionist painting, or modernist literature. Thus, this book seeks a far broader audience than merely that which would be interested in American blues, British rock music, or both. The British Blues: Contexts and Causal Factors

As Britons, the enthusiasts-­turned-­performers who comprised the British blues network found that they could benefit from their proximity to, and distance from, the United States and its culture. This combination of proximity and distance enabled British performers to relate to that culture in

Introduction  •  3

interesting and innovative ways. The most important commonality between Britons and Americans is that both speak the English language; the common language was crucial to explaining Britain’s cultural dominance.4 In addition to a shared language, Britain and the United States share some of the same “folkways”; the blues itself has its roots not only in West African griot music but also in the folk musical traditions of the British Isles. (Indeed, these close-­to-­home traditions would be mined for inspiration and then re-­injected into British rock music in the early 1970s.)5 However, Britain was also distant enough from America that young Britons developed a fresh (and sometimes critical) outsiders’ perspective on American culture. The blues, as a cultural form and a social text, meant specific things to both black and white audiences in America during the 1940s and 1950s. These meanings, derived from the immediate social contexts in which blacks and whites interacted, culturally, socially, and economically, shaped audience responses to the music—­and they differed, sometimes wildly, along racial, class, and age lines. But British audiences were separated from these contexts; they had not grown up with much institutionalized racism, and they had little factual knowledge, besides what they could glean from books, of what it would have actually “meant” to be a lower-­class black or white Southerner. Their method of learning the blues—­via records, radio broadcasts, and books, as opposed to actual experience of African-­American life—­was taken by some critics as a weakness in the British blues boom. But I argue that, in terms of creativity and innovation, it was actually an important strength. Young Britons believed that they could stand apart from the ideological quicksand of racism and “white guilt” that often impeded their American counterparts’ attempts to appropriate the blues and play it with sincerity.6 Author and music critic John Milward has asserted, “In Britain, the blues was a musical choice that . . . owed more to bohemian instincts and adolescent rebellion than race.”7 In the following chapters, I argue that there was more to it than just “bohemian instincts and adolescent rebellion.” The British strongly believed themselves free of racial considerations and thus approached the blues from a different sociocultural footing. As such, they proceeded to borrow freely, absorbing styles and genres at will and piecing together repertoires based on whatever they liked (or thought audiences might like). Borrowing and Bricolage

The trend toward borrowing and amalgamation has been a defining characteristic of British culture for centuries. Politically, Great Britain itself is an amalgam of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh polities, and what can be

4  •  The British Blues Network

called “English” culture was forged out of an admixture of Germanic, Latin, Celtic, and French elements.8 A broader “British” culture, furthermore, would also include the contributions made by centuries’ worth of migrants from Europe and—­particularly since the late 1940s—­Britain’s former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This tendency can be traced at least as far back as the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, who routinely borrowed characters and plot devices from ancient Greek drama, Celtic legends, French and Italian melodramas, and religious passion plays, with little regard for what could or should be mixed together. Author Peter Ackroyd points out “a certain continuity of expression” encompassing, among other examples, “Spenser delight[ing] in his alterations of mood” and “Marlowe specialis[ing] in comedy and horror mixed.”9 In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens proved that this tradition of often contrary mixing was still alive when he referred to the practice of alternating dramatic and comedic elements in English fiction as “streaky well-­cured bacon.”10 We can also see the tendency toward borrowing and bricolage in British classical music, in which, before twentieth-­century composers such as Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams started to emphasize English folk themes overtly in their work, Britain gained a reputation for borrowing forms and styles from the Continent and adapting them in interesting ways. In the 1960s, British blues enthusiasts drew on this long-­standing tradition by producing a varied musical mélange. First into the blender went American styles such as blues, soul, jazz, and country-­and-­western; subsequently, English folk and sea chanteys and non-­Western styles such as Indian raga. Centuries’ worth of British cultural borrowing was not necessarily a conscious influence on British rock musicians, but I argue that it helped prepare the ground for what would come. British Decline and the New American Superpower

The British Blues Network is also a history of how people in Britain received and perceived American culture. This culture, and the imagined “America” that came with it, has been a source of fascination for Europeans since the discovery of the New World. This transatlantic transmission intensified in the late Victorian period with the onset of “mass culture” and again after the Second World War, when America became the dominant power in the West. Like many of the forms of American culture—­for example, Hollywood films, comic books, hamburgers, and Coca-­Cola—­blues and rock ‘n’ roll music subtly transmitted notions of American life, with an emphasis on the freedom and mobility that supposedly defined America. These fed ex-

Introduction  •  5

isting assumptions about America among audiences in both Britain and Western Europe. Reading testimony from British blues enthusiasts, it is obvious that these young men used the blues either to form ideas about America and its culture or to add texture to existing ideas about both. The positive, creative response of Britons who began as consumers of American culture but ended up as performers and interpreters of it is a vital part of the historical discussion of Euro-­American cultural exchange after 1945. This book discusses how British consumers-­cum-­producers used blues and rock ‘n’ roll music to fill a perceived need in their own cultural situation. Although Great Britain had defeated the Nazis and defended democracy, it seemed to have become a small, gray, second-­rate power since the war—­ financially strapped and culturally exhausted—­a new “sick man of Europe” perhaps.11 It was everywhere in retreat from its formerly vast empire (no matter with how much good grace Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was organizing the withdrawal) and uncertain about its place in the world.12 It is doubtful whether young men like Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton gave much thought to the loss, say, of India or Kenya, but they cannot have escaped the prevailing national mood of uncertainty and ossification. In this culture of perceived national decline, British blues enthusiasts constructed America as a place where there was still adventure and mobility, where anything was possible, and where—­according to Keith Richards—­“the chicks looked better.”13 This was how British “sons” perceived the lives of their African-­ American blues “fathers,” but it was also more generally how they perceived American life—­and they constructed an entire alternative masculine persona accordingly. For five decades, the decline of British power and influence has been the subject of an extensive historiography of its own. So has the so-­called special relationship between Great Britain and the United States, which has had political, diplomatic, and economic dimensions but also a cultural dimension to which scholars are recently beginning to accord serious attention.14 In making a contribution to these two interrelated yet distinct historiographies, The British Blues Network responds, in a small way, to a famous remark made during the Second World War by future British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Speaking to an associate, Macmillan drew on the British aristocracy’s inexhaustible storehouse of classical allusions to lay out his ideal for the “special relationship.” We  .  .  . are the Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—­great big, vulgar people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more un-

6  •  The British Blues Network

spoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run [Allied Forces Headquarters] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.15

Leaving aside the fact that this would cast Britons in the role of “slaves,” it is clear that Macmillan envisioned a post-­1945 world where the Americans provided the muscle and the money while the British supplied the know-­ how and the sophistication necessary to run a world empire. Or, as an old rhyme put it: In Washington Lord Halifax Once whispered to Lord Keynes “It’s true they’ve all the moneybags But we have all the brains.”16 The “special relationship” was meant to be symbiotic, to some extent, with each nation-­state benefiting from the other’s contributions. Looking at the subsequent history, in military, political, and economic terms, it is obvious that such a symbiosis never really occurred. The British expedition to Suez in 1956 was stranded by the withdrawal of American support and capital. Since then, Macmillan and many of his successors at 10 Downing Street have played an unequal role in their public political relationship with American presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. The British Blues Network advances the argument that, although the equal symbiosis may never have occurred in the world of diplomacy or economics, the cultural relationship between American and British musicians was a noteworthy instance where it did. The development of blues-­based popular music, as it is chronicled in this study, was not merely another area where America exported popular culture and Britain passively received it. Through the efforts of British rock bands, the direction of transatlantic cultural production shifted, so that by 1965 Britain was exporting popular culture to America and American fans and musicians were being influenced by it. Through American musicians’ responses to the British Invasion, a transatlantic dialogue began in which neither nation’s musicians simply dictated the terms of cultural expression to those of the other. Here, at the level of popular music and youth culture, we can see the special relationship operating as British politicians like Macmillan had dreamed it could. Here we may see a way in which the British attempted to “relocate” their dominance.

Introduction  •  7

The British Blues: Networks

Finally, British dominance in popular music can be explained by the presence of a dense network of urban centers that enabled young people—­first as consumers and then as producers of mass popular culture—­to foster dialogues with each other. Although London is the intellectual and cultural hub of Great Britain, other important urban centers, such as Liverpool and Birmingham, are less than four hours away by train. Social, economic, and cultural connectivity increased in the late 1950s with the construction and opening of two new national motorways—­the M6 and M1 in 1958 and 1959, respectively.17 This meant that ideas and cultural products could be easily disseminated throughout Britain.18 Furthermore, once blues enthusiasts became active performers, they could also travel with relative ease to perform in urban centers with similarly developing blues “scenes.” For example, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ home base in 1965 was London, but the group would often perform gigs in Birmingham and Newcastle, with a return to London in between, in the span of one day.19 Such treks were grueling but possible. The British situation may be favorably compared to that in France, where most of the nation’s cultural and intellectual ferment is concentrated in Paris but few other major urban cultural centers are nearby, or in the United States, where traveling even between Chicago and New York requires the better part of a day’s journey by car or train.20 Aided by geography and advances in travel and communication, the British blues boom was also driven along by the interconnectivity of what I call an “interpersonal cultural network.” The members of this network were often of a broadly defined generation. They all knew each other socially (or at least shared common acquaintances). They appraised each other’s work and relied on each other for inspiration, discussion, and criticism. They were certainly not all friends and more often were fierce rivals. But they regarded themselves as peers—­steeped in the same idioms and often devoted to similar aesthetic and moral ideals. The network’s combination of camaraderie, friendly and not so friendly rivalry, and petty jealousy undoubtedly spurred its members to greater cultural achievements than might have been possible had they all been the best of friends—­or if they had been unaware of each other. In analyzing the interpersonal nature of the British “blues boom,” The British Blues Network joins an ever-­growing body of scholarship that explains why large-­scale bursts of creativity happen in certain definable places and times by focusing on similar interpersonal networks. Intellectual and cultural historians have done interesting and significant work by identifying

8  •  The British Blues Network

these networks, reconstructing the circumstances under which members gathered and collaborated with one another, and assessing the importance of such collaborations over the last four centuries. This historiography is certainly not limited to popular music. For example, Peter Gay has had enormous success using personal networks as a conceptual framework in which to describe the interconnectivity of Enlightenment philosophes in his two-­volume history The Enlightenment (1969). Ross King has addressed these issues with regard to the French Impressionists who redefined nineteenth-­century painting in his Judgment of Paris. And Dan Franck, Peter Gay, and Leah Dickerman have made similar, though separate, contributions on the influence of social scene, personal contacts, and network formation in the development of European Modernism and Dadaism.21 In works such as these, historians have enriched our understanding of intellectual thought and cultural production by recognizing that it mattered that thinkers knew, ate, drank, and cohabitated with each other and that their work would have been noticeably different (and arguably poorer) without the necessary influences provided by their peers. The same is true of the British blues network, and thus The British Blues Network will do likewise. Cast of Characters

The British blues scene consisted of three broad, often interlocking strata of young men. The first and largest stratum was composed of those who began as fans of blues music and remained at this level. They spent their Saturdays scouring Britain’s secondhand shops for precious vinyl, attended the rare live performances by African-­American blues musicians, and read whatever printed material they could obtain about the music. The rock musicians who emerged in Great Britain during this period began as members of this first stratum. In time a sizable minority slice of this stratum, not satisfied with the accessible amount of live blues music or printed material, went beyond the fan level and formed two further strata: one made up of active performers and the other of critics, journalists, and amateur historians. I focus the bulk of my attention on the young Britons who made up the performers’ stratum—­although in quite a few cases I rely on the critics’ category to provide necessary primary source evidence. When I use the term British blues network (and later blues-­rock network), I am referring to the performers’ stratum. This group was not a monolith, though, and each participant had slightly different inclinations as far as musical direction and influences went. Thus, whenever I use the term British blues network I am making a necessary generalization, confident that each assertion applies to a large

Introduction  •  9

enough number of these men to be analytically significant. I draw statements and examples from as wide a range of participants and opinions as possible, but there are doubtless important figures who receive barely a mention in this study. For manageability’s sake, I have chosen to focus on eleven main interlocutors, whose stories I return to often in this narrative: Jeff Beck, Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, Pete Townshend, and Steve Winwood. This group—­which, for better or worse, privileges guitarists and lead singers as a band’s major creative forces—­benefits from being representative yet diverse. There is ethnic diversity (e.g., most are English, but Davies is of Welsh and Stewart of Scottish extraction); geographic diversity (eight are from the greater London area, and four are from the Midlands or points farther north); and musical diversity (with varying degrees of influence from English folk, jazz, or country-­and-­western music). At the risk of seeming willfully controversial, I have chosen to focus in most cases on bands other than the Beatles. In making this choice, I am not arguing that the Beatles were unimportant—­they were incredibly important, of course. They do appear in this narrative when their stories intersect with those of my more central interlocutors. However, in certain key ways—­ especially as regards the less central role played by the blues in their musical upbringing—­the Beatles were often outliers who emerged at the same time as the blues scene elsewhere in Britain and made it possible for British blues bands to achieve initial success in America. Furthermore, I believe that the story of British blues-­influenced rock music is much more than “just” the story of the Beatles—­especially given the fact that serious academic attention has tended to concentrate on that band, often to the exclusion of the numerous other important figures examined in this study.22 The interpersonal network comprised of young British blues enthusiasts was vital to the diffusion of musical and artistic ideas throughout Britain, as well as to the development of rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. How the blues spread throughout Britain, its impact, the meanings with which it came to be laden, and everything that emerged musically as a result cannot be understood without recourse to interpersonal interaction. Most obviously, a relatively like-­minded group of peers provided the opportunity to form a band and play in public. Beyond that, the intellectual network also provided much-­needed discussion, inspiration, support, and bases for comparison among enthusiasts and performers. Much like an arms race, the British blues network’s members drove themselves to succeed and innovate in an atmosphere of almost constant one-­upmanship. It is unlikely that the most important British bands would have been

10  •  The British Blues Network

driven to experiment and become more musically sophisticated if there had been no one to impress or outsell. Would Bob Dylan have been moved to “go electric” without first hearing the Animals’ “The House of the Rising Sun”? Would Steve Winwood have found the right blend of jazz, blues, and English folk without his collaborators in Traffic? Would George Harrison have done as much to popularize the sitar if his compatriots in the Yardbirds and the Kinks were not experimenting with Indian music? Would Eric Clapton have created the haunting romantic plea “Layla” without the love triangle among himself, his good friend Harrison, and Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd? Finally, would albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The White Album, and Beggars Banquet have entered the world without the late 1960s camaraderie and competition between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? John Lennon famously sneered that the Rolling Stones merely did what the Beatles had done six months earlier, but this call-­and-­ response actually fueled both bands’ musical creativity.23 In business and economics, this is called market competition, and it usually results in greater innovation and better products. Such “what-­ifs” can obviously never be answered, but they are instructive in understanding the rich social and intellectual ferment in which transatlantic popular music was being produced at this time. It could be argued that all these individuals were supremely talented and might have scaled such creative heights without the “invidious comparison” (to borrow a phrase from Thorstein Veblen) provided by their comrades.24 But that is equally unanswerable, and the point remains that the cultural network did exist, that it did provide a laboratory and sounding board for its members, that it did spur them creatively, and that the results did innovate popular musical expression from the 1960s onward. The British Blues: Affiliation, Filiation, Invention, and Identity

Earlier I mentioned “relocations” of British dominance into other areas in an era of imperial collapse. By listening to and then performing the blues, young middle-­class British enthusiasts took one such symbolic relocation—­ from ordinary, everyday suburbia to American cities like Chicago and Memphis, and to the rural Mississippi Delta. The blues offered an alternative masculine ideal to which these young men could aspire, and a different set of “fathers” to whom they could adhere in preference to their perceived unsatisfactory cultural inheritance. In his 1983 work The World, the Text, and the Critic, theorist Edward Said drew a distinction between “filiation”

Introduction  •  11

and “affiliation” as sociocultural influences on the work of intellectuals and cultural commentators. Filiations are values, loyalties, and identifications that we inherit from our parents’ generation, whereas affiliations are those we choose for ourselves as maturing individuals forming our own identities—­often in contradiction to our filiations.25 Here the process of affiliation might easily be called “reverse adoption.” In enjoying blues music, seeking to learn all they could about it, and then emulating it, the British blues network staked a claim to being the white “sons” of faraway, often older African-­American “fathers.” Irrespective of the geographic, cultural, and economic distance between them—­and of what these fathers might have thought of the prospect of being adopted—­these young Britons looked up to their adoptive fathers for musical and personal guidance and vowed to carry on their musical legacy. This reverse adoption was at the heart of the British blues boom. The music of African-­American bluesmen—­and the uneven biographies that British enthusiasts pieced together from the scant source base—­offered these young men a more satisfying experience than the life of the “suburban organization man,” as well as an opportunity to assert some kind of dominance over the world around them. The “Bluesman” Persona

African-­American blues performers constructed a persona, the “bluesman,” and when they sang it was from this archetype’s perspective. The bluesman gained a measure of power and freedom in a world that often denied black men the most basic of civil rights. He achieved these things through his skill and knowledge (some supernaturally gained), his sexual dynamism, and his use of violence. Furthermore, the bluesman portrayed himself as a thoroughly modern man, at home in the sprawling urban cityscape and in almost perpetual motion via modern conveyances like automobiles and trains. The bluesman was just a persona, a way for the blues performer to negotiate an identity through his music. There is little historical evidence that the lives of individual black bluesmen matched the lifestyle about which they sang. However, many of their British acolytes took them at their word. To them the bluesman actually lived the life, and did the things, portrayed in the lyrics, thus, the key to appropriating even a portion of his power and knowledge was to do likewise. Thus the bluesman provided these young Britons with a blueprint (no pun intended) for how to “be a man.” It needs to be stated that there was hardly any real socioeconomic common ground to be had between these African-­American adoptive “fathers” and their younger British “sons.” The fathers were black and the victims of

12  •  The British Blues Network

centuries’ worth of racism and oppression in American society. The sons were white, mostly middle-­class, and British; since the Victorian era, this was a trio of identifiers that put them in the top rank of global power and privilege. Neither they nor their immediate relatives had any personal experience of enslavement or racism. In terms of class, British blues enthusiasts were at least upwardly mobile working class, although most, as mentioned, were comfortably middle class (so much so that some British blues enthusiasts from the so-­called stockbroker belt of Surrey, south of London, jokingly referred to their birthplace as the “Surrey Delta” to point up the sheer incongruity of being “as far from Mississippi as you can get”).26 Meanwhile, although there was a growing black middle class in America by the 1950s, the vast majority of African-­American people—­especially in the South—­did not and could not reasonably expect to belong to it. Most African Americans of this era were poor whether they worked as sharecroppers in the South or in other professions in the North. All the British blues enthusiasts discussed in this book obtained at least a secondary school education, and many attended postsecondary school (even if many did not finish it). Most African Americans in the American South did not finish high school, and—­as events in Arkansas and Mississippi in the late 1950s and early 1960s proved—­ university was not a realistic option for most. And yet many British blues enthusiasts have made attempts to bridge the gap and justify what they did by making some sort of identification with African Americans and their socioeconomic circumstances. Perhaps predictably, these have ranged from the vaguely comparable to the ludicrously offensive. Guitarist Eric Clapton claimed that, although he did not know economic poverty, he suffered from a sort of “emotional poverty” due to growing up as a “seven-­stone weakling” abandoned by first his father and then his mother and raised by his grandparents. This, he claimed, enabled him somehow to understand the pain and desperation he heard in the blues.27 And, as far actual economic poverty goes, although most of them could remember wartime rationing, it would be nonsense to claim that any members of the British blues network had experienced anything like the deprivation that often defined the lives of sharecropping African Americans in the Deep South. In his 2001 book Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey, bass guitarist Wyman observed that “many black musicians grew up in the Southern states of the US in difficult circumstances, something of a shared experience [with me].”28 He then backpedaled, saying, “In no way would I compare my upbringing to what black families in the Delta had to face,” before finally settling down to the claim that his childhood poverty was “one reason, perhaps, why I found

Introduction  •  13

myself relating so strongly, years later, to the feelings and attitudes inspired by the blues.”29 American folk music collector Alan Lomax asserted that young British men identified with “Negro prison and work songs” because they felt “imprisoned” by the English class system.30 Singer Eric Burdon simultaneously bore out this assertion and proved its essential absurdity when he claimed, in 2003, that the lives of African-­American slaves and coal miners from Burdon’s native Newcastle were similar because at the end of the workday the miners had “black faces, too”—­black with coal dust.31 Thus, to claim any real common experience with African Americans on socioeconomic grounds would seem rather bizarre—­even offensive. However, as this book makes clear, even if middle-­class white British kids and working-­class African-­American men did not have actual poverty and institutionalized racism in common, these were not the only things they had, or could have had, in common. For one thing, being white, middle-­class, and British had meant power and privilege during the days of the Empire. But by the 1950s the Empire was going to pieces and the United States had replaced Britain in terms of global power and prosperity. To some in Britain, this lack of power seemed to provide some commonality with underprivileged African Americans; to young Britons, both groups were now being told what to do by a white American establishment. Furthermore, as discussed in chapter 4, the hierarchical structure of the British educational system in the 1950s—­which slotted children into either more or less prestigious schools based on the results of standardized testing at age eleven—­left some young British men feeling like intellectual and social failures from a young age. Some of them gravitated toward the “safety valve” of art schools, which further encouraged them to think of themselves as creatively talented but misunderstood misfits. And, finally, the British discerned some common ground on the basis of shared heterosexual masculinity. “Ain’t but one kind of blues,” said Delta blues guitarist Eddie “Son” House, “and that consists of a male and female that’s in love.”32 The British took this common-­ denominator statement to heart. To be an African-­ lowest-­ American bluesman, as young white British men constructed him, was to have knowledge and skill not found in a classroom. It was to be a master seducer of the opposite sex—­something that would have resonated with young heterosexual men of any nationality and era. Finally, to be a bluesman was to have freedom and power, to go wherever one wanted and make one’s own decisions without a boss, a policeman, or a wife vetoing them. It was, quite simply, to be a man. One thing that is necessary to keep in mind is that British blues enthusiasts did not wish to identify with and emulate African Americans per se.

14  •  The British Blues Network

They wanted to identify with and emulate African-­American bluesmen. This may seem like hairsplitting, but it makes a difference. At no point will one find Eric Clapton or Mick Jagger sincerely wishing that they could become poor black sharecroppers, janitors, or factory workers. That would have been too much like real, everyday work, which was already staring them in the face. Clapton, in talking about his “emotional poverty,” stated that he thought the bluesman had “no options, no alternatives whatsoever other than just to sing and play, to ease his pain.” It was not the pain of the African-­American bluesman that Clapton wanted—­pain he claimed he had already. It was the array of options available to ease that pain that was attractive to him, and to many of his cohort. The distinction between real-­life pain and the options to cope with it was one the bluesman himself would have understood, and—­so the British thought—­it was why he became a bluesman in the first place. It is the fantastical distinction between a “Wild West” cowboy and a farmer in Missouri, between a Victorian era soldier in Kenya and an office clerk in Surrey, between a rock star and a suburban nine-­to-­fiver in Ohio. One might say, then, not that British blues enthusiasts wanted to be black but that they wanted to be cowboys—­and that they basically constructed the bluesman as a black cowboy. “Inventing” the Blues . . . and Blues “Authenticity”

These constructions have had much wider cultural ramifications than just the way in which a cohort of young British blues enthusiasts saw themselves and their blues “fathers.” As blues historian Elijah Wald has asserted, “For most modern listeners, the history, aesthetic, and sound of blues as a whole was formed by the Stones and a handful of their white, mostly English contemporaries. . . . [I]t is through their eyes that the rest of the world has come to see [the blues].”33 The British Blues Network joins a growing historiography that is interested in how white interlocutors not only discovered but also to a large extent “invented” the blues canon and, indeed, the notion of blues “authenticity” (and “inauthenticity”). According to Wald and historian Marybeth Hamilton, the genre we know today as “Delta blues” largely did not exist before white American record collectors and anthropologists sought “uncorrupted black singers, untainted by the city, by commerce, by the sights and sounds of modernity.”34 They found it in the obscure recordings of musicians like Charley Patton, Eddie “Son” House, and—­the sine qua non Delta blues figure—­Robert Johnson. These musicians were largely unknown even to most black record buyers in the Delta region, much less in the contemporary mainstream. However,

Introduction  •  15

white enthusiasts privileged their output out of all proportion to other, more mainstream forms of black popular music. Thus, blues has come to mean untutored rawness instead of skillful professionalism, rural antiquity instead of urban modernity, and male instead of female. Acoustic guitars and harmonicas were privileged over pianos and anything electrified. Musicians who found themselves on the wrong side of these dichotomies, such as the Mississippi Sheiks, Leroy Carr, Louis Jordan, Mamie Smith, and Fats Waller, were excluded from the canon as “inauthentic,” even though (in fact, because) they were far more popular with black audiences. As the evidence makes clear, Robert Johnson wanted nothing more than to “make it” as an urban commercial success—­he just did not live long enough.35 And, as both Hamilton and Wald discuss, this “invention” continued with the English blues acolytes who inherited much from the previous generation of white enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence Wald’s comment about the blues being a creation of the Rolling Stones. The British Blues Network proceeds in this vein but with a few qualifications. First, I argue that the white enthusiasts’ task of inventing the blues did exert an initial defining influence on the likes of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and the Animals. For one thing, they created a template that could not help but influence what younger British enthusiasts would have received as the blues tradition—­what it did and did not mean, and who could and could not play it. The British blues scene of the early to mid-­1960s did not simply spring fully formed from nowhere (or out of Muddy Waters’s head). In fact it was heavily influenced by discourses on blues “authenticity” that came before. For example, in the early 1960s, in an attempt to sell their products to a growing audience of mostly white folk enthusiasts, record companies often went into their vaults to find suitable material for reissue. This was how Columbia Records came to release sixteen of Robert Johnson’s recordings under the rather immodest title King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961. I will discuss this compilation further in chapter 2; for now suffice it to say that it made Johnson a hero to British enthusiasts, and it confirmed his place at the top of the blues pantheon—­a position he did not enjoy in America and perhaps would never have enjoyed without their proselytizing on his behalf.36 The white enthusiasts’ task of invention also partially predetermined young Britons’ interactions with the blues in another crucial way: it defined the ideal blues performer as old (middle aged if not outright elderly) and male. In African-­American society from the 1900s through the 1960s, performers that audiences would have recognized as playing blues were male and female, young and old. However, white revivalists claimed that, to quote Hamilton, “the bluesman embodied the tensions about modern masculin-

16  •  The British Blues Network

ity . . . [for] to them, authenticity had a male voice.”37 Furthermore, since they were convinced that such “authenticity” no longer existed in the modern era, white revivalists gravitated toward male performers from decades past whose records had not sold well—­meaning that by the 1950s and 1960s these “rediscovered” performers were often old and retired. The importance of this construction—­that the bluesman is by definition an old man—­is not to be underestimated. Young British blues enthusiasts affiliated with a coterie of African-­American musicians who were old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers—­and, as I will argue throughout, it was the perceived paternal-­ filial (and, by extension, fraternal) relationship that was of paramount importance in spurring the musical creativity that resulted. Who knows what direction popular music might have taken if blues authenticity had been previously defined as being the province of primarily young men or middle-­aged women? That being said, I argue that young British enthusiasts’ interaction with the blues and its predetermined heroes was not as simple as just continuing and entrenching the earlier revivalists’ Delta purism, full stop. Hamilton, as mentioned above, pitted that purism against slick, professional pop music, which had allegedly been “corrupted” by urban modernity. Yet, in analyzing the later British blues scene, it is clear just how attractive that “corruption” could be and how central this seems to have been to the British fascination with the blues in general. The lure of the haunted, rural drifter of the Delta “tradition” was strong, but so, too, were the “bright lights, big city,” the sharp menswear, and the Cadillacs of the “Chicago blues” tradition. Clapton could simultaneously call listening to Johnson a “religious experience” and profess to being “gobsmacked” by the slickness, skill, and silk suits of Muddy Waters and his band when they toured Britain in 1963.38 It should be noted that when the Rolling Stones finally had a break in their 1965 American tour and visited a location they considered hallowed ground, it was Chicago’s Chess Studios—­not a jook joint or “the crossroads” in Mississippi, nor anywhere else in the South. Thus, The British Blues Network argues, along with Wald and Hamilton, that the Rolling Stones and their compatriots did to a large extent invent what the blues means, sounds like, and looks like to subsequent generations of mostly white enthusiasts. It also goes further and argues that the Stones and others to a large extent invented the “rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle” as it is understood by fans and critics alike in the early twenty-­first century. But, to complicate Wald’s and Hamilton’s analyses, it also argues that they were far more catholic and inclusive in what raw materials they felt were authentic enough to include in the version of the blues they invented for wider consumption. This invention of the blues led to a strongly gendered bias in British con-

Introduction  •  17

sumers’ understanding of the music, if not in the music itself. If the only authentic blues was the kind played by raw, untutored, rural, male musicians, then urban, polished, female blues musicians would be marginalized if not omitted from the canon outright. And, if authenticity accrued only to musicians who played the guitar—­and since the guitar was used as a conceptual stand-­in for a penis—­then female blues musicians, who did not, by and large, play the guitar or have a penis, would be doubly marginalized and omitted. But the issue was not just that that women were marginalized within the canon or that the blues was “normalized” as male. Male blues musicians, operating in a heteronormative society even if they were themselves not heterosexual, wrote and sang from the perspective that men and women were necessary and confrontational opposites. The Western heterosexual male perspective—­not just in popular music but also in literature and “sitcom” television, among other media—­holds that men pursue women sexually, that men are the active and women the passive figures in any relationship, that the roles may not be reversed, and that once in a relationship a woman’s seeming raison d’être is to control the man and limit his freedom. This is the perspective that was hardwired into the blues, invented by the 1950s, and transmitted to Britain. The female blues musician was silenced, and so was her perspective. This resulted in British blues enthusiasts’ tendency to blind themselves to the existence of popular and important female American blues musicians such as Bessie Smith and “Ma” Rainey. (Aside from Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks,” one rarely finds female-­ produced blues songs covered by the likes of the Rolling Stones or Yardbirds.) The British blues network also found it nearly impossible to imagine the possibility that women could play a role in the “bluesman’s” world aside from that of passive sexual object or active impediment and adversary. This bled over into many British blues-­rock musicians’ personal lives, which are dotted with numerous one-­night stands and failed relationships. Consider Chrissie Shrimpton’s verdict on ex-­boyfriend Mick Jagger: “Mick doesn’t respect women. Mick doesn’t like women. He never has.”39 As a result, my work runs the risk of continuing such a gendered bias. The privileging not only of male actors over female but also of masculine perspectives over feminine—­as well as the emphasis on the construction of an often misogynist masculinity—­reflects the imbalance in the network itself. The imbalance is, on one level, what the book is about. It is a book about masculinity—­about young British male cultural producers who believed that African-­American blues musicians could offer them a way to “be a man” that was superior to what suburban postwar Britain had in store for them. And, what’s more, these young men thought of themselves as the “sons” of

18  •  The British Blues Network

African-­American blues “fathers.” So it only makes sense that the sons would read the lessons bequeathed to them by their fathers and act to emulate them. They thus created an ideally “boys-­only” world where women were either sexual objects to be enjoyed and discarded or obstacles to be avoided—­not actors with their own agency. A scholarly treatment of what British women (especially those in direct contact with Clapton, Plant, and Jagger et al.) thought of the blues in general, and of the doings of the blues-­obsessed men in their midst, would be most welcome. Unfortunately, perhaps, this is not that book. For three recent fine examples of the scholarly treatment of American female blues musicians and blues culture, I would direct the reader to Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, chapters 4 and 5 of Adam Gussow’s Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, and chapter 5 of Ulrich Adelt’s Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White.40 British Blues Eclecticism and the Scholarly Ethos

The prevailing ethos of the British blues boom that resulted was inquisitive, scholarly, and active. Rather than passively consuming the strange yet enthralling music they heard coming from their transistor radios and turntables, young blues enthusiasts actively went in search of more: more music like it and more information about both the music and its performers. Starting with the rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard, British blues “scholars” dug deeper and went farther back until they reached what they considered the ultimate “source” of this music—­the Delta blues exemplified by Patton, House, James, and Robert Johnson. Said Mick Jagger in a 2003 interview, “We were like great musical historians . . . and slightly pedantic about the whole thing. But the result was quite good.”41 A quest to research the origins of rock ‘n’ roll through the blues would not be tremendously taxing to the budding twenty-­first-­century enthusiast; a trip to one’s local library or the Internet would yield detailed biographies of blues performers, catalogs of recordings, and lists of performers who had influenced or been influenced by them. Of late digital applications such as iTunes would also enable an enthusiast to easily download the “source” music to a computer or smartphone for relatively little money. But in the early 1960s there was a dearth of information about the blues in mainstream circulation, and, correspondingly, the twin tasks of discovery and acquisition were more difficult—­and thus more rewarding. The influential recording project undertaken by folklorists John and Alan Lomax and John Work on behalf of

Introduction  •  19

the US Library of Congress was only twenty years old at this point, and Robert Johnson had only just been “rediscovered” by American folk enthusiasts. And there was even less information in Great Britain. Samuel Charters’s The Country Blues, which musicologist Roberta Freund Schwartz correctly calls “the first extended study of the blues available to American readers,” was published in 1959 and was not available in Britain until late 1960, months after the first comparable British work of scholarship, Paul Oliver’s groundbreaking Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues.42 Undaunted, young enthusiasts seized every scrap of information they could get their hands on, scouring secondhand shops for obscure albums, taping songs and concerts off the radio using reel-­to-­reel tape recorders, and even—­in the case of enterprising individuals like Mick Jagger and John Mayall—­ordering albums directly from the United States by mail. The scholarly approach stood the British blues enthusiasts in good stead, as they were able to cobble together an impressive collection of blues records, taped radio broadcasts, and what little published material existed at the time. Interestingly, the blues took hold in Britain neither as the result of some organized sales strategy nor as the spearhead of an American cultural “invasion” of Europe but through the interest and initiative of enthusiasts on the ground. Pieced together in this manner, British enthusiasts’ understanding and knowledge of the blues were very eclectic and did not always recognize the stylistic boundaries between subgenres that would have existed for American listeners. Strictly speaking, this is a story not only about the blues but also about two related musical forms: rhythm and blues (or R&B) and soul. R&B refers to a musical offshoot of blues that emerged in the 1950s and was generally recognized by many in the American music industry as a slicker, more urbane, and more danceable style than its predecessor.43 Soul, on the other hand, emerged in the early 1960s as a fusion of R&B and the Southern gospel tradition. It was more concerned with the uplift in the here and now of a new generation of young African-­American listeners and often focused on the secular instead of the spiritual. Both because of the generational gap and because of its secularization of gospel themes, soul was viewed by many in the African-­American community as inherently sinful, just as blues had been before it.44 In America, then, subgenres were often separate. But in Britain no such formal distinctions existed due to the haphazard acquisition of sources. Enthusiasts of one subgenre most likely also listened to, and collected, the other as well. Thus, although at times I specify whether I mean blues or R&B or soul, usually I operate as though there is very little in the way of formal distinctions among them—­because that is how my subjects typically operated.

20  •  The British Blues Network

Viewed as the product of a fruitful and eclectic British (and then transatlantic) dialogue that began with and remained conversant with the blues, Anglo-­American rock texts as diverse and divergent as the Who’s rock opera Tommy, Led Zeppelin’s quasi-­mystical epic “Stairway to Heaven,” and Bob Dylan’s Dadaesque poem “Subterranean Homesick Blues” can all be seen as different variations on the same source material. All of this, it must be stressed, began with the reception and appropriation of the blues by a small cadre of young white British men in the early 1960s. The blues’ tropic vocabulary, its fund of characters, expressions, and ideas, became the bedrock on which much of the British and American rock music of the 1960s was built. The Beatles relied less overtly on the blues and R&B than did almost all their counterparts on the mid-­1960s British scene, and yet John Lennon would still declare, “The blues is a chair, not a design for a chair, or a better chair . . . it is the first chair. It is a chair for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music.”45 Because of the British blues network, rock musicians have been sitting on that chair ever since. Chapter Synopses

The subject matter of The British Blues Network will doubtless be familiar to many readers. After all, many of its central characters have achieved international superstardom over the last five decades for either their musical achievements or their offstage exploits. They have, as a result, been the subject of a substantial number of popular biographies and documentaries. Thus, I do not share any stories that have not already been shared, nor have I unearthed any mind-­blowing revelations about one’s favorite artists that have hitherto lain buried. Where The British Blues Network makes substantial contributions is in the area of historical analysis and embedding of the well-­worn narrative in the ebbs and flows of British and transatlantic cultural history over the past seven decades. This is an area where not only popular but also scholarly attention is demonstrably thinner. Popular music in general has been the subject of an ever-­growing serious historiography for the past three or four decades, but thus far cultural and intellectual historians have been rather reluctant to treat British blues-­rock musicians as worthy commentators on serious issues. This neglect ignores a vitally important category of cultural producers who wrestled with the issues of American cultural influence, social inclusion and marginalization, race and gender relations, and the relationship between sexuality and power. Soul, heavy metal, and rap (among other genres) have inspired efforts by aca-

Introduction  •  21

demic historians to show that popular music expression does not operate in a vacuum, that it is informed by, and in turn informs, the larger sociocultural context in which it is performed and consumed.46 Like these, I attempt to connect British blues-­based rock music to the individuals who produced it and to embed both in the society and culture in which they existed. I will also use the examples of that music, and the young men who produced it, to say something deeper and more significant about British and transatlantic intellectual and cultural history at large. The British Blues Network proceeds chronologically and thematically, examining the development of British blues-­based popular music from the beginnings of the so-­called blues boom through its period of greatest creativity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It takes in the British blues network’s transition from blues emulators to blues-­rock innovators. But I also take the long view of the British blues network as being made up of men who were shaped by their formative circumstances. Thus, chapter 1, “Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation,” situates the British blues network in its proper historical context. It sketches the political, social, and cultural milieu that followed the Second World War, the decolonization of Great Britain, in which these young, mostly middle class white men were born, grew up, and became teenagers. The most crucial factors were the continuing influence of the Second World War, the windup of the British Empire, and the rise of a fascinating new superpower in the United States. The chapter also traces the development of a distinctively British youth culture in the emergence of the late 1960s cultural scene known as “Swinging London,” in which British musicians, actors, and fashion designers reversed (however temporarily) the direction of transatlantic cultural influence. Against this socioeconomic and cultural backdrop, American blues and R&B music was transmitted to, and received by, British audiences. Chapter 2, “Trying to Make London My Home,” analyzes the multifarious ways in which these related processes of transmission and reception actually occurred. Through the American military, but in other unique ways as well, blues and R&B music made its way to Britain via such diverse media as record albums, radio broadcasts, and infrequent barnstorming tours featuring African-­ American blues musicians. The chapter discusses the roots of the British blues network in a slightly earlier British blues and jazz scene made up of somewhat older collectors, journalists, and fans who were responsible not only for staging some of these African-­American blues performances but also for the spread and creation of knowledge and opinions about the music throughout Britain. However, transmission and reception do not necessarily entail acceptance, much less popularity. Chapter 3, “But My Dad Was Black,” pauses to

22  •  The British Blues Network

consider at length some of the reasons why the blues—­its imagery, emotions, and legends in addition to the music itself—­struck such a profound chord in its young male British enthusiasts. It is, of course, not completely implausible that young Britons should have been attracted to the blues, but throughout this chapter I analyze the reasons for the attraction, reinscribing familiar blues tropes such as violence and sexuality in the process. At first, young male enthusiasts in various British towns and cities operated in isolation, barely even aware of each other’s existence. As time went on, though, enthusiasts came together to form an interpersonal network—­getting to know each other in secondhand record shops, coffee bars, pubs, and art college common rooms. Chapter 4, “Blues Brothers,” discusses how British blues enthusiasts formed homosocial bonds based on their shared love and consumption of blues music and how this helped to transform an emulative “British blues” into an innovative “British blues-­rock.” The network often facilitated a rapid diffusion of musical ideas and performative techniques since everyone knew each other (if only in passing) and everyone found themselves at the same social venues. As mentioned above, British blues enthusiasts did not always get along, but dislike, rivalry, and jealousy can also be powerful catalysts to creativity. Perhaps no one relationship demonstrates this complicated matrix better than the friendly rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and this chapter uses that relationship as a case study. The chapter finally considers the “fraternal” influence of North American musicians such as Bob Dylan and groups such as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Band, which began a creative dialogue when Britons began traveling to the United States in the aftermath of the British Invasion. One of the most important features of the British musical project was how musicians used creativity and eclecticism to build on the lessons of the blues. By the late 1960s Britain’s rock groups were developing a kind of rock music that was truly creative and innovative and not emulative of blues classics. Chapter 5, “I Just Can’t Be Satisfied,” assesses the most important musical developments that came out of this period. During this time, the rock groups in question borrowed liberally from a myriad of other musical and cultural influences, including Indian raga, jazz, and opera, and grafted their borrowings onto their blues foundations. They “refiliated” back to their own cultural inheritance by expressing “British” and “English” cultural tropes—­ not least by means of their construction of an “imagined” Britain populated with British characters. They also “supercharged” the blues itself by amplifying its sound and enriching its treasure trove of tropic resources.

Introduction  •  23

* * *

I have chosen to end my study in 1970, although most of the musicians on whom I focus continued making music after that date—­and some still do. I have several reasons for choosing 1970 as my cutoff point. First, and most basically, 1970 was the year in which the 1960s ended, both chronologically and, to many observers, emotionally. It was a year of events that were seen as marking the end of one cultural “era” and the beginning of another—­for example, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the campus shootings at Kent State and Jackson State universities, and the acrimonious breakup of the Beatles. But 1970 also represents a watershed in terms of the creative output of the British rock network. In this year, I argue, British blues-­based rock bands produced a number of “classic” recordings—­among them Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominoes and Led Zeppelin III by Led Zeppelin—­that can be taken to represent the coming to fruition of all the cultural and musical lessons the British blues network had learned over the course of a decade or more.47 On these recordings, one can discern the influences at work, but they are also, for the most part, unique and influential musical statements. After this the prodigious creativity of the previous five years may have ebbed, but a set of rules and conventions had been established that would govern musical expression in rock for the next forty years and beyond. Even though most of the Britons on whom this book focuses continued to be popular throughout the 1970s, that decade belongs more to later emerging, often younger musicians who continued to make music using vocabulary and paradigms that had already been created for them. This interpersonal network of young British, and to a lesser extent American, men dominated popular music and youth culture. They inspired numerous others to imitate their example by forming bands of their own and countless more to adopt them as their heroes, just as they themselves had once adopted African-­American bluesmen as their replacement “fathers.” Our understanding of modern popular culture, as well as the Anglo-­ American cultural relationship, cannot be complete without first understanding the products and processes that inspired the British rock musicians who were at the forefront of musical innovation in the 1960s and 1970s. Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and many others achieved enduring international stardom during these pivotal decades. The British Blues Network explains how and why these men were motivated to emulate the blues and start down the path that would lead to that stardom.

1  •  Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation The Socioeconomic and Cultural Background Lucky? Sure I was lucky. I thought I was lucky when I first opened my eyes and saw that half of the map was red . . . and that my parents had a TV set . . . [and that] I passed all my exams. —­Mick Jagger1 England’s lost everything but Rock-­n-­Roll. —­Robert Plant2

As Keith Richards once put it, “every town” in Britain in the late 1950s had a small knot of passionate, young, mostly male blues enthusiasts, “sometimes just four or five guys—­the blues freaks!”3 Jimmy Page estimated that there were “one in four hundred kids at our schools that played the electric guitar.”4 Scouring their hometown’s record shops for the latest prized releases from America, packing into jazz clubs to hear their favorite bands, or strumming along on beat-­up guitars in art college common rooms, it was perhaps only a matter of time before each town’s enthusiasts would find each other and eventually form groups to imitate their heroes. The young men who did so in the late 1950s and early 1960s came to comprise an interpersonal cultural network—­the formation of which I explore in chapter 4. Almost without exception, every member of the British blues network hailed from one of six metropolitan areas—­Richards’s estimation of “every town” notwithstanding. These were London and the “Home Counties,” Liverpool, Birmingham and the West Midlands, Newcastle, Manchester, and Belfast.5 Author Brad Tolinski encouraged American readers to think of the extreme fertility of the Home Counties as a breeding ground for blues enthusiasts as being akin to “Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Hank Aaron all 24

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  25

belong[ing] to the same Little League.”6 Beyond the network’s geographic compactness, there was also a great deal of class commonality among its members—­some were upwardly mobile working class, but most were comfortably middle class. British blues enthusiasts were shaped by environmental and personal factors in ways that would color, though not predetermine, their reception of African-­American blues and their eventual desire to emulate its practitioners. A young male Briton born in 1940 would have been five years old when the Second World War ended—­perhaps old enough to have hazy memories of German bombers and air raid sirens. His father may or may have not served in the war; regardless, the war would have left a searing impact on them both. His family’s home may or may not have been destroyed in the German Blitz, and he would definitely have seen remaining damage in the neighborhood as a child. The legacies of the war, especially its wider political and socioeconomic impact, would have loomed large during our young Briton’s childhood, none too subtly influencing his life and worldview. In 1951 he would have taken the “Eleven-­Plus,” a skills test administered to eleven-­year-­olds to determine what form of secondary education they should receive—­either in technical schools, “secondary modern” schools, or the incredibly prestigious grammar schools.7 It is likely that our archetypal Briton would not have scored well enough to be placed in grammar school and might well have been enrolled in an art school. In the newly reformed educational system, art schools came to be seen as an escape for creative misfits or simply an alternative for students wishing to avoid the “secondary moderns”; in time they proved to be fertile incubators for young blues enthusiasts. Our young Briton would have just hit his teens in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned queen on national television and, in an unrelated development, the government finally ended rationing on sugar and eggs. The next year rationing ended on meat and cheese, the last items still controlled since the war. He would have turned sixteen in 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, the coming to power of Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, the beginning of the British economic turnaround, and Elvis Presley’s entrée onto the music scene in Britain. Our Briton would have regarded this last event as the most earth shattering of the bunch, and it is likely that he would have spent his discretionary income on rock ‘n’ roll records. Harboring dreams of being the next Presley or Chuck Berry, he would have joined a group playing a rough-­and-­ready British version of rock ‘n’ roll known as skiffle. Our archetypal Briton would have been eligible for National Service—­two years of active military service followed by three and a half years in the reserves—­when he turned seventeen in 1957. The government did not begin

26  •  The British Blues Network

winding down the program until 1960, so his younger compatriots would likely have avoided it.8 His late teens and early twenties would have unfolded against the backdrop of widespread affluence and a consumer-­driven economy—­real incomes rose by 20 percent between 1951 and 1961, and only 1.2 percent of the British work force was unemployed in 1957. Television ownership had jumped from 4.3 to 81.8 percent of British households by 1960.9 Also of importance in the wider society during our young Briton’s adolescence were issues such as British decolonization, the debate over whether Britain should join the European Economic Community while at the same time attempting to maintain its “special relationship” with the United States, and the transition in 1963 from a Conservative to a Labour government under the progressive technocrat Harold Wilson.10 In other words, although each young Briton who would eventually grow up to play or sing in a blues-­rock band had distinctive upbringings, family lives, educations, and youth experiences, in general he and his fellows were all influenced by roughly the same socioeconomic and cultural milieu. In order to better understand how these young men came to shape popular music and culture, we must first understand how that milieu shaped them—­and shaped their perspectives. “Bet You’re Sorry You Won”: World War and Decolonization

The first major influence not only on members of the British blues network but also on Britain as a whole was the Second World War. Physically, Britain’s cities had been grievously damaged by Nazi Germany’s aerial assaults; Hitler’s V-­1 and V-­2 weapons left a trail of destroyed buildings, neighborhoods, roads, and railway lines.11 According to historian John F. Lyons, “Nazi bombing campaigns had destroyed more than 200,000 homes during the war and made another 250,000 uninhabitable.”12 In Dartford, Surrey, the house of Bert and Doris Richards and their infant son Keith was demolished by an air strike in 1944; the family escaped harm by virtue of having been out shopping that day. Reflecting on the episode years later, Keith Richards remarked, with perverse glee, “Hitler was after my ass.”13 In 1963 his Rolling Stones would pose for one of their very first album cover photographs on one of London’s still-­visible bomb craters—­signifying their own gritty menace, as well as reminding the world that, at least in an architectural sense, Britain had still not completely recovered.14 To the northwest, in the London suburb of Chiswick, the destruction of the Blitz left a lasting, indirect impression on Pete Townshend (who was born two weeks after V-­E Day). Two decades later, as the leader of the Who, Townshend

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  27

claimed that he was “tun[ing] up [his] guitar to emulate the sound” of the Luftwaffe bombers that targeted the railway yards two blocks from his family’s home (which, of course, he had never actually heard).15 Not only did Britain’s buildings and infrastructure bear the scars of the war. Both in psychological and physical terms, so did some of the British blues network’s own fathers. Some of these men served in the armed forces, some worked in the industrial complex aiding the war effort, and all of them lived through the recurring nightmare of air raid sirens and bomb destruction. Cream drummer Peter “Ginger” Baker’s father Frederick was a bricklayer who served in the Royal Corps of Signalers; he was killed in action during the Dodecanese campaign in 1943.16 Of those who served, the other British blues enthusiasts’ fathers came back from the war alive but deeply affected by the experience. Bert Richards, before losing his home in the Blitz, served as a dispatch rider in the British army during the invasion of Normandy, where a German mortar seriously wounded him. This afforded him a medical discharge, but it also resulted in what was probably an undiagnosed case of post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as young Keith remembered him having nightmares and screaming in his sleep.17 Robert Plant’s father, also named Robert, served in the Royal Air Force. According to his son, he came back a much more serious man. Once a fun-­ loving, musical-­instrument-­playing civil engineer, the elder Plant “went to war, lost his opportunities, and had to come home and dig deep to get them back.”18 In Eric Clapton’s case, the trauma was not the father’s but the son’s. Clapton’s father was a Canadian airman named Edward Fryer who, after a brief liaison with Clapton’s mother, participated in the Normandy invasion and returned to Canada after the war’s end. His mother married another Canadian soldier and moved with him to West Germany, where they started another family. Clapton was left to be raised by his grandparents and made to believe that his mother was actually his sister during the latter’s rare visits. This theme of abandonment was one of several factors that Clapton has said caused him to feel an “emotional poverty” and later to identify with blues music.19 Keith Richards was unique in that his family was the only one of the British blues network to actually have its house destroyed—­although Rod Stewart’s family had its front windows in Highgate, North London, blown out by bomb aftershocks so often that his father eventually boarded them up instead of having the glass replaced.20 And Ginger Baker was the only one of the network whose father was killed in action. However, in a broader sense, none among the British blues network escaped the larger, indirect impact of the war. This took three distinct yet interrelated forms: economic, sociocultural, and geopolitical.

28  •  The British Blues Network

Rationing of food and consumer durables, introduced in 1940, was not lifted on V-­E Day; owing to the precarious economic position in which Britain found itself, it lasted into the 1950s.21 Many British children—­our protagonists included—­grew up knowing meat, eggs, cheese, sugar, tea, and bread only as infrequent treats. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones remembers his parents stretching the family diet with horsemeat and whale.22 The economic realities of postwar Britain were thus brought home to British youth in this most basic of ways. Whether or not one believes Stones biographer Stephen Davis’s assertion that “the Stones and their generation were short of stature, thanks to Hitler and his armies”—­or Richards’s that sugar rationing explains “why a lot of us are still skinny”—­the gastronomic scarcity imposed by rationing was perhaps the only vaguely economically sound analogy that can be drawn between the poor black sharecroppers of the Mississippi Delta and their largely middle-­class British disciples.23 Another less direct effect of economic rationing was that it created a sense among young Britons that their homeland was gray and boring. The “grayness” of Britain, carrying with it a vague implicit understanding of clouds and rain in the forecast, has long been a stereotypical attribute of the country. However, the slow recovery from the Blitz and the continued rationing made postwar Britain, if anything, a touch grayer than usual. Said Jack Bruce, bass guitarist for Blues Incorporated, Manfred Mann, and Cream, in 2009: There was no color whatsoever in Britain. Glasgow [Bruce’s hometown] didn’t exist; there was just this sort of grey wash . . . you kept bumping into things because you couldn’t see anything. Dark at four o’clock.24 Doubtless Bruce was using a bit of exaggerated color for emphasis. However, the general idea—­that 1950s Britain was gray, boring, and economically and culturally exhausted and its young people in desperate need of excitement, adventure, and dessert food—­has been cited so often by members of the British blues network as to become virtually a commonplace.25 The drabness of the weather and the cityscape was advanced at least once as a point of similarity between London and Chicago, the better to explain why the former’s kids found themselves drawn to the latter’s blues.26 Given the state of the country, Keith Richards might very well be forgiven for growing up wondering if Britain had actually won the war against the Germans—­or if the victory had been worth it.27 This vague sense was thrown into sharper relief in the early 1950s when West Germany began ex-

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  29

periencing a rapid economic recovery thanks to American Marshall Plan aid (of which Britain was also a beneficiary). The Germans referred to this period inimitably as a Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). Meanwhile, Britain became, in historian Tony Judt’s phrase, “an underperforming laggard,” cash strapped and still required to ration milk, bread, and sugar.28 And yet Germany had lost the war and Britain had won it. For many young Britons, there was also what Pete Townshend referred to as a “unique postwar sense of denial,” the sense that whatever had happened during the war adults refused to talk about it and, indeed, seemed to refuse to engage critically with it much at all, preferring instead simply to put it behind them. This mentality contributed to a growing “generation gap”; on one side were those Britons who had fought in or lived through the war and on the other those who had either not done so or were too young to remember it. Rarely did the twain meet.29 Adults blamed young people for failing to understand what the war had been like. Ironically, youngsters did not understand what it was like in great part because adults would not talk about it. Generally speaking, British kids grew up with a sense of at least mild foreboding—­something had happened that was shaping their parents’ and their lives, something that was causing Britain to be the way it was. But this something was neither of their understanding nor of their making. Members of the older generation probably helped widen the gap by claiming that their sacrifices—­which they refused to talk about—­were not properly appreciated by the young people for whom they had been made. This emotional minefield was played for laughs in a famous exchange from the Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. Man on train [to John]: Don’t take that tone with me, young man. I fought the war for your sort. Ringo: Bet you’re sorry you won.30 And indeed he may have been—­and perhaps more so in June 1965, when Queen Elizabeth II invested the “Fab Four” as Members of the British Empire [MBE], an honor usually reserved for politicians and soldiers. In response, some angry veterans returned their medals in protest at what one called “mawkish, bizarre effrontery to our wartime endeavours.”31 Owing to a variety of factors, the war also helped cause a drastic, gradual, and not initially acknowledged downturn in Britain’s geopolitical standing.32 Britain’s seeming rewards for standing alone for eighteen months against the German war machine, and eventually helping to defeat it, were vastly straitened economic circumstances, a secondary status to and reliance

30  •  The British Blues Network

on the new American superpower, and the beginnings of a decolonization process that would see the Union Jack lowered for the last time in dozens of ceremonies all over the world between 1947 and 1997.33 Solid causal connections between Britain’s geopolitical weakness and the favorable reception of the blues by a visible section of young British manhood are obviously very difficult to prove and must remain conjectural. “The shrinking of the British Empire” was mentioned by American folk music collector Alan Lomax as one of the direct causal factors—­along with “class-­and-­caste lines” and “the dull job [and] lack of money”—­causing British youths to feel they could identify with “Negro prison songs.”34 Decades later journalists Chris Douring and Chip Stern argued that “the repression of ambition in post-­Empire Britain was just as intense” as the despair felt by black factory workers in 1950s Chicago.35 It can be argued that there was in British culture a palpable if abstract feeling of national exhaustion, even sclerosis, and unease over a perceived lack of virility.36 Additionally, the windup of empire deprived Britain’s young men of a traditional opportunity for employment and adventure. Since the seventeenth century, such young men might have opted for a post in the military-­ cum-­administrative apparatus that governed the Empire, in preference to the dreary clerical or mercantile careers that might have been theirs if they had stayed in gray, rainy Britain.37 Such a post offered adventure and a chance to “see the world,” which to the outward-­looking British held considerable attraction. With decolonization, these opportunities ended. In another era, a young man like Michael Jagger (only later to be known as “Mick”) could have parlayed a degree from the London School of Economics into a post in the Colonial Office. Now his options consisted primarily of: Teacher training? Chartered accountancy? Junior management or any of the other financially secure but otherwise uninviting options that were typical for the grammar school leavers with the so-­so grades Mike anticipated for his GCE “A” levels? If he was fed-­up now, what was he going to be like then?38 Likewise, someone like Robert Plant, who was apprenticing in the mid-­1960s with a West Midlands accountant, might have found this line of work a bit more palatable if he could have looked forward to managing a corporation’s overseas accounts in Nairobi or Cairo.39 As it was, Plant gravitated toward the notion of being a wandering bluesman, saying later, “I didn’t know about fame; I just knew . . . I might’ve been an accountant . . . in the middle of a very post-­World War Two, austere Britain—­there must’ve been a way out. And I found it.”40

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  31

At the same time that the British Empire was winding down it was also, in a way, “coming home” in the form of increased nonwhite immigration into Britain from former colonial territories. In the aftermath of the war, facing an acute labor shortage, the Labour government began recruiting immigrants from the Commonwealth. In 1948 Parliament passed the British Nationality Act, which extended full citizenship to all Commonwealth residents, with corresponding rights to settle in the mother country.41 In addition, the government advertised affordable transportation and housing to all would-­be immigrants. No sooner had the ink dried on these advertisements than the first transport ship, the MV Empire Windrush, carrying 492 Jamaicans, docked at Tilbury, near London, on June 22, 1948.42 Immigration from the Commonwealth continued unabated until 1962, when the House of Commons passed legislation to limit the influx. But by that time more than 200,000 West Indians, South Asians, and Africans were living in Britain’s cities, working primarily in the service industries.43 The photographs of Jamaicans disembarking from the Windrush in 1948 have come to symbolize the beginning of modern British multicultural society.44 In some sense, Britain has always been multicultural—­the presence and influence of the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, in addition to émigrés from the Continent, attest to that. But the “Windrush generation” (as the first emigrants were called) provided Britain with its first large-­scale taste of a multiracial society, a reality with which white Britons had an uneasy coming to terms.45 The proximity and seeming permanence of nonwhite immigrants in British urban centers led, perhaps inevitably, to fevered debates in the media and Whitehall about the threat posed by unchecked nonwhite immigration: what it meant, who belonged, and who did not.46 In more direct terms, it led to increased racial violence, as can be seen in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. But members of the nonwhite immigrant community left their musical mark on the British blues network as well. Thanks to them, West Indian ska, “bluebeat,” and reggae; African polyrhythmic drumming; Indian sitar and tabla music; and an overall partiality to the musically exotic were added to the British musical palette.47 “Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here”: The USA “Comes Ashore”

The third important aftereffect of the Second World War was the rise of the United States as a military, financial, and cultural superpower. America, as a cultural construct and political entity, has been a fixture in Europe’s collective imagination since colonial times. Depending on one’s age, class, and political persuasion, America and all it was taken to stand for—­technological

32  •  The British Blues Network

efficiency, mass-­produced banality, lowbrow tastelessness, social egalitarianism, autonomy from history and tradition—­were either fascinating and attractive or completely abhorrent to Europeans. For some they were both. But for much of the modern period, America was safely “offshore”—­that is, visible at a distance and often wondered about, sometimes with fascination and sometimes with concern, but not yet having a strong presence in domestic discourse.48 But for many Britons the Second World War was the moment when the United States “came ashore,” both literally and metaphorically. This irrevocably transformed the relationship between the United States, its people, and its culture, on the one hand, and Britain, its people, and its culture on the other. Beginning in 1942, the American military began to be deployed throughout Britain and Northern Ireland in preparation for the “D-­Day” invasion of France. Nearly three million troops, support staff, and diplomatic personnel were stationed in Britain at the height of what historian David Reynolds has called an “American occupation.”49 They brought with them American food and drink, American accents and slang, and, most pertinently for this study, American music.50 The overwhelming and occasionally overweening presence of so many American GIs and their culture caused some consternation, especially among middle-­aged intellectuals such as George Orwell and J. B. Priestley. Orwell famously groaned, “It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that London is occupied territory”; Priestley, meanwhile, referred to America’s “style of urban life” and pop culture as “the great invader.”51 (This, at a time when a much worse invader still lurked across the English Channel.) The Americans maintained enough of a military presence in Britain by V-­E Day and throughout the 1950s that many teenagers of the 1960s had gained some knowledge of or had personal interactions with the “Yanks” in uniform.52 They were the first and sometimes only physical manifestation of America that many Britons had ever seen. In the abstract, the Yanks became a screen onto which numerous collective anxieties could be projected, which often were as much about Britain as they were about America. For example, in the oft-­repeated British jibe that the Americans were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here,” one can see numerous unarticulated resentments about American spending power and moral laxity, as well as the nameless worry that once the Americans (and their culture) were “here,” it would be the absolute devil to go back to normal afterward.53 Furthermore, a much-­voiced concern over sexual liaisons between GIs and British girls can be seen more as a commentary on the ideal society of sexually continent people sticking to proper gender roles, as well as the

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  33

threat that sexual impropriety (and with foreigners to boot!) supposedly posed to both.54 Complicating the picture was the African-­American GI. Like his white comrades, the African-­American GI, too, was constructed and used for ideological work, though in different ways. Drawing on a century’s worth of racial mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic that constructed the black male as hypersexual and exotic, British popular discourse portrayed the African-­American GI as even more of a sexual threat than his white compatriots were, even if only by a matter of degree.55 Paradoxically, it is arguable that the African American GI was perceived as a threat more because he was an American than because he was black.56 Another ideological function performed by the African-­American GI was to allow the British to develop a sense that they were a less overtly racist people than the Americans were. On the level of policy, the British government and military command were strongly resistant to the Americans’ insistence that the color bar, which defined not only social but also military relations in the United States, be transposed to Britain, where, it was proudly (if disingenuously) pointed out, no such segregation existed.57 On the ground, local publicans and dance hall proprietors were often ostentatious in accepting the business of African-­American GIs, often over the loud protests of white GIs.58 As is often the case with race relations, attributing motivation and analyzing deeper emotion are always tricky. But it is entirely possible (though difficult to prove) that a residue of this self-­ congratulatory idea—­that the British were less racist than white Americans and saw African-­American GIs as Americans first and black second—­ exerted an influence on how later generations would react to African-­American bluesmen and blues music. White Britons’ divergent experiences with racial difference in the case of black Americans and black Britons during and after the war ended up prompting many young British blues enthusiasts to create an interesting and important bifurcation. Rather than perceiving black Britons and African-­ Americans as the same because of their race, many white Britons constructed black Britons as a threatening, unapproachable “Other” whom they would never want to emulate. Meanwhile, British blues enthusiasts-­in-­training tended to construct African-­Americans as appealing role models, different enough to be exotic but somehow approachable enough to make the reverse adoption not seem ludicrous to them.59 To put it simply, Eric Clapton wanted to “grow up to be like” Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, and Mick Jagger later did everything he could, however briefly, to “become James Brown.”60 But neither wanted to be a Jamaican or a Bahamian, and they

34  •  The British Blues Network

sometimes, at least in Clapton’s case, seemed to harbor overt hostility toward Jamaicans and Bahamians. This bifurcation can be seen as the continuation of a long-­standing British tradition, both “out there” in the Empire and “at home” in Britain itself: the ability to characterize and create hierarchical categories between and sometimes even within races. Recently, historians of the British Empire have dealt with this categorization in other contexts. Mrinalini Sinha, for example, has emphasized the mutually constitutive gendered relationship between “manly Englishmen” and “effeminate Bengalis” in political and legal debates in nineteenth-­century India. Likewise, David Omissi posits a British construction of “martial” (e.g., the Sikhs) and “nonmartial” (e.g., the Bengalis) races and its use as a basis for recruitment into the armies of the British Raj.61 In his discussion of immigration to Britain since the seventeenth century, Tony Kushner argues that the British created an often subconscious hierarchy of immigrants by weighing their potential contributions versus their potential drain on the economic resources of “the nation.”62 Young white Britons who grew up in the postwar period inherited these traditions of imperial and post-­imperial categorization and used them to construct a bifurcated understanding of racial difference. The only real-­life African-­American men that most young white Britons ever encountered in this era were GIs. These were among the most mobile, skilled, and physically fit examples of African-­Americans anywhere. To emulate these black people was to aspire to be something exotic and different and, to some extent, to identify with a downtrodden race that expressed its problems with music. However, it was also to aspire to their perceived mobility, dynamism, and strength—­all of which were being used, at least in theory, to defend Britain “against the most desperate enemy she ever had.”63 Furthermore, the GIs were only “over here” temporarily; they would be returning to the States when their tours of duty were over. The stays of entertainers like Muddy Waters, later on, were even shorter—­only until the end of a tour. Thus, they could be seen, interacted with, admired, and emulated but would then be safely gone again, with arguably little lasting impact on Britain’s society or economy or on understandings of “the nation,” who belonged in it, and who did not. As we will see in chapter 3, that kind of impermanence was a quality to which young white Britons also came to aspire. Mobility, rootlessness, never having to be restrained in one place for very long—­all of these were attractive elements in blues music itself. But even before that, they were part of the way white Britons understood the specific types of African-­ Americans that visited Britain. The exoticism of black Britons, on the other hand, was often constructed

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  35

negatively. Black Britons seemed to pose numerous social, economic, and cultural problems—­most of which would be familiar to twenty-­first-­century Americans paying attention to the discourse on Latin American immigration to the United States. Black Britons would compete with white Britons for jobs.64 In the minds of some white commentators, black Britons would be unable to assimilate to British culture and, by failing to do so, would ruin the idealized “nation.” At a more local level, black Britons were seen as moving into historically white neighborhoods and bringing with them unsavory behavior.65 Furthermore, black Britons were more or less permanent immigrants; generally speaking, they were not going back to their birthplaces. For all the tough talk claiming that “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack,” the only options available to anti-­immigrant politicians were to try to stop any further immigration from the Commonwealth; to try to protect white British culture by discriminating against the black Britons already in the country; or, as in the case of Conservative demagogue Enoch Powell, to incite racial violence.66 Thus, even if black Britons had not been perceived as economically burdensome or culturally threatening, they would have remained real people living real lives in Britain, unable to be ignored. No such problems of permanence existed with African-­Americans; they came “over here” and made their cultural impact briefly and afterward safely existed as idealized and essentialized archetypes. Blues scholar Ulrich Adelt puts a fine point on it: “Clapton’s admiration of America was closely linked with an imagined Otherness, which is why the blues . . . offered similar colonial fantasies. These fantasies were not compatible with the postcolonial reality of the Caribbean immigrants who quite possibly even frequented the same clubs.”67 Nothing spoils a fantasy like a real-­life dissonant voice or experience. This is one reason why Robert Johnson, having died decades before the British discovered his music, proved more popular with British blues enthusiasts than living, breathing blues musicians like Sonny Boy Williamson II. This difference in social construct between black Americans and black Britons perhaps explains why British blues enthusiasts actively affiliated with the culture of the former but not the latter. It can also partly help explain why Clapton thought he could go onstage in 1976 and voice his support for Enoch Powell while simultaneously attempting to maintain his close friendship with black blues performers and his affinity for the music without any seeming awareness of hypocrisy. To Clapton, who has often been portrayed by his defenders as having been either “just” drunk or politically naive, it was not so much that he had outgrown his affinity for black culture or revealed his true colors as a closeted racist. Rather, like many in his cohort, he had years before drawn a serious and unbreachable distinction between black

36  •  The British Blues Network

Americans and black Britons—­constructing one positively and the other negatively—­and was simply allowing that distinction to inform his public remarks on that evening in 1976.68 “Putting on the Style”: Rock ‘n’ Roll and Skiffle in Britain

With the gradual onset of the Cold War, America’s presence in Britain continued to be felt figuratively, as well as now literally. The decline of Britain’s international role and prestige coincided with the rise of America’s. The financial center of the world was now New York, not London, and Whitehall was gradually ceding its geopolitical decision-­making power to Washington.69 And, as much as politicians in both countries touted the Anglo-­American “special relationship,” it was clear which was the weaker sister. The United States dominated the economic, political, and cultural life of Western Europe, including Britain. From 1945 onward, American popular culture saturated Western European markets. In Britain, Coca-­ Cola began to challenge ale, beer, and the ever-­popular gin and tonic for supremacy. “Hamburger bars” (especially the by equal measures loved and loathed Wimpy Bars) sprang up in London and other British cities alongside other popular “foreign invaders” such as the Italian trattoria, the Indian tandoori restaurant, and the Chinese chop suey joint.70 American films were often action-­packed, violent, romantic, and melodramatic. They also often portrayed “ordinary” heroes, unlike British parlor dramas, which were perceived as stuffy and aristocratic; thus the former carried the day almost effortlessly.71 “For those interested in the written word,” historian John F. Lyons points out, “the United States provided a wealth of exciting literature,” from comic books to detective stories to even the “highbrow” offerings of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway.72 Historians have identified a variety of factors that caused this saturation besides the fact that, to the consternation of the cultural snob, audiences simply preferred American products.73 For one thing, trade agreements between the United States and Western European governments stipulated that a majority of the films shown in Europe would be American made.74 The devastation of domestic cultural industries by the war meant that they had no way to outproduce the Americans anyway. Additionally, the war had temporarily halted Europe’s importation of American products (especially films); with international trade restored in 1945, a six-­year backlog now flooded European markets.75 The British government continued to use “imperial preference” tariffs to block the influx of American manufactured goods into the

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  37

country, but to little avail.76 It seems that the best British companies could do was produce a British version of every popular American product. Thus, instead of countering the popularity of American “teddy bears,” British manufacturers simply jumped on the bandwagon with Winnie the Pooh, Sooty Bear, and Paddington. Likewise, faced with the advent of the American bombshell sex-­symbol Marilyn Monroe, the British film industry marketed a “British Marilyn” named Diana Dors.77 By far the most popular American cultural export, not only to Britain but also to the rest of the world, was rock ‘n’ roll music. Its emergence in the 1950s from a mélange of country-­and-­western and rhythm ­and ­blues (R&B) music has been documented too often to require repetition here.78 A few words must be said, however, about rock ‘n’ roll’s infiltration into Britain because of its importance as a means of communicating “America” to the British imagination. Rock ‘n’ roll first came to Britain, as it came to much of Western Europe, in the form of the country crooner turned rock ‘n’ roller Bill Haley, whose hit singles “Shake, Rattle ‘n’ Roll” and “Rock Around the Clock” were the first rock ‘n’ roll songs to enter the British charts, in December 1954 and November 1955, respectively.79 Also influential was the film Blackboard Jungle, which featured “Rock Around the Clock” as part of its soundtrack. The film made headlines in the United States and Britain alike because teenagers in both countries danced in the aisles and some, when ordered to desist, responded by rioting. Such incidents alerted the adult Establishment in both countries to the violence and hedonism supposedly encouraged by this so-­called jungle music.80 All this seemed as nothing, however, compared to the advent of Elvis Presley in 1956. As in America, Elvis earned at once the shock and disgust of Britain’s adults and the undying devotion of many of its teenagers. The reasons for adult repulsion were mostly the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Elvis’s lyrics were perceived as imbecilic, his singing style as embarrassingly maudlin, and his music as sexually suggestive, as was the man himself with curled lip and swiveling hips.81 The Daily Mirror’s Patrick Doncaster referred to Elvis’s singing style as “a gurgle of breathless spasms” and “about as musical as the flushing of a sewer.” Not to be outdone, the Daily Mail’s Peter Lewis sneered, “[h]is lyrics were subliterate, truculent aphrodisiacs, helped out with rutting noises, animal grunts, and groans.” The “blackness” of Elvis’s music, and of rock ‘n’ roll in general, also attracted negative comment in both Britain and America. The Daily Mail posited that rock ‘n’ roll’s popularity was “the Negro’s revenge,” although it might be said that British discourse resisted replicating the American media’s overall deranged tone of apocalyptic panic.82

38  •  The British Blues Network

None of this mattered to young Britons—­or if it did, it just confirmed their love of Elvis as an anti-­Establishment hero. Keith Richards declared (with the benefit, no doubt, of thirty years of hindsight), “We were very conscious that we were in a totally new era. . . . It was like A.D. and B.C., and 1956 was Year One.”83 John Lennon noted, “[n]othing really affected me until Elvis. . . . It was the spark, and then everything opened up for us.”84 Paul McCartney concurred: “That was him, that was the guru we had been waiting for. The Messiah had arrived.”85 But disc jockey John Peel captures the sheer otherworldliness of Elvis’s emergence most dramatically, perhaps. Elvis’s song “Heartbreak Hotel,” he said, had the effect on me of a naked extra-­terrestrial walking through the door and announcing that he/she was going to live with me for the rest of my life. . . . There was something frightening, something lewd, something seriously out of control about “Heartbreak Hotel,” and alarmed though I was by Elvis, I knew I wanted more.86 British teenagers’ love of American rock ‘n’ roll did not limit itself to Presley, even if he remained their favorite. “Rockabilly” stars such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent were all massively popular amongst young British audiences.87 In fact, bassist/singer Billy Hatton of the Liverpool rock ‘n’ roll group the Fourmost claimed that in Liverpool “Carl Perkins was more popular than Elvis.” This could possibly be due, he thought, to the “large Irish population in Liverpool [which] was especially receptive to a music [country-­and-­western] that had its roots in traditional Celtic music.”88 Also extremely popular was Texas-­born guitarist Buddy Holly; Lennon and McCartney, for example, renamed their skiffle band the Beatles in “(punning) honor” of Holly’s band, the Crickets.89 On the R&B side of rock ‘n’ roll’s biracial amalgam, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley also achieved legendary status in Britain—­even more so once the “blues boom” got under way, since their hits became de rigueur cover material for any aspiring British blues band.90 American rock ‘n’ roll became so popular in Britain that, in much the same way as Chicago blues would do in the early 1960s, it inspired British teenagers to transcend merely listening and consuming and attempt to play it themselves. This led to the development of “skiffle,” a musical phenomenon simultaneously derivative of African-­American style and distinctly British. Equal parts jazz, folk, and Delta blues, skiffle was played out of reverence for an imagined nineteenth-­century rural South in which the music supposedly

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  39

had its roots.91 Skiffle emphasized a sort of rustic simplicity—­a “do-­it-­ yourself ” mentality that fit in very well in a Britain where rationing had only recently ended and an electric guitar could cost as much as three months’ wages.92 For example, in the absence of an expensive stand-­up bass, British “skifflers” had to improvise by jury-­rigging a tea chest, a broomstick, and a length of string. Having to do this was seen not as a drawback but as a badge of noncommercial “authenticity.” The underlying mentality of skiffle, which shares some basic similarities with that of punk music in the mid-­1970s, was to democratize music, to make it possible for anyone to play it.93 For eighteen months, beginning in early 1955, this mentality continued to catch on, and not just in “trad” jazz or folk circles. The godfather and, in time, the virtual embodiment of what has come to be called the “skiffle boom” was Tony “Lonnie” Donegan, a banjo player for Chris Barber’s influential Dixieland jazz band. Donegan scored a huge, if inadvertent, hit in early 1955 with “Rock Island Line,” an old Lead Belly song recorded almost as an afterthought on Barber’s 1955 album New Orleans Joys.94 The song made it onto not only the British but also, miraculously, the American charts. On the strength of this and a few subsequent hits, Donegan became something of an overnight sensation in Britain and skiffle became a bona fide pop craze.95 Perhaps thousands of teenage boys, concerned less with reverence for the old-­time American South than with the affections of the girls at their school, seized on skiffle, giving it their all on tea-­chest bass, washboard, and acoustic guitar.96 Such groups provided a start not only to Lennon and McCartney but also to Ray Davies of the Kinks, Jimmy Page of the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, and numerous other key figures of the British blues boom.97 Many skiffle groups never advanced past some enjoyable after-­school entertainment; to be fair, many probably had no ambitions beyond that. However, there was a rising and affluent teenage market for record albums, fan magazines, and concert tickets, and much of that market’s purchasing power was flowing in the wrong direction—­away from Britain to America.98 Just as their counterparts were doing in the rest of Western Europe, British record companies and impresarios, though suspicious that rock ‘n’ roll was a passing fad, got to work finding homegrown talent with which to harness that purchasing power.99 Skiffle groups played nightly to underage Britons at the country’s many “milk bars” (Britain’s version of the American “malt shop”) and coffeehouses, which served as ideal talent mines.100 Several young British men were discovered around the coffeehouse and milk bar scene, signed to record contracts, and then foisted onto a pop-­ hungry British youth market. The first such find was Tommy Hicks, who was

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talent-­spotted by the British pop impresario Larry Parnes in 1957. Given a leather jacket and renamed Tommy Steele, Hicks was billed as the “British Elvis.”101 When British record buyers and concertgoers proved receptive, Parnes began to stockpile a stable of young, mostly working-­class singers who comprised the “first wave” of British rock ‘n’ roll. He renamed them, using a simple formula that left historian Shawn Levy wondering if it was the same formula used to rename “porn stars”; thus, Dickie Pride, Marty Eager, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, and Georgie Fame all ascended the British pop charts in the late 1950s or early 1960s.102 Of all these British teen idols, it was Cliff Richard and his group the Shadows that left the most lasting imprint on British popular music prior to 1963.103 Between 1960 and 1969, his records spent more time on the British charts than any other, outselling the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.104 Partly this must be attributed to the almost three years’ head start he had on both groups. But unlike some of their contemporaries, Richard and the Shadows had genuine talent and earned their accolades largely on their own merit. According to historian Dominic Sandbrook, the secret of Richard’s success lay in his ability to infuse the rough energy of American rockabilly into the conventions and polish of English mainstream pop.105 To countless British rock singers and bands of the 1960s and 1970s who sought to blend elements of American and English styles in their music, Cliff Richard was an early intellectual predecessor. By the early 1960s, however, Richard was an unrecognized predecessor, as were the likes of Steele, Eager, and Fury. One of the major factors that drove the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and others first to immerse themselves in the sounds of African-­American blues and then to evangelize on its behalf was their perception that contemporary pop and what was then being sold as rock ‘n’ roll had become dishonest, cloying, and unable to articulate any authentic or true sentiments. Future Rolling Stone Brian Jones estimated that rock ‘n’ roll had been “watered down.”106 More than forty years after the fact, Jones’s erstwhile bandmate Bill Wyman recalled with disgust the “garbage” that was on the radio, citing in particular Connie Francis’s “Lipstick on Your Collar.”107 In forming this opinion, the records of homegrown rock ‘n’ roll and pop singers were just as much a body of evidence as those of American teen idols like Paul Anka or Frankie Avalon. However, it is important to note that, whether early 1960s British blues enthusiasts would have admitted it or not, Britain’s skifflers-­turned-­pop idols provided a necessary step in the development of British rock music—­and not just in the negative way of giving blues enthusiasts something against which to rally.

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  41

“Throwing a Load of Demons into Heaven”: The British Fascination with America

A major effect of rock ‘n’ roll’s entrenchment in Britain between 1955 and 1963 was to solidify certain images of America that had been conveyed to Europe for the past seven decades. The prevailing image of America to British youngsters was that of a wide-­open fantasyland populated with cowboys, Indians, gangsters, cops, hard-­boiled detectives, femmes fatales, riverboat captains, tycoons, and sports heroes.108 Of this motley cast, the cowboy was the most popular and emulated of all American archetypes. Once jazz and the blues came to Britain, this cast of mythic characters was augmented by a black face: the itinerant “bluesman,” cast aside by both white and black America, financially and politically powerless but mobile and sexually dynamic.109 In America women were invariably perceived as glamorous, alluring, strong, and often sexually uninhibited, and the brash image of the American woman is one of the most enduring elements make the transition from American to British popular culture.110 America, to many young Britons of this generation, was more an abstract concept than an actual nation-­state with actual people living actual lives. This was to be expected, as few working-­or lower-­middle-­class Britons had ever been to the United States, nor did they expect to visit anytime soon. Such was the fantastical allure of the States for many Britons that the GIs were both literally and figuratively larger than life—­in a sense, rock stars to a generation of future rock stars. As well, any Briton who had been to the States and back was held in a certain reverence, and so were the objects he or she brought back. For example, Eric Burdon’s family in Newcastle lived upstairs from a merchant seaman who gave the future Animal lead singer his first two American blues records, purchased on one of his trips across the Atlantic.111 One gets the sense that if Burdon’s neighbor, and others who filled this particular cultural role, had brought back 78 rpm discs of children’s nursery rhymes, those might have been seen by young Britons as just as fascinating as the blues and country-­and-­western records that did come back. American popular culture seemingly echoed America’s ethos, which held that anything was possible, that a man was master of his own destiny, that a second (or third or tenth) chance was just over the next hill, and that good more often than not defeated evil. Blues music, ironically, joined this chorus from the underground, extolling an America in which there was freedom in solitude and power in masculine sexuality.112 Above all, from American popular culture young Britons got the impression that there were seemingly no

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“ordinary” people in America. Aristocracy and royal family aside, however, Britain seemed to be full of them. “To be an American,” said Ian McLagan, keyboardist for the Small Faces, “it seemed was where it was at, and to be English absolutely wasn’t. England was a miserable place for kids compared to how I imagined the States to be, and that wasn’t just my opinion.”113 Confirming McLagan’s assertion, writer Richard Newman—­a teenager in Richmond, Surrey, in the late 1960s—­put it even more starkly. If you were looking around for a scene or a situation, or a time and place that was the complete opposite of [cool], then London in the late fifties and early sixties would fit the bill nicely. What we are looking at here is “uncool” big time. For many young people growing up in fifties’ England, the worst thing about their lives was that they were not Americans.114 The notion that stolid, gray, cash-­strapped Britain suffered much by comparison with a powerful, wealthy, Technicolor America full of exciting and attractive people could be found any number of places in postwar British culture. For example, in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1959), the cantankerous protagonist Jimmy Porter muses that “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age—­unless you’re an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.”115 While it is clear that Porter was less than thrilled with this realization, the young men who made up the British blues boom—­in a way, the cultural children of men like Porter—­were unqualified, fascinated devotees of American culture and American ways. In his autobiography, Eric Clapton recalled that, growing up, “America was the land of promise.” When I was eight or nine years old, I had been given a prize at school for neatness and tidiness. It was a book on America, filled with pictures of skyscrapers, cowboys and Indians, cars, and all sorts of other stuff, and what I did first when I knew we [Cream] were going [to America in 1966] was to make a short list of all the things I had fantasized about doing if I ever went there. I was going to buy a fringed cowboy jacket, for example, and some cowboy boots. I was going to have a milk shake and a hamburger.116 Clapton’s anecdote is telling because, in addition to indulging in quintessentially American experiences like eating American diner food, he also wanted fervently to assume the wardrobe and, with it, the identity of the American

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  43

cowboy. To Keith Richards, there was virtually no area of social, economic, or cultural activity in which America did not excel over Britain. “America,” he said, “was a fairyland, and all the best music came from there, and they had the best cars, and the chicks looked better. So it was like throwing a load of demons into heaven, and letting them loose.”117 But it was not until 1964 that Richards and his compatriots would get a chance to enjoy this metaphorical job of breaking and entering. Until then, young Britons under the age of twenty had to content themselves with dreaming of America and of being extraordinary.118 Young British rock musicians’ dreamy fantasies about America did not—­could not—­survive unscathed the experience of actually traveling to the United States beginning in 1964. Like countless travelers before them, they faced the simple fact that America and Americans were real, and imperfect. This would have been the case at any place in any decade, but the United States in the mid-­to late 1960s showed British visitors what many of them considered to be a frightening blend of racism, violence, and sociocultural conservatism. Some began to think that perhaps the essence of America was actually its stultifying conformity. The Rolling Stones found themselves harassed by policemen all over the States, for drug possession but also once, bizarrely, for “topless bathing” in a hotel swimming pool; the management had assumed the long-­haired Stones were women.119 Bass player Noel Redding and drummer Ginger Baker each publicly equated America with Nazi Germany—­a common, if glib and far-­fetched, equation made by left-­leaning European youths in the later 1960s.120 Mick Jagger told New Musical Express, “[m]aterially, America is fantastic. It’s just the people who are so bloody awful.”121 Even if the notion of “America the perfect” died the death for British rock stars, that of “America the fascinating” seemingly never did. American cultural heroes and antiheroes remained popular tropes in British rock music for the next few decades, and so did the ideas that “America” had stood for: freedom, wide-­open spaces, mobility, modernity, and the chance to endlessly reinvent oneself. Indeed, as of the early 1970s, the United States became not only a fantasy destination but also a real-­life residence for many British rock stars trying to avoid the taxman back home. London Blows-­Up: Mod Culture and “Swinging London”

The fact that young British rock musicians could make their way across the Atlantic to perform and record in the United States at all was a striking sign

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that something atypical was happening in transatlantic popular culture. By 1965 important cultural developments in many fields (of which the “British Invasion” was but one example) seemed to be coalescing to make Britain, and especially London, seem like the epicenter of international cool. Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s the United States seemed to have a permanent monopoly on that intangible and elusive commodity, a cadre of young, creative British men and women in fields such as fashion design, film, art, literature, and popular music strove to reverse—­if only temporarily—­the direction in which transatlantic cultural creativity flowed. Actor Terence Stamp, himself one of that cadre, recalled hearing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” for the first time in 1963. Because we were so subjected to anything good being American, . . . I just assumed that [the song] was American. . . . And I went into a record shop and said, “Do you have this American record ‘Love Me Do’”? And [the clerk] said, “That’s an English record.” And I was floored.122 This kind of cultural dynamism can be said to have reached its apex in 1966. In April of that year, taking belated public notice of what many in the British capital already knew, Time magazine devoted a cover story to the vibrant British cultural scene and coined the phrase “Swinging London” to refer to it.123 Then, on the very same evening in July 1966, England’s football team won the World Cup over a rival West German team and the supergroup Cream, representing what was supposedly the best of British rock music, took the stage for the very first time at the National Jazz and Blues Festival in Windsor.124 The year was capped with the release of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s iconic film Blow-­Up, which depicted a London of hip photographers, miniskirted aspiring fashion models, pop music groups, recreational drug use, and casual sex.125 The central characters and poster boys of the Swinging London scene were the fashion-­obsessed young men belonging to the Mod subculture. Generally speaking, Mods were of the same social class as the blues enthusiasts. They worked entry-­level white-­collar jobs, from which vanilla employment they earned the wages to support their various addictions, namely, their “holy Trinity” of fashionable clothing, record albums, and amphetamines.126 Like other British youth subcultures both before (e.g., the Teddy Boys of the 1950s) and after (e.g., the Skinheads of the late 1960s), the Mods defined themselves largely via sartorial style. They had a weakness for fine men’s fashion, whether from America or Continental Europe.127 As perhaps

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  45

befitted a youth population that was the beneficiary of newfound economic affluence—­and thus the ability to make nonessential purchases—­Mods were obsessed with the finest details of consumer culture, thus proclaiming their status as wealthy, knowledgeable insiders. Impassioned debates were held among Mods, for example, as to whether a fancy suit ought to have six-­or eight-­inch lapels! The Mod subculture was, as its original adherents proudly attest even now, “incredibly snobbish,” even bigoted, like a narcissistic cult whose members aspired constantly to one-­up their comrades.128 As Pete Townshend attested, “[T]he real Mod scene . . . was incestuous, secretive. Difficult to be a real up-­to-­the-­minute Mod ’cause no cunt would tell you where to get the clothes.”129 Mods attracted the attention of society at large in 1964 and 1965 due to a series of much-­publicized “Bank Holiday Riots” in which they clashed with both police and their arch-­nemeses, the leather-­clad, motorcycle-­ riding Rockers. For our purposes, the Mods were more significant because of their musical tastes, which ran overwhelmingly to the R&B and soul music being produced in Detroit and Memphis.130 Gradually, their dogmatic attachments to these African-­American styles relaxed sufficiently to allow allegiance to a small but noteworthy knot of novice British R&B bands like the Who, the Small Faces, the Animals, and the Kinks—­bands that never really were Mod but came to be adopted by Mods.131 Furthermore, in both their insatiable lust for the unique article and their amazing particularity, Mods shared important commonalities with the growing cadre of amateur blues zealots, who might, as Manfred Mann guitarist Tom McGuinness once did, “walk three miles to catch a glimpse of a John Lee Hooker album cover”—­ not to listen to it, just to look at it.132 In full force, Swinging London’s sociocultural ferment was responsible for a great deal of remarkable cultural productivity, and it gave necessary intellectual and cultural cover to the British blues network. The “blues freaks” were, at least in the beginning, fiercely protective of their chosen art form and derisive of the wider pop culture, but they did not and could not exist completely separate from the seemingly pop-­obsessed London scene. For example, in 1967 Mick Jagger could count among his social acquaintances fashion photographer David Bailey, Guinness brewing heir Tara Browne, and avant-­ garde art dealer Robert Fraser.133 The Yardbirds provided the soundtrack for Antonioni’s Blow-­Up; the Who arguably did the same, metaphorically, for young Mods with songs like “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation,” which expressed the frustrations many inarticulate young men claimed to have.134 And, finally, if Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson inspired what young British performers played and sang, Mod or Pop artists

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and designers influenced, among other things, the way they groomed and dressed themselves.135 The kinds of inspirational cultural encounters that occurred within the British blues network also occurred between that network and the larger British youth culture. By this I mean that young blues enthusiasts like Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart did not just talk, trade ideas, collaborate, and compete with other blues enthusiasts. As befits a cultural moment that thought of itself—­perhaps naively—­as breathing democratic fresh air into a stuffy, hierarchical society in postwar Britain, the idea was for everyone—­of every class and perspective—­to mix and mingle.136 Whether at nightclubs such as The Scotch of St. James or backstage at concert venues such as Eel Pie Island, young creative types traded ideas about music, politics, art, film, design, and even literature. I make mention of these extraordinary interconnections because, in a study that endeavors to explain the social and cultural factors that shaped the British blues network, the impact of the contemporary youth culture at large must be accorded some attention alongside the impact of black American culture.137 Conclusions

An interpersonal network comprised of young, mostly male British blues enthusiasts grew up in the early 1960s and became vital in the middle of that decade to the diffusion of musical and artistic ideas throughout Britain, as well as to the development of rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. That network was forged in a very specific social, economic, and cultural milieu: urban/suburban Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s. When the young men who would eventually form the network were growing up, Britain was gradually recovering from the Second World War, which had a number of formative influences on a young white male Briton. Not the least of these were material destruction, the rationing of consumer goods, and a general mood of national forgetfulness and lack of critical engagement with what had happened and was happening to British society. It also brought “America” as an abstract concept and actual Americans (especially African-­ American GIs) “onshore” into Britain on a large scale for the first time. The war even indirectly led to the more permanent “coming ashore” of thousands of nonwhite Commonwealth immigrants to address labor shortages, which had an immense impact on Britain economically, culturally, and in terms of how white Britons conceived of “the nation.” Beginning in the late 1950s, Britain took a sharp turn out of its consumer

Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation  •  47

privation and into an era of unprecedented affluence and consumer purchasing power, which, coupled with the “baby boom” and sociological labeling of the “teenager,” not only served notice that there were far more young people in Britain but also created a sense of demographic cohesion, with places to go and things to buy—­including radios, televisions, and record albums. However, widespread affluence could not reverse the seemingly inexorable decline of Britain from the ranks of the global powers—­a slide symbolized by its withdrawal from the Empire during this era, as well as by the proportionate accession of the United States to the position of world superpower. Young Britons who were born during and immediately after the war had to come to grips with both of these geopolitical developments. Essentially, these developments helped to create a simple dynamic in the minds of young Britons such as our future aspiring bluesmen. The Britain in which they grew up, the Britain of their parents, was gray, broke, and boring, with decolonization and rationing the seeming payouts for a victory that some began to feel had not been worth the cost. America, meanwhile, seemed glamorous, confident, energetic, and flush with cash. Our young Britons wanted, in a sense, to become Americans, so much so that they would reverse-­ adopt African-­American bluesmen as replacement “fathers” in abstract preference to their own. By the early 1960s, the purchasing power was there, although the cultural dynamism and energy had seemingly not yet arrived. The youthful sexiness and energy of America only seemed confirmed with the bursting forth of rock ‘n’ roll, which was transmitted to British audiences, with a slight time lag, by the late 1950s. Young Britons of the post–­Second World War generation grew up in the shadow of what historian Mervyn Leffler called America’s “preponderance of power” in military and economic, as well as cultural, terms.138 In some ways, Britain’s experience was no different from that of the rest of Western Europe. American popular culture was transmitted all over Europe, just as it was in Britain. Likewise, much of American popular culture—­especially rock ‘n’ roll—­was met with the same rapturous reception by young people there. There were, after all, screaming girls and leather-­clad boys in love with Elvis in France, West Germany, Italy, and Holland, too. However, as I continue to argue in the coming chapters, the British case was quite different. Rather than just passively receiving and consuming American musical forms like rock ‘n’ roll and the blues, young British men also aspired to emulate them and, eventually, innovate them. British blues-­rock musicians eventually challenged at least America’s cultural preponderance with the music and personae they created. The shared language was a part of the reason why, but only a part. How all of this happened over the next decade and beyond was influenced

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(though not predetermined) by the distinct social, economic, and cultural backdrop against which British young men’s consumption and reproduction of American popular culture occurred. The combination of sociocultural and economic circumstances and the specific methods of reception started a cultural chain reaction that led, by 1962, to the beginning of the British “blues boom” and the formation of the interpersonal network that would come to innovate popular music and youth culture not only in Britain but in the United States as well. What has yet to be addressed is how the “blues freaks” that Keith Richards claims were in “every town” in Britain received their creative inspiration before finding each other—­that is, how the blues came to Britain in the first place. It is to this reception that we now turn.

2  •  Trying to Make London My Home Introductory Encounters with the Blues I remember “Big Bill” Broonzy came ambling up the street . . . looking around like he was lost. . . . I said, “You looking for the [Newcastle] City Hall? Well, this is the door.” He said, “How do I get in there?” So I said, “Well, let me just kick the doors in for you.” —­Eric Burdon1

As roommate James Phelge tells the story, it was a freezing Saturday morning in 1963 when a young Keith Richards burst into the Chelsea flat he shared with Phelge and fellow Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. He was flushed with pleasure despite the temperature and cradling a large parcel under his arm. His flatmates broke off from warming themselves at the flat’s “pathetic-­looking fire” and excitedly crowded around Richards to see what he had brought home. It was a record album. [T]he latest Bo Diddley, ordered from the States. . . . Each arrival generated the same routine with the ritual studying of the cover. Everyone seemed to be trying to savor the precious moments of anticipation before playing the first track, when all would finally be revealed. To be loved or rejected.2 It seems safe to surmise that what emanated from the flat’s beat-­up record player that morning was more likely to be loved than rejected. After all, in the early days before Jagger and Richards became a top-­selling songwriting team, the oeuvre of Bo Diddley, alongside those of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, provided the fledgling Rolling Stones with most of their performed material.3 Young British enthusiasts like the Rolling Stones carried on a love affair with the blues and R&B, and like all love affairs, it was built on fleeting encounters, rendezvous, and precious tokens. 49

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At a basic level, the preceding story relates how three young British men came in contact with a Bo Diddley record one winter day. However, in its general contours, it can be made to represent numerous encounters occurring all over Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Change the locale from Chelsea to Newcastle, for instance, change the artist from Bo Diddley to John Lee Hooker, and change the acquisition method from catalog mail order to a gift from a merchant seaman living downstairs, and now it is the story of an early blues encounter for Animal-­in-­waiting Eric Burdon.4 Alternatively, imagine that it is not a record album at all but the scratchy signal of the American Forces Network (AFN) on a transistor radio that is the site of the encounter and it becomes the experience of, among others, future guitar hero Jeff Beck.5 In the British blues network, the medium and the circumstances of the blues encounters could differ widely from person to person. However, the excitement and awe that resulted from the first encounter with the blues, and the anticipation with which subsequent encounters were met, were universal. This chapter examines the transmission of American blues and R&B music to Britain beginning in the 1940s. This transmission occurred via three key media: record albums, radio broadcasts, and infrequent live performances given by visiting African-­American bluesmen. One of the underlying premises of this chapter is that this process of transmission, encounter, and reception should not be taken for granted, as though it were a completely natural thing for young British men to come into contact with, let alone enjoy and emulate, musical forms that were not perceived as mainstream in the country that had produced them. In some ways, the British blues boom must be seen as the result of a series of momentous historical accidents, as it was certainly not a concerted effort on the part of American record companies or the American government to place Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed albums into the hands of Britain’s young people (and during the Cold War, many such efforts were being made, just not with blues or rock ‘n’ roll).6 A close examination of the transmission process is useful for two reasons. First, it attests to the inherently accidental nature of cultural transmission. More important, I believe that the vastly different ways in which British and American musicians dealt with and used the blues vis-­à-­vis popular music has much to do with the distinctive means by which British and American fans received and responded to the blues in the first place.7 Thus, it is necessary to chart the differences in the beginning to help explain more fully the eventual divergences. This initial period of prodigious exchange between African-­American music and British musicians lasted until the mid-­1960s. At this point, the blues had had a sufficient impact to establish a critical mass of young blues

Trying to Make London My Home  •  51

enthusiasts who had formed bands and become relatively well known in Britain, if not yet in America. From this point forward, although African-­ American bluesmen were obviously still influential and widely revered, young British musicians would also serve to inspire subsequent generations of their countrymen to make music. But this critical mass never would have been reached without the multifarious and often unwitting transatlantic musical exchange that preceded it. “GI Blues”: The American Military and Its Musical Impact

In the previous chapter, I discussed the fact that American GIs stationed in Britain during and after the Second World War played an important role in crafting imagined discourses about America’s people and culture and about national and racial difference in general. However, we should not ignore the fact that the GIs were also significant to a future British blues culture in purely pragmatic ways. The iconic GI, strapping and handsome, extroverted, well heeled, and—­most important—­generous, was quite popular among the young, providing them an occasional respite from rationing with their seemingly endless supply of Coca-­Cola, chocolate, and chewing gum.8 The GIs’ record albums were a welcome treat, as well. They provided many British children with their first exposure to the sounds of blues, R&B, and country-­and-­western—­“sounds,” according to Rolling Stones biographer Stephen Davis, that “the English began to love.”9 These records trickled down to the locals by means of GIs who either traded them or simply gave them away to pint-­sized supplicants.10 Just hearing the records was sometimes enough. Mick Jagger, for instance, recalls first hearing Muddy Waters while spending a summer teaching physical education at an American airbase; there he was befriended by an African-­American army cook who played blues records almost constantly.11 Van Morrison’s father, a shipyard electrician, supplemented his enormous collection of American records by buying from and bartering with the GIs and merchant marines stationed in and around his native Belfast. In the years to come, this mother lode would help fire his only son’s interest in Lead Belly, Josh White and Mose Allison.12 The importance of the African-­American GI to the development of an indigenous British blues scene continued after V-­E Day. Along with the West Indians who had been immigrating to Britain’s urban areas in large numbers since the late 1940s, African-­American GIs on weekend furlough made up the majority of the nightly clientele at the British blues network’s most vital proving-­ground, London’s nightclubs.13 (This was also the case in Hamburg,

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where the African-­American GIs helping to occupy West Germany found their demand for blues and R&B met by a succession of fledgling British bands, most notably the Beatles and Them.)14 Onstage at London’s Flamingo Club, it would not have been unusual to look out into the audience, as British blues shouter Chris Farlowe did one evening in 1965, and be confronted with a sea of black faces, with the occasional clusters of fearless white enthusiasts sprinkled throughout.15 Eric Clapton attests that it was “a place that I was scared to go, until I was actually in bands,” and even for those in bands, intimidating it must surely have been.16 The African-­American GI was often, as I have said, the first and most immediate living representative that British blues enthusiasts had ever seen of the culture they would come to so admire. Thus, the stakes for onstage failure were enormously high. However, as would happen numerous times in the British blues movement, the young white enthusiasts would often earn the (sometimes enthusiastic) respect of that audience. Pianist Georgie Fame (né Clive Powell) relates an unexpected benefit of becoming a crowd pleaser among the African American GIs. I hated the name Georgie Fame, because I’d been . . . saddled with this name by [pop impresario] Larry Parnes as one of his exotic rock ‘n’ roll stable of singers. But when we went down the Flamingo, and the GIs would yell out, “Hey, Fame, mutha!,” it sounded OK. It sounded hip.17 The African-­American GIs who patronized the Flamingo and clubs like it provided Fame with more than just encouragement regarding their music or stage names. They also added further layers to the British blues enthusiasts’ musical education; Fame recalls that he gradually became friends with them and they would play him their own records, which they brought to the club. Fame became so impressed with one record in particular—­Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onions”—­that its owner let him keep it.18 Besides the proliferation of their record albums and their patronage of the nightclubs where many British R&B bands learned their trade, the GIs were also instrumental in bringing the blues to Britain through radio broadcasts provided on their behalf by the American Forces Network (AFN). Like the GI presence in Britain itself, the AFN was a phenomenon that began during the Second World War and continued well into the Cold War. It was created to provide a quality broadcast alternative to the BBC, which the GIs had generally found unsatisfactory.19 The AFN began broadcasting on July 4, 1943, from eight locations throughout England and Wales (a number that

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would eventually grow to sixty-­six).20 After D-­Day, as the Allied armies pushed eastward through France, the Low Countries, and Germany itself, the AFN dispatched mobile broadcast units to serve the advancing armies. Within months of V-­E Day, the AFN shut down its transmitters in Britain and reestablished its headquarters and main broadcast center in Frankfurt-­ am-­ Main in Germany. Powerful 100,000-­ watt transmitters based in Frankfurt-­am-­Main, Munich, Stuttgart, and Bremen enabled the AFN to continue reaching Britain.21 Continuing to reach Britain was important because, although the AFN was intended solely for the consumption of GIs, it had also become quite popular among British audiences. This development occurred despite the intentions of the AFN programmers, as well as the extreme concern of the BBC, which had been assured that this would not happen.22 In a radio-­mad culture such as Britain’s, where nearly every household had a set, and with little else to do under wartime blackouts and rationing, it is unclear why anybody thought that resourceful local audiences would be unable to find AFN on their dials, but find it they did.23 This is yet another example of the ways in which transmissions and receptions of popular culture are often achieved by accident. The AFN provided, at least until the mid-­1960s, the only outlet where British audiences could regularly hear American popular music over the radio. The BBC, which had a Crown-­mandated monopoly over the airwaves, followed the dictates of its director-­general, John Reith, who held that radio should be used solely for the edification of the public.24 This did not mean that the BBC would broadcast no entertainment whatsoever, but that entertainment was to be defined solidly as the kind of “high” culture that informed and educated the listener. Thus, to the BBC, radio entertainment could take the form of serious drama, classical music, and the odd bit of jazz (since, in certain circles, jazz was regarded as serious intellectual stuff ).25 Even jazz was restricted, though, because of a 1930 “needletime” agreement with the British Musicians’ Union (MU) that severely limited the amount of American music that could be broadcast on the BBC.26 The needletime agreement was overturned in 1959, but even while it was in effect it was only partially successful. American music managed to get through anyway, sometimes in the oddest of ways. Eric Clapton remembers a weekly segment, Children’s Hour, which aired “when [he] was ten or eleven” on the BBC every Saturday morning. The show was hosted by this strange person, Uncle Mac, a very old man with one leg and a strange little penchant for children. He’d play things like [Frankie

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Laine’s] “Mule Train,” and then every week he’d slip in something like a Buddy Holly record or a Chuck Berry record. And the first blues I ever heard was on that programme; it was a song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Sonny Terry howling and playing the harmonica. It blew me away.27 That Children’s Hour has been called “one of BBC Radio’s most fondly remembered children’s programmes” suggests that there was an opportunity for numerous unnamed others who also got their first taste of the blues in this manner.28 “Uncle Mac,” whose given name was Derek McCulloch, was presumably tolerated because he was eccentric and old—­fifty-­seven when he began hosting the show.29 Other justifications can help to explain notable instances whereby the blues slipped past the BBC’s vetting process. Alan Lomax was an esteemed American folklorist whose recording trips into the Deep South in the 1940s on behalf of the Library of Congress were responsible for the discovery (or rediscovery) of many important blues artists. He hosted two popular shows on the Light Programme entitled “Adventures in Folksong” and “Patterns in American Song.” These half-­hour broadcasts were devoted to the history and anthropology of jazz and the blues, with a healthy slice of airtime for Lomax’s field recordings as “evidence.”30 These shows were allowed to air because, passing as they did for erudite lessons on the nature of African-­American culture, they fit the Reithian dictum that radio must inform and educate. Nuggets such as these, however, were still rather few and far between. Those who wanted to hear American popular music had to go elsewhere, and their main avenue was the AFN, whose popularity was amplified with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-­1950s. Now jazz and blues fans looking for their fix were joined by teenagers who had heard (or at least heard of) the exciting new American music from the media and movies like Blackboard Jungle. They tuned into the AFN, often surreptitiously, since their parents likely would have looked unfavorably on them listening to so-­called jungle music. In fact, going by the testimonies of British blues enthusiasts, one would think that every boy in Britain spent his nights thrilling to the sounds of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry by the glow of the small transistor radio he kept hidden under his bedsheets.31 Perhaps such subterfuge was necessary: Robert Plant remembers his father cutting the plug off his son’s record player after the latter had played the same R&B song seventeen times in a row!32 AFN’s late night broadcasts were hosted by the deep-­voiced Willis

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Conover, from Washington, DC, which might as well have been “another planet” to his young British audience.33 Bound only by the wide-­ranging listening tastes of his primary audience of white and African-­American GIs, Conover played a diverse slate of popular music: rock ‘n’ roll, country-­and-­ western, jazz, R&B, and blues. Listening to Conover’s eclectic broadcasts, young Britons who tuned in to hear rock ‘n’ roll became acquainted with the blues and R&B as well. Keith Richards and John Lennon, for example, were initially rockabilly fans who latched onto Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf because the AFN played their songs in the same blocks of airtime as the more familiar rock ‘n’ roll hits.34 An Education at 45 Rpm: The Cult of Record Acquisition

As popular as the blues, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll were among young Britons, it is probable that many restricted themselves to simply listening to the BBC and AFN. However, in Manchester, John Mayall took his love of American music one step further—­he taped it. In the late 1950s, Mayall was in his mid-­twenties, which was significant to this discussion for two reasons. For one, being older meant that he had several years’ head start on his fellows in terms of buying blues records. For another, unlike most of the younger cohort, he held down a steady job—­as the art director of a Manchester graphic design studio.35 This meant that he had enough disposable income to buy a reel-­to-­reel tape recorder, which he used to record much of what came through over the AFN’s airwaves.36 By 1963, when he moved from Manchester to London to join Alexis Korner’s band Blues Incorporated, he had amassed what has been described by Clapton, Fame, Steve Winwood, and many others as the largest and most diverse collection of records and reel-­to-­reel tapes they had ever encountered.37 This collection became an invaluable asset to the younger members of the British blues network, who, although they had jobs and the pocket money to buy their own albums, could never have matched Mayall’s hoard. Said Jimmy Page, “What saved the day was that . . . a whole network formed of people who would swap and trade music. None of us really had any money to buy all these rare, imported albums, but it all built up.”38 Instead of trying to buy a collection to match Mayall’s, many young enthusiasts opted simply to borrow, a subject to which I return in chapter 4 as part of a discussion of how record collecting forged homosocial bonds among male blues enthusiasts. The vinyl education provided to Clapton by Mayall supplemented the

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former’s initial, much more visceral blues epiphany. In late 1961, Clapton (just sixteen at the time) and fellow blues enthusiast Clive Blewchamp got their hands on a copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers, a recent Columbia Records rerelease of sixteen Robert Johnson tracks. Johnson would soon become Clapton’s idol, but initially, Clapton said later, “I actually couldn’t take it. . . . [I]t was too much to cope with. . . . It came as something of a shock to me that there could be anything so powerful. . . . It was almost like Robert Johnson was too strong to mix with other people.”39 Such was the intensity of Johnson’s music that Clapton could not bring himself to listen to the record again for another six months. The second time, though, Johnson “got me like a bug. I got really bigoted and fanatical about it.”40 Talking with blues chronicler Peter Guralnick in 1990, Clapton effused about that album, and Johnson, in almost apostolic terms. It was almost like I’d been prepared each step of the way to receive him . . . like a religious experience that started out by hearing Chuck Berry, and then at each stage I was going further and further back, and deeper and deeper into the source of the music, until I was ready for Robert Johnson.41 Numerous others in the British blues network had similar “road to Tarsus” moments with King of the Delta Blues Singers. With a clarity that is remarkably similar to that with which Americans of the same generation can remember where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, many British musicians can remember the exact circumstances in which they first heard Johnson’s album.42 In intensity and detail, Clapton’s “epiphany” was matched by that of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant, both of whom held forth in Musician magazine on the occasion of the release of The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson in 1990. Richards: I guess [prior to King] The Best of Muddy Waters was the criteria album at the time for us. And then we found out about Jimmy Reed. And then you realize there’s a whole load of them! When I was 18, it was Brian Jones who first played me the record [King], and I said, “Who the hell—­where’d you get this?? This is superior!” Because that must have been the peak, at least of ’30s blues, just a blues singer with a guitar. . . . If you listen to a lot of Robert Johnson, well, in one form or another he’s in you. . . . I

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wonder sometimes if he was anything like that persona that comes across on that record.43 Plant: When I was 15, in Worcestershire, I went into a record store and there was an old CBS gatefold album which was part of a series that included Blind Boy Fuller, Bessie Smith, Leroy Carr. What this album was, was a repackaging of Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. It had scant detail. No photo, of course. There was a sharecropper’s shack on the front and then it went into some eloquent, glib overview of the blues. And I was absolutely astounded. . . . Through the folk clubs and the whole beatnik movement I’d been exposed to Big Joe Williams and the, let’s call it, the general slide style. But I’d never heard anything as seductive.44 Each of these testimonies is shot through with three important themes in constructing both the reception of Robert Johnson by British listeners and the importance with which he came to be invested. The first is the depth of the emotional impact on the listener of the music itself. The second is the mystery that seemed to swirl around Johnson, which was certainly encouraged by the spare packaging accompanying the record. The third is that King of the Delta Blues Singers was not the first blues record they had listened to or even purchased. It is crucial to note that record albums like King of the Delta Blues Singers were often not the initial entrée to the blues for young Britons; most enthusiasts already had a working knowledge of what blues music sounded like, to which Johnson could be compared. The importance of record albums to the British blues network is not to be underestimated. Since most albums had to be actively sought, it stands to reason that they were often not something to be encountered by the uninitiated. Record albums were the media by means of which British blues enthusiasts confirmed or deepened their love of the blues after they had already been exposed to it in other ways. They were also a way to forge the acquaintanceships that would later coalesce into the British blues network. By now the story of how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards renewed their childhood friendship in 1962 on a commuter train because Jagger was carrying a handful of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters albums has passed into rock legend.45 Similar processes were repeated again and again in art college common rooms and parents’ living rooms across Britain. In addition to solidifying a love of the blues and initiating social contacts between enthusiasts, record albums became the centerpiece of a bona fide

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cult—­the holy relics that justified the expenditure of a fortnight’s pay and sometimes an entire day spent hunting through dark, secluded shops.46 The cult of record acquisition became the most visible evidence of the necessary link between the British blues boom and the wider consumer culture of which it was a part; without the boom in consumer durables and the attendant increase in the country’s standard of living, this cult would never have been possible.47 When it came to searching for these treasures, the ever-­resourceful cognoscente employed a variety of methods. One, as mentioned, was to trawl a multitude of secondhand shops—­particularly in Soho, London’s bohemian enclave. Jazz historian Jim Godbolt asserts that “before the war, shops specializing in jazz [and the blues] were virtually unknown.”48 However, with the consumer culture boom and the coincident “trad” jazz revival, shops catering to this clientele sprang up within striking distance of Soho’s jazz clubs.49 In particular, Dobell’s in Charing Cross Road was a popular destination. The shop had opened before the Second World War as an antiquarian bookshop run by Doug Dobell’s father; after his demobilization from the army, Doug converted it into a record shop. By the early 1960s, he was able to boast that “every true jazz fan is born within the sound of Dobell’s.”50 Likewise, Birmingham was home to a “cramped and poky” shop called the Diskery, which became a “mecca for the area’s aspirant musicians” (including a young Robert Plant). It had a reputation as the only place for miles that sold imported American records. As a bonus, it employed a local black disc jockey going by the name of Erskin T, who served as an evangelist for the blues and soul.51 Another way to hear the latest R&B records, if not acquire them, was to spend an evening in one of a growing number of urban British nightclubs that played African-­American music, including the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the Club-­A-­Go-­Go in Newcastle, and the Sink in Liverpool.52 The highest density of such venues was in London. The Roaring Twenties nightclub near Carnaby Street played an important role in the birth of British blues owing to the presence of Jamaican disc jockey Count Suckle. Born Wilbert Augustus Campbell, Suckle had connections with the music scene in Memphis, which kept him supplied with the latest releases by the Sun, Chess, and Modern/RPM labels. Suckle would play these records during the intermissions between the club’s live sets. In this way, Georgie Fame first heard James Brown’s Night Train and Sam Cooke’s Night Beat, and was also exposed to the “ska” and calypso records that Suckle acquired from London’s West Indian community.53 Guy Stevens, the disc jockey at the Scene club, also had an American source, and his records ensured that the Scene was the

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favorite hangout of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger throughout the summer and autumn of 1963.54 Sometimes the young British blues enthusiast could have an entire record collection literally fall into his lap. This was the happy circumstance that befell Pete Townshend when his American flatmate was deported in 1962 after being charged with marijuana possession. The young American’s vast record collection, which he was forced to leave behind, became Townshend’s by default. According to fellow flatmate Richard Barnes, this mother lode consisted of albums by Mose Allison, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, the Coasters, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf—­among hundreds of others.55 The eclecticism of this unfortunate young American’s collection directly influenced the selection of material covered by Townshend’s band the Detours, which later became the Who. After 1959 the quest for American blues albums became easier due to a limited production and distribution agreement between Chicago’s Chess and Britain’s Pye labels.56 This deal enabled many of the early 1960s hits of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon to reach British audiences, and it explains why songs written by these three artists, in particular, were so well represented in the cover versions performed by the British blues network. Although it is unclear how the Chess-­Pye agreement affected the release of items from the Chicago label’s back catalog, the extreme measures taken by Mick Jagger seem to suggest that the agreement held only for new releases. Using the government stipend that was supposed to pay for a degree program in political science at the London School of Economics, Jagger regularly ordered obscure vinyl treasures from the Chess direct-­mail catalog.57 This was not an entirely ideal acquisition method given the exorbitant shipping and handling costs and two-­month wait for international mailings. But under the circumstances it was what Jagger and cognoscenti like him felt compelled to do. The cult of record acquisition still had its echoes in the later careers of members of the British blues network, often after they had been superstars for many years. Pete Townshend recalls a 1981 party thrown by Jagger at which the latter played a host of “old, great blues records” that he kept in an enormous travel trunk in his hotel room. Many of them, he claimed, he had owned since before he was a Rolling Stone. In response to Townshend’s query about how he had chosen which ones to bring with him, Jagger replied earnestly, “I take all my records. All of them. Everywhere.”58 And, although none may match Jagger in this respect, it is beyond question that many in the British blues network still feel much the same adolescent enthusiasm for the records that first inspired them.

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At the Feet of the Masters: The Blues “Fathers” Come to Britain

After radio broadcasts and record albums, the third major way in which the blues made it to Britain was via some of its practitioners actually making it to Britain for rare in-­person visits and live performances. This points up an important, somewhat overlooked aspect of British blues prehistory: the traditional, or “trad,” jazz revival of the 1950s. Trad emerged as a revivalist impulse within jazz in opposition to the self-­consciously intellectual and modernist “bebop” style. British revivalists such as trombonist Chris Barber, clarinetist Acker Bilk, and trumpeter Ken Colyer embraced an anti-­ modernist path by re-­creating the “Dixieland” style that had been performed in New Orleans in the decades prior.59 Trad jazz had its critics, and neither the form nor its practitioners have fared particularly well in the public consciousness over the past sixty years—­partly because the later British blues movement eclipsed it and winners write history.60 Trad enthusiasts have been characterized as closed-­minded hipsters, the British version of American folk enthusiasts who booed Bob Dylan for “going electric” in 1965. They were supposedly obsessed with the “authenticity” and “purity” of their music and unwilling to make time even for a modernized, electrified form of the blues, much less the supposedly “vulgar” rock ‘n’ roll.61 Trad has also survived in the public consciousness as a weird fad enjoyed by slightly outré, university-­educated eccentrics.62 To whatever extent any of these contemporary characterizations hold water, the point remains that the trad jazz movement was not only incredibly popular in its time but also of tremendous significance in shaping the British blues movement that followed. For one thing, the trad crowd was among the first in Britain to exalt African-­American music and culture and position them as preferable alternatives to modern, everyday British culture.63 For another, a sizable part of the British blues movement’s eventual audience and even performance venues was poached from those of trad.64 Finally, the trad jazz revival must be credited with sponsoring the first in-­person performances by African-­American blues performers in the country in the 1950s. The first of these tours were sponsored by Barber under the aegis of the National Jazz League (NJL).65 The NJL not only invited the performers and handled all the logistical arrangements, but it was also responsible for lobbying the British government and the MU to lift the ban on American musicians performing in Britain.66 According to younger enthusiasts like Paul Jones, Barber did all of this for a deceptively simple and self-­serving reason: “For him, it was just [that] he wanted to play with those people. He wanted to hear them right there, y’know, playing in front of his rhythm section.”67

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Perhaps more meaningful because of their rarity, these in-­the-­flesh live appearances confirmed a generation of young Britons in their love affair with the blues. The first bluesman to travel to Britain was “Big Bill” Broonzy, whose star was at that time on the wane among African-­American audiences. In the early 1950s, he shrewdly made the jump to white coffeehouse audiences in New York and then in Western Europe, where he was rapturously received by white jazz and folk enthusiasts.68 As the first African-­American bluesman to tour Britain, Broonzy was important for the eventual emergence of the British blues network, even if its members were too young to have actually attended his gigs. For one thing, they convinced Barber and the NJL that there existed a viable audience for folk blues, which prompted Barber to perform more folk blues with his own band.69 This led to Lonnie Donegan’s performance and eventual recording of “Rock Island Line,” which in turn led to the skiffle boom that influenced our very young protagonists. Broonzy’s first tour in 1951 also convinced Barber that bringing American bluesmen to Britain was worthwhile, both culturally and financially, and should be continued. To this end, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee visited Britain in 1954, followed by “Champion” Jack Dupree in 1956, by Broonzy again in 1957, and finally by Muddy Waters in 1958.70 Waters’s performances created what Bob Brunning calls “a now scarcely creditable storm” of controversy.71 Fans of trad jazz and folk blues had become accustomed to hearing elderly African Americans—­dressed either in overalls or threadbare suits—­ accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars and harmonicas. They were completely unprepared for Waters and his backing band, who—­dressed impeccably in silk suits and patent leather shoes—­did not look the part.72 And they certainly did not sound the part, plugged into an admittedly small amplifier, which made some in the scandalized audience worry they might lose their hearing.73 To the trad crowd, “screaming guitar and howling piano” were absolute heresy; many booed and walked out. Chastened, Waters told the English music paper Melody Maker, “Now I know that the people in England like soft guitar and the old blues. Next time I come I’ll learn some old songs first.”74 However, Waters’s electrified Chicago blues deeply impressed others in the audience. Enough voters liked his recent electric compilation The Best of Muddy Waters that it ran third in Jazz Journal’s “best records of 1958” poll, and was named “best vocal record” by Melody Maker.75 In London, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, a guitarist and a harmonica player, respectively, in Chris Barber’s trad band, liked what they heard, comparing it favorably to the tedium of what Korner called “this skiffle shit.”76 Inspired by Waters’s performance, they felt sufficiently emboldened to form an amplified blues

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unit within Barber’s band. In 1961 they parted ways with Barber entirely and formed their own band. Farther north, Eric Burdon, then an indifferent seventeen-­year-­old graphics student at the Newcastle College of Art, had acquired two tickets to Waters’s show. In the school cafeteria on the afternoon of the show, he announced that he had an extra ticket and asked if anyone wanted to accompany him. John Steel, also seventeen, said he would. On the way home after the show, the pair could talk of nothing but Waters’s sound and whether they could possibly produce that much power themselves. The genesis of their R&B band, the Animals, can be traced to that night in 1958.77 The next important appearance of American bluesmen in Britain was in 1962 as part of the first American Folk Blues Festival (AFBF), a package tour of Europe organized by German enthusiasts Fritz Rau and Horst Lippmann. Well aware of the grassroots interest in the blues among (mostly teenaged) European audiences, and eager to get some footage of the genuine article for their German television show Jazz Gehört and Gesehen ( Jazz Heard and Seen), Rau and Lippmann enlisted the Chess producer, bass guitarist, and lyricist Willie Dixon to help them round up the best American blues talent and book dates all over the Continent.78 The original bill was breathtaking: it included Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Memphis Slim, and T-­Bone Walker.79 The tour’s lone British show was on October 18, 1962, in Manchester. Rau and Lippmann claimed that a lukewarm reception from British promoters prevented them from booking any additional stops in Britain. Enough young enthusiasts—­including Jimmy Page, Paul Jones, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards—­swarmed the Manchester Free Trade Hall that night, however, that Rau and Lippmann had no trouble booking British gigs the following year.80 The 1963 AFBF featured the return of Muddy Waters to the nation that had met his previous trip there with such hostility and incredulity. This time around, he was true to the promise he had given in 1958 to Melody Maker, sticking to “soft guitar and old blues.” What he had not reckoned with—­indeed, could not have reckoned with—­was the sea change that had occurred in the British scene over the five years since his last visit.81 Trad jazz was on the wane, giving way to the electrified R&B produced by Korner and Davies’s Blues Incorporated and its spin-­off, the Rolling Stones. “Screaming guitar and howling piano” were now all the rage, so to speak. Thus, Waters’s “down-­home” acoustic set was now just as out of place as his amplified Chicago-­style set had been previously. A bewildered Waters wondered, “‘Just what did they want, these white folks?’ He’d given them the old down-­home country blues this time—­ and now all they could ask him was, ‘Why’d you leave the Telecaster behind?’”82 On subsequent trips to Britain, Waters did not leave the Telecaster be-

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hind, and he resumed his rightful role as a paterfamilias to the British blues network. As a result of their exposure via the AFBF, so did John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson II.83 These last three gained added stature in the eyes of the movement because, appreciative of the warm reception they were accorded in Britain, they decided to stay in the country after the 1964 AFBF concluded.84 This added touring was run on a shoestring budget, meaning that Chess Records could not afford to retain their studio band in Britain to back Howlin’ Wolf.85 However, booking agents found an inexpensive local talent source practically begging to be tapped: young British blues enthusiasts who craved the kind of training and personal interaction that only working with the masters could provide.86 Thus, John Lee Hooker was backed first by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (to less than stellar reviews, it must be said) and then by a South London R&B outfit called the Groundhogs, while Howlin’ Wolf was backed by “Long John” Baldry’s Hoochie-­Coochie Men, the Muleskinners, and the T-­ Bones.87 Sonny Boy Williamson II was backed by several of the bands on the scene—­though not the Rolling Stones, who were by then “too big in their own right to serve as anybody’s backing band.”88 Of all these pairings, the most noteworthy, most contentious, and arguably most telling in the early days of this transatlantic relationship was the shotgun marriage between Williamson II and two groups of British enthusiasts-­ turned-­ backing-­ musicians: the Yardbirds and the Animals. Sonny Boy Williamson II (allegedly born Aleck or “Rice” Miller) was one of the great characters of postwar blues. He first attained prominence in the American South as the voice of “King Biscuit Flour” and the Helena, Arkansas, radio station KFFA.89 He had stolen his sobriquet (thus the designation “II” after his name) from Chicago bluesman John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, who, having been murdered in 1948, was in no position to challenge the usurpation. Blues historians Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have called him a “con man,” and indeed no one has ever been able to confirm his legal birth name.90 By 1964 he was in his early fifties, had lost most of his teeth, and was drinking several bottles of whiskey a day.91 Based on these facts alone, one might guess that his relationship with his young white acolytes was fraught at best. Williamson II seemed to harbor a genuine respect and affection for Britain. He was touched by the fervent applause he received, as well as the relative lack of racism he encountered. He certainly enjoyed the paycheck; according to Horst Lippmann, he wept with joy when he received his cut at the end of the first AFBF.92 A noticeable slice of that cut went toward the purchase of some custom-­made haberdashery. The pièce de résistance was a rather

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loud suit, complete with bowler hat—­although there are conflicting opinions about whether the suit was a blue and gray pinstripe or a mustard and black checkerboard.93 Either way, Williamson II claimed to have been guided by some sense of what he imagined a proper British “gent” would wear.94 The aging bluesman also expressed his fondness for Britain and its people in the song “I’m Trying to Make London My Home,” which stated that “the people back in the United States / I declare they just don’t know what in the world is goin’ on.”95 For a few months, from late 1964 to early 1965, it was believed (or at least hoped) that Williamson II was speaking literally and would settle in Britain permanently, as Memphis Slim had done in Paris and Eddie Boyd in, of all places, Helsinki.96 However, Williamson II returned to Arkansas. Four months after his last tour of Britain, in April 1965, the “grand vizier of the blues” was dead of cancer.97 Fond of Britain though he may have been, Williamson II seemed far less sanguine about the performance of his backing bands. It cannot have helped that on meeting the old bluesman, Clapton—­who “couldn’t wait to show off ” his blues knowledge—­led with “Hey, isn’t your real name Rice Miller?”98 Williamson began his stormy relationship with the Animals and Yardbirds in 1964. Offstage, he spent a great deal of his time telling his wide-­eyed young charges tall tales about the American South and the blues circles in which he moved. As a party piece, he related the story of how Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his limitless talent and later died “on all fours, barking like a dog.”99 These entertaining and exaggerated chestnuts aside, Williamson II came off to his charges as a condescending, mean-­ spirited drunk who changed the key or time signature of songs when it suited him and berated them when they failed to keep up. Clapton claimed that Williamson pulled a knife on him at one point.100 Robert Plant—­at the time simply a young, blues-­obsessed fan—­also had a less than ideal introduction to his idol, in the men’s restroom of a Birmingham concert venue. He’s taking a leak, I’m taking a leak, and I’m saying—­as a million people have said to me—­“Mr. Williamson, thank you, you’ve been such a great influence and inspiration, and can I have your autograph?” And he looked down at me with his big eyes, and opened that mouth with one tooth in it, and said, “Get lost, son.” And I said, “Thank you.” Great moment for me.101 A story to tell one’s grandchildren, to be sure, and Plant claimed to have cemented this “hallowed” encounter by sneaking backstage and stealing one of

Trying to Make London My Home  •  65

Williamson’s harmonicas—­a moment that might seem par for the course to those who view Led Zeppelin’s later blues covers as cultural larceny.102 But what might have been the final indignity for the British came after Williamson II went home to Arkansas, where he confided in another band of young white admirers, the Hawks (later to become the Band), that “these British kids, they want to play the blues so bad . . . and they play the blues so bad!”103 The difficulties between Williamson II and white British blues enthusiasts demonstrate one of the reasons why Robert Johnson’s early demise—­a quarter century prior—­was of supreme importance to members of the British blues network. It was not merely because of the added allure of being a “genius who died before his time.” Being dead long before he could be rediscovered meant that Johnson was in some sense an empty screen onto which all their hopes and desires could be projected.104 There was no chance of meeting him or even seeing his face (at that time, no verified photographs of him existed). To actually meet one’s idol in the flesh carries with it the potential for disappointment, and to those in the British blues scene this potential was no less real. Johnson, by all accounts, was nowhere near as unpredictable or irritable as Williamson II. But just proving to be an ordinary flesh-­and-­ blood man could very easily have provided a jarring contrast to the legend that had been created. As things stood, British blues enthusiasts’ favorable opinions of Johnson would never be challenged; he would remain what they made of him. Despite the sometimes “staggering levels of mutual incomprehension” between the British enthusiasts-­cum-­performers and Sonny Boy Williamson II, their partnership was quite fruitful—­at least for the British. In a general cultural sense, interaction with Williamson II was a discursive site where ideas about America, American culture, and African-­American life were transmitted to Britain; leaving his status as a bluesman aside, he was one of the only African-­American men they had ever met. From a strictly musical standpoint, the partnership was beneficial to the British. Even as they shudder, decades later, at their memories of dealing with the difficult bluesman, John Mayall, Jim McCarty, and Eric Clapton pay tribute to the invaluable tutelage they received. Author Charles Shaar Murray has referred to the working relationship between Williamson II and British R&B bands as “Blues University”; even though the professor was harsh, the lessons were necessary.105 Clapton even allows himself the comforting thought that, by doing their best, picking up as much as they could, and letting their very heartfelt sincerity show, the Yardbirds and Animals ultimately earned Williamson II’s grudging approval.106 The relationship between the British enthusiasts and other American

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bluesmen they met, if not as volatile as the one they had with Williamson II, also yielded positive results. With Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf, the British enthusiasts managed to forge a much more intimate personal rapport, which crossed on several occasions into the realm of the filial. This feeling was partly natural due to the participants’ comparative ages; the African-­American bluesmen under discussion here were in their fifties or sixties, whereas John Mayall, the oldest of the Britons that played with them, was “only” thirty-­one in 1964. On another level, theirs was also a symbolic relationship of “fathers” teaching their “sons” the music trade so they could carry on in their footsteps. This was especially true of Dixon, who noted that he regularly made “mixtapes” of his Chess songs and gave them to young British musicians in the hopes that they might cover a few.107 But on a deeper level that is perhaps harder to explain, it also was quite personal, for even the most arrogant British charges adopted an attitude of reverence and humility toward the bluesmen. Giorgio Gomelsky, onetime manager of both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, recalled a scene that occurred in his living room in 1964. He walked in to find Wolf, Dixon, and Williamson II sitting on his sofa, imparting wisdom to a small knot of young British acolytes, including Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, seated reverently at their feet.108 A similar tableau played out in 1965 on the American television program Shindig!, on which the Rolling Stones refused to perform unless Howlin’ Wolf could do so as well and then sat at the gigantic bluesman’s feet as he sang “How Many More Years.”109 Andy McKechnie, guitarist of the T-­ Bones, attests that “what he had to offer to a very young bunch of boys was so very touching—­not just in the music field, but [also] heart-­to-­heart father-­ like instructions for a good life.”110 Thus, in terms of completing (or at least improving) the blues education that members of the British blues network had begun via record albums and radio broadcasts, in-­person interactions with their father figures were of considerable importance. The British blues boom took place in stages. The first period, which began in the late 1950s, can be seen as an apprenticeship in which young Britons first became interested in African-­American music. Passionate fans were converted into eager, though inexperienced, musicians and then into learned pseudo-scholars and seasoned musicians with a deeper understanding of the music and the culture that produced it. This first period ended in around 1965, by which point the apprenticeship had been served. The Beatles and other “British Invasion” bands had begun to break through to massive acclaim in the United States, and the newly seasoned British R&B bands, swept along in the Invasion’s wake, were poised to make their mark on the transatlantic scene as well.

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“Put It All in the Blender”: British Musical Eclecticism

Early British blues and R&B bands that were forged in this first period were linked by one defining characteristic—­their very eclectic approach to and understanding of the blues and R&B. When discussing the African-­ American music they so admired, the British blues enthusiasts usually used “blues,” “rhythm and blues,” and “R&B” more or less interchangeably. In a 1965 interview with Chris Welch of Melody Maker, Steve Winwood (then the singer of the Spencer Davis Group) tried to think of a term that was less restrictive than R&B and came up with “Negro pop.” As social historian David Simonelli attests, this was “alternately inclusive and exclusive at the same time”—­and it failed to gain traction.111 British enthusiasts’ tendency to think broadly about African-­American music parallels the categorization used by the music industry itself, which, as of the 1950s, tended to lump together all forms of recorded African-­American music under the R&B classification.112 By the time of the British blues boom, the American music industry had created more specialized categories for African-­ American music: R&B tended to refer to music with electrified instrumentation and usually a brass section—­a more urbane and danceable style than Delta blues, city blues, or gospel music.113 Age and class differences often created further delineations; blues and R&B were seen by many older, usually rural African Americans, as inherently sinful and thus separate from the purer strains of gospel music. Soul was often seen as a betrayal since it attempted to secularize gospel music.114 Meanwhile, to many younger African Americans, soul music became very popular; city and (especially) country blues were derided for being too “old,” too representative of Jim Crow, or too popular with white people.115 The British audience, however, did not make such fine distinctions among these types of music. Blues historian Elijah Wald noted in reference to the late twentieth century, “[B]lues has come to be generally understood as the range of music found in the blues section when we go shopping for CDs. . . . a grab-­bag term for all sorts of older African-­American musics that cannot be filed elsewhere.” Wald’s own working definition of blues is “whatever the mass of black record buyers called ‘blues’ in any period.”116 Replace “black” with “British” and I would add that Wald’s statement also applies to this study’s protagonists. The tendency of the music industry to collapse most African-­American musical genres under a vastly simplified umbrella classification was compounded by the ways in which African-­American music was transmitted to Britain. Disc jockeys on the AFN rarely differentiated between musical subgenres; they just played what was popular on the Billboard

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or Cash Box charts. Nor did differentiation seem to matter much to retailers. For example, John Mayall ordered his records from an American mail-­order catalog entitled Vintage Jazz Mart, which also sold blues, spirituals, Motown and Atlantic soul, and even children’s novelty records.117 The record collection owned by Van Morrison’s father was defined mainly by its eclecticism, as was the aforementioned library inherited by Pete Townshend from his deported American flatmate. This eclecticism produced a generation of young British men who were allowed to become fanatical about all kinds of African-­American music, not just the blues. This broad inclusiveness explains how Georgie Fame could cite Ray Charles, Fats Domino, blues pianist “Big Maceo” Merriweather, and jazzman Mose Allison as formative influences.118 It explains how Rod Stewart could actively aspire to being the vocal heir to soul crooner Sam Cooke but tell an interviewer with a straight face, as he did in 1970, that his only career ambition was to sing “dee blooze.”119 It explains how the Rolling Stones were seemingly so quick to abandon Chicago-­style blues after performing on the same bill as soul heroes James Brown and Ike Turner in 1965; it even partly explains their very poorly understood embrace of funk and disco music in the late 1970s.120 Finally, the British audience’s sense of catholicity can help to explain a seeming paradox at work in young Eric Clapton. If any participant in the British blues scene could be said to be a strict purist, eschewing all else for the single-­minded pursuit of a Delta blues “ideal,” it would be Clapton. And yet he has said of his early tastes: I got caught up with [Thelonious] Monk, and [Charlie] Mingus, and all those guys in the same period, and was listening to it all at the same time, and I would buy a John Lee Hooker album . . . a [jazzman] Lee Morgan album . . . and to me, it was all . . . the same thing.121 In the same interview, Clapton admitted to being, in those days, both a “self-­ appointed ambassador of the blues” to Britain and “very judgmental about anybody that wasn’t doing it the way I thought it should be done.”122 To Clapton and many others like him at that time, this was in no way a contradiction but a very real part of their musical expression. None of them was lying or insincere or “selling out” his roots. Young men like Clapton were judgmental and protective of their precious African-­American R&B music, but what they included within the category of R&B was a great deal broader than many people might realize. The British scene’s inclusiveness had important and lasting repercussions

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regarding the musical direction taken by its members in later years. Separated from the immediate social contexts that shaped audience responses to different African-­American musical styles in America, the British absorbed these styles at will, piecing together repertoires based on what they liked (or thought audiences might like) instead of remaining within strict genre confines.123 For example, a typical set by the Spencer Davis Group at the Flamingo Club in 1964 might include some Ray Charles, some jazz, some Fats Domino, and even some 1940s-era big band music—­a mélange designed to appeal equally to the teenage Mods, West Indians, and African-­American GIs in the audience.124 This juxtaposition even sometimes occurred within songs, as the Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, attests. Because so many of the songs sounded exactly the same, we had to use our imagination to build them up. Blues taught us to use musical freedom. Playing pop before, you just copied a record and that was it. If we got near to the record, we were happy. But blues was a completely different thing altogether. We’d play one verse for twenty minutes and make up half the lyrics.125 Likewise, even a band like Cream, so named because of its members’ reputations as the most skilled on their respective instruments, found eclectic bricolage a necessary refuge. At the band’s very first performance—­at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival in July 1966—­Clapton remembers, “[W]e ran out of numbers so quickly that we just had to improvise. So we just made up twelve-­bar blues and that became Cream.”126 Sometimes those creating the musical bricolage did not have to “make up” the lyrics; they just mixed and matched lyrical tidbits from all over the blues canon. According to author George Case, Robert Plant had studied blues music so assiduously as a teenager in the West Midlands that he knew it “like a fire-­and-­brimstone preacher knows the Bible: quoting a line here, a verse there, a chorus from somewhere else. ” By the time he joined Led Zeppelin in 1968, then, “the bitter poetry of lemons and trains, of steady-­rollin’ women and worried minds had been absorbed by him to [such] a degree that it lost its literal meaning or authorial attribution.”127 Thus, this freewheeling eclecticism could have its problematic side, as it may have encouraged Plant to “forget” exactly where his inspiration came from and be less than rigorous when it came time to assign proper composer credit on Led Zeppelin records.128 This eclectic freedom—­the perceived ability to mix anything into a song as long as it sounded good and conveyed the requisite feeling—­became, in Charles Shaar Murray’s words, a “springboard,” from which the groundbreak-

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ing British bands of the 1960s and 1970s “innovated rather than imitated” the music that had come before.129 In time, reggae, British music hall standards, Indian ragas, Anglican hymns, Gregorian chants, country-­and-­western, funk, and—­yes—­even disco became grist to the mill for such groups as the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, and Traffic, as well as the numerous “glam,” progressive, and art-­rock bands that followed them in the 1970s.130 This eclecticism is perhaps best illustrated by Steve Winwood, lead singer and keyboardist for the Spencer Davis Group. His forays into jazz, folk, and music hall territory with Traffic in the 1970s can be seen to have brought the eclecticism of those early R&B days full circle.131 Conclusions

In 1963 this freewheeling musical eclecticism, and the influence that it would wield on transatlantic musical culture, was all in the future. The interpersonal network that grew around British blues enthusiasts—­however they got their hands on the blues and for whatever reasons it appealed to them—­was much more a blues appreciation society than anything. The underlying goal was, as Steve Winwood told film director Mike Figgis in 2003, “to bring this music to people’s attention [and] show them what an interesting, wonderful form it was.”132 Keith Richards echoed this assertion in his inimitable (and notably cruder) way. The original raison d’être of the Rolling Stones, he said, was to “turn other people on to Muddy Waters . . . to get a few [more] people interested in listening to the shit we thought they ought to listen to.”133 However, beyond the confines of nightclubs, record shops, and art school common rooms, the scope for evangelism was rather limited. By 1963 British pop music had been a going concern for more than seven years, and there seemed to be little realistic chance of selling one’s earnest approximations of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson on the other side of the Atlantic.134 Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones claimed that his realism on this score (and what he perceived as Brian Jones’s lack thereof ) caused him to decline the latter Jones’s invitation to join the newly formed Rolling Stones in 1962. [Brian] couched his invitation to me in these terms: He said, “We haven’t been taking it seriously. I’m gonna take it seriously from now on. I’m moving to London, I’m getting a flat, I’m forming a band, and

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I’m gonna become rich and famous.” And it was that last bit that I said, [scoffs,] “Aw, Brian, come off it, y’know  .  .  . we’re playing the blues, man.”135 That would all change, of course, with the emergence of Liverpool’s Beatles and the launch of the “British Invasion.” That monument to hype known as “Beatlemania” caused an immediate and seemingly insatiable demand for more bands just like it. A cadre of artist and repertory (A&R) executives representing virtually all the major British and American recording companies combed Britain for more purveyors of tuneful, well-­scrubbed pop music.136 It seemed that as long as a group was young, male, British, and capable of attracting teenage girls in some way, it was to be signed up immediately—­ its members could be cleaned up later. In their zeal to capitalize on the successes of the Beatles, non-­discriminating record companies also began to tap the British R&B scene. By 1965 the industry’s “sign first, ask questions later” approach had led to the enlistment of, among others, the Rolling Stones, Animals, Yardbirds, Kinks, Who, Spencer Davis Group, and Manfred Mann into the ranks of the British Invasion.137 Being thus enlisted necessarily meant there would be some amount of compromise between these bands’ blues evangelism and the creative strictures of the pop music industry. But this was reckoned a needful compromise if a group was to get a record contract and a trip to the object of its fascination—­ America. The chance for bands to spread the blues “gospel” in its homeland—­ and while they were at it potentially earn a bigger payday and entertain a much larger pool of young female admirers—­clinched the deal.138 The transmission of the blues and R&B to Britain in the postwar period was not planned, and in many ways it happened completely against the intentions of the people responsible for its diffusion. In this way, it is highly illustrative of the haphazard and variable nature of cultural transmission—­a fact that is sometimes obscured by the more visible attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War to plan the purposeful spread of both “high” and popular culture overseas to achieve greater political ends. Accidental and haphazard, the methods by which the blues was transmitted to Britain during and after the Second World War were of great importance in understanding how fans and enthusiasts received, understood, and used both the music and the culture of which it was a part. Britain “got the blues” not through any sustained, direct contact with African-­Americans or American society but instead, indirectly and sporadically, through blues texts and artifacts that had been separated from their immediate sociocul-

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tural contexts. Only on a few fleeting occasions did young white enthusiasts actually get to see African-­American blues performers “in the flesh”—­ although this certainly did not stop them from constructing those performers as alternative “fathers” that they could essentially “reverse adopt.” The often incomplete nature of the transmission of the blues to Britain led to an eclectic, cobbled-­together understanding of what the blues meant and how it should be understood and played. To paraphrase Mississippi guitarist Jim Dickinson (as quoted by biographer Robert Gordon), only a minority of the best songs ever get recorded, only a minority of recordings get released, and only a minority of those releases get played.139 In this context, it is crucial to add that only some of the songs that were recorded and released made their way to Britain. Record albums and radio broadcasts were hard to come by, and live visits were even rarer; most offered enthusiasts just the fuzziest of glimpses into blues culture specifically and African-­American life generally. The view was not clear enough for enthusiasts to understand what that culture and life were really like. It was just clear enough for them to form spotty, impressionistic understandings of both and to like what they thought they were seeing and hearing. The fact that many blues albums were originally the property of African-­ American GIs only increased their imaginative value, as almost anything the GI touched tended to turn to metaphorical gold for young Britons. The rarity of blues texts and artifacts only increased their value to young white Britons who sought alternatives to what they saw as the mass-­produced banalities of postwar culture. Education in the blues required a kind of economic and spiritual commitment that not many would be willing to make. A copy of Connie Francis’s “Lipstick on Your Collar,” for example, could be had for a reasonable amount of money in most shops. But finding a copy of Muddy Waters’s “Can’t Be Satisfied” required more of an investment—­in time and money. If an enthusiast wanted a deeper education in the blues, he had to work for it. If he got it, he could rightly call himself an anti-­mainstream cognoscente—­that is, a member of a small, enlightened minority to be compared favorably with the vast, ignorant majority. As Paul Jones attested, “There was something very attractive about the fact that large numbers, huge numbers of people wanted to listen to Bill Haley and Tommy Steele . . . but that we wanted to listen to Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter.”140 It is clear that many of Jones’s compatriots felt the same way about the blues and R&B that were transmitted, haphazardly and incompletely, into Britain in the 1950s and beyond. However, transmission is certainly not the same as reception or consumption. Explaining how the blues made it to Britain is only the first part of the

Trying to Make London My Home  •  73

story. Why a cohort of young, mostly middle-­class British men chose to consume the blues and R&B, and in vast preference to the other forms of popular music that were also available in Britain at the same time, is the next step. The following chapter examines the attractions offered by the blues, as a musical and literary form, to its young British listeners and explains why those listeners found it so seductive and magnetic that they anointed themselves its prophets to the wider world.

3  •  But My Dad Was Black Masculinity, Mobility, and Blues Culture in Britain In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man / Now I’ve reached that age, I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can —­Led Zeppelin1

In December 1964, keyboardist Ian McLagan and his band, the Muleskinners, had an important upcoming gig, and they were nervous. This was not simple stage fright, though. The Muleskinners had been enlisted as the backing band for Howlin’ Wolf on his British tour. White British blues enthusiasts like McLagan and his bandmates had been committed autodidacts, schooling themselves in the blues idiom as much as they could from record albums, radio broadcasts, and blues literature by authors such as Paul Oliver. Which is to say, they knew of Howlin’ Wolf, of his music, and—­however incompletely and with however many distortions—­of the socioeconomic circumstances in which he lived and worked. But now they were about to meet him in person, an intimidating prospect. What would their hero think of their interest in his music? How would he respond to the notion of being “reverse adopted” by avid white “sons”? How would he rate their musical abilities since they would be working with each other night after night? The previous year, Sonny Boy Williamson II had been through Britain, backed by their compatriots the Animals and Yardbirds, and that relationship had been notoriously fraught. What would Howlin’ Wolf be like? McLagan recalled, “We’re all anticipating this big, scary man, and the doors open. . . . ‘My boys!’ he yelled. I mean, five little white kids—­we were anything but his boys, but we were so happy to be called that . . . he just made us feel so special.”2 74

But My Dad Was Black  •  75

It is unclear what Howlin’ Wolf meant by this greeting—­whether he actually accepted and embraced his status as a distant “father figure” to young men of a different race, class, and national identity or whether he was simply trying to put a bunch of scared teenagers at ease. Such a smooth initial encounter between young white accompanists and older African-­American frontmen was certainly not a given. But this much is clear: Whatever the “father” thought about the arrangement, the “sons” very much wanted to be recognized as such and felt validated when they seemed to receive that recognition. Beginning in the early 1960s, white British blues enthusiasts, dissatisfied with their cultural inheritance, chose to embrace, and appropriate for themselves, aspects of a culture that—­on the surface, at least—­seemed diametrically opposed to their own. Borrowing from theorist Edward Said, I contend that these young Britons chose to “affiliate” themselves with African-­ American masculine blues culture.3 Once again, “filiations” are the values, loyalties, and identifications that we inherit from our parents’ generation, whereas “affiliations” are those that we actively choose as individuals forming our own identities—­often, if not always, in contradiction to our filiations. In enjoying blues music, seeking to learn all they could about it and the culture that produced it, and then taking the step of forming bands to emulate it, the members of the British blues network identified themselves as the white sons of faraway, older African-­American fathers. Irrespective of how ludicrous the geographic and economic distance between the two sides might have been, the young Britons looked up to their adoptive fathers for both musical and personal guidance (since music and lifestyle were fallaciously seen as being linked) and vowed to carry on their musical legacy. To wit, Jimmy Page said, “I’ve often thought that, in the way the Stones tried to be the sons of Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin tried to be the sons of Howlin’ Wolf.”4 On the occasion of Muddy Waters’s death in 1983, Eric Clapton eulogized the bluesman, saying, “I felt like he was my father and I was his adopted son.”5 Even more amazingly, the fathers themselves, though initially bemused at the prospect of being “adopted” by new white sons from across the Atlantic, seemed to look indulgently on the idea, sometimes even actively encouraging it, when both sides met. Muddy Waters, for example, seemed comfortable (increasingly so as time went on) with the notion of himself as a paterfamilias to the white blues scene. Told by an interviewer that the proposed title of his 1969 collaboration with white American blues musicians Michael Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield was Fathers and Sons, Waters enthused, “That’s a very good title, ’cause I am the daddy and all these kids are my sons. I feel like there are so many kids tracing in my tracks that I’m the father out here.”6 This chapter analyzes this project of affiliation, both how young white

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British enthusiasts did it and why they should have wished to. It analyzes the blues, both as a set of texts and as a culture, to offer some explanations about why it proved so attractive to these listeners that they chose to affiliate with it, in the process adding important layers to their existing identities as young white British men. As consumed and interpreted by the sons, the fathers seemed to provide an “authentic” alternative to the banal sentiments that the sons believed were currently being offered up by contemporary pop music.7 The blues seemed to speak directly and honestly, and with a soupçon of menace and danger, about such classic tropes as sexuality, freedom, violence, and power. Finally, since the blues was a part of the larger American culture (however oppressed and marginalized the form and its practitioners may have been), it provided a sort of “back way in” to America and its culture, vividly depicting American landscapes, people, ways of life, and consumer goods. In this way, like films noir and Western movies before it, the blues was seen as yet another point of entry for young Europeans yearning for some kind of interaction with the superpower across the Atlantic. It is crucial to remember—­as many of the British blues enthusiasts did not—­that through his music the African-­American blues musician was not necessarily relating anything that had actually happened to him, nor was he sharing any of his own thoughts or opinions. Rather, he was negotiating an identity, just as those who later heard and appropriated that music would also do.8 To do this, he spoke through a constructed persona—­the powerful, skilled, and sexually dynamic bluesman. Though politically and economically oppressed and often frustrated by the government, the police, and the women in his life, he seemed to enjoy a spiritual and creative freedom that young British listeners felt had been denied them. Furthermore, the bluesman often expressed himself using an inherently modern musical form forged out of the industrial urban landscape. Thus, the blues presented an alternative masculine ideal to a group of young white men who felt that either their masculine identity or their ability to express it was unsatisfying. It must be noted that much of this was and remains open to interpretation. Some commentators tend to savage British rock musicians for perverting the blues and making it sound like a collection of simple-­minded songs that merely glorify sex, violence, and Devil worship, as opposed to what it actually meant to African-­American listeners and performers.9 Whether or not the blues are actually about promiscuous sex, wanton violence, and diabolical transactions, the British blues enthusiasts perceived that they were owing to an accumulation of cultural beliefs and prejudices that they brought to the music as Britons, as Europeans, as white men, as members of the middle class, as art students, and so on. Everything they did musically after engaging

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with the blues was done with these perceptions and this baggage fully—­if subconsciously—­in mind. “Got No Time for Muswell Town”: The Suburban “Organization Man” and His Detractors

Before discussing how the masculine ideal supposedly articulated in the blues was used to fill a cultural need, we must first examine that need in some detail. Numerous sociocultural factors—­the windup of the British Empire, postwar moral and physical exhaustion, economic weakness, and resulting cultural malaise, especially vis-­à-­vis Americans—­can be said to have contributed to a general feeling of emasculation among young middle-­ class British men, or at least of such powerful alienation as to render them unable to properly articulate their own masculine identities.10 Furthermore, the bourgeois culture with which they were filiated seemed incapable of providing satisfactory male role models, to the point where young men felt compelled to look to another race in another country for alternatives. This search for alternative fathers was mostly metaphorical. Somewhat ironically for men who would become some of the most visible spokesmen for “youth in revolt” during the 1960s, most members of the British blues network had satisfactory relationships with their actual fathers. Keith Richards, who claimed to have had an adversarial relationship with his father premised on his poor academic performance and their differences of opinion over Keith’s musical ambitions, was an exception. Even Eric Clapton, who has cited abandonment by his biological father as an example of the pain and “emotional poverty” that led him to identify with the blues, had a very close fatherly relationship with the maternal grandfather who raised him. Most British blues enthusiasts were probably like Rod Stewart, who claimed to have had a close and supportive relationship with his father that continued into Rod’s adulthood.11 It was not their actual fathers that blues enthusiasts sought to reject or replace; it was the postwar mainstream culture—­and that culture’s definitions of what constituted acceptable masculinity—­of which their fathers could be taken as representatives. So what was it about this culture and its definitions of masculinity that young blues enthusiasts loathed? As historian George L. Mosse has pointed out, there have been several occasions over the previous three centuries during which British or European middle-­class masculinity has supposedly been “in crisis.” During these troubling times, the normative standards of masculinity have been perceived as being under attack by various sociocultural factors, usu-

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ally the result of an onrush of modernity. As a result, also under attack is the stability of the society of which normative masculinity is often used as a barometer. Two examples of this phenomenon are the weakness attributed to British masculinity in the wake of the South African War at the beginning of the twentieth century and the anxieties occasioned by the emergence of the “New Woman” in Germany immediately following the First World War.12 And yet it is probably too simplistic to say that British masculinity was in crisis per se. After the Second World War, there was an understandable desire to return society to some sort of normality as soon as was feasible. This desire took different forms throughout Europe and Britain, but often it resulted in an uncomfortable silence on the part both of politicians and populace—­a refusal to engage critically with wartime events, choosing instead to just move forward.13 This “unique post-­war mood of denial” (as Pete Townshend described it) was one of the defining aspects of the wartime generation, and it would become a key factor behind student unrest in the late 1960s.14 According to Mosse, along with this denial came a swift reinscription of the normative masculine ideal. The virtues that went to make up this ideal—­ most notably sobriety, self-­restraint, decency, and courage—­were seen as being more necessary at this time than ever before.15 Proof of this reinstatement was not just evident in mainstream culture. After years of Nietzchean supermen rampaging throughout Europe, it can also be seen in the politics of the age, as morally upright grandfather figures (e.g., Adenauer, de Gaulle, Churchill, Macmillan, Truman, and Eisenhower) were elected to positions of power in West Germany, France, Britain, and the United States.16 For more than three centuries, alongside and against the stereotype of the masculine ideal, there had grown up a countertype, which for the sake of convenience I call the “man of adventure.” Strictly speaking, the man of adventure was not the antithesis of the middle-­class “ideal man”; in fact, the two shared many of the same aspirational characteristics—­with courage and restraint foremost among them—­and many men of adventure were of middle-­class origin.17 However, there were important differences: whereas the middle-­class ideal man drew strength from his settled lifestyle, the man of adventure relished the freedom to wander as he chose. On the fringes of middle-­class modernity, he escaped the unrest and anomie that beset those at the center of that modernity.18 Of necessity, the man of adventure was an imperial archetype, as only the safety valve of the British Empire could afford that kind of escape.19 In his way, the imperial man of adventure shared much with his closest American counterpart, the Wild West “cowboy”; the similarities go a long way toward explaining Britons’ long-­standing fascination with Western movies.20

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However, with decolonization, the sudden relegation of Britain to the status of a second-­rate power, and the settling down of the world to what seemed like a long and drawn-­out Cold War, opportunities for a man of adventure seemed to be disappearing. In their place beckoned the lifestyle of the “organization man,” one of gray flannel suits, a monotonous forty-­hour workweek in middle management, and a humdrum home life somewhere in the suburbs.21 Almost nothing about the organization man seemed appealing to young British blues enthusiasts, but one gets the sense from reading interviews with these young men and listening to the music they created that “he” and his “life” might have been more palatable if they at least had a fashionable downtown address. Critic Robert Christgau referred to this lifestyle, which young British men stood to inherit if they did not act quickly, as their “suburban mess of pottage” and suggests that the desire to escape it was one of the major factors driving groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to succeed at music.22 To many young Britons—­the members of the blues network chief among them—­the suburban world was not just a place to live. It was the adversary, a stultifying world of social conformism and proper moral values. Even if one grew up outside this milieu, the values it seemed to represent were those that young men of the working class and petit-­bourgeoisie could see on the horizon. Thus, a boy from London’s working-­class Shepherd’s Bush area, like Pete Townshend, could articulate the same fear and loathing of suburban Britain and all that for which in his mind it stood as could one from the petit-­ bourgeois London suburb of Muswell Hill like Ray Davies. Counterpoised to this objectionable status quo were the urban and, later on, rural British “escape worlds.” Disaffected young Britons looked to these worlds to provide them with an alternative in terms of experience and identity, just as they looked to the imagined American urban landscape. The suitability of Chicago or the Mississippi Delta as a backdrop for the African-­American bluesman was transposed onto London and Birmingham for his British counterpart. Britain’s suburban spaces served mainly as fodder for often satirical condemnations of the “normal” or “straight” world and value system that the British bohemian element wholeheartedly rejected.23 Here was the domain of parental authority, both literally and, in the form of “Auntie” BBC, figuratively; of the dreaded “organization man”; and of domestic responsibility and “feminized” mass consumer culture.24 The antipathy that the typical British blues enthusiast held for the suburban experience had been amplified by comparison with the urban-­and rural-­based dynamism of the African-­ American bluesman’s world. When this came into contact with the self-­ consciously sophisticated satire of Bob Dylan’s “flashing chain imagery,” the

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result was a body of attacks on suburban culture that was both incredibly strident and extremely conspicuous. It is no exaggeration to say that if cheerful, cheeky endorsements of appropriate romantic love launched the British Invasion, then surly, bohemian disgust with suburban conformism kept it going. Perhaps this was because the suburban lifestyle was so near to them and their position apart from it so precarious. Whatever the reason, Britain’s budding rock musicians seemed at constant pains to remind themselves and their audiences of precisely what they were rebelling against when they “reverse adopted” African-­American blues and R&B culture. What were British rock bands like the Kinks and Rolling Stones attacking when they turned their metaphorical guns on suburban culture? First, there were satires of suburban culture’s supposed conformism and hypocrisy, especially as embodied by the archetype of the organization man.25 The Kinks’ “Well-­Respected Man” was a litany of all the sins for which this wretched creature deserved the scorn of the Mods and blues enthusiasts. He was punctual, conservative, obsessed with keeping up appearances, and followed conscientiously in the footsteps of his equally conformist parents.26 All this earned him the unquestioning “respect” of his social peers. This would have been bad enough on its own, but it was made worse by being just a façade, concealing the fact that he was actually greedy, arrogant, and lecherous, and that his parents were immoral and sexually debauched.27 This sort of sordidness clad in gray flannel was also disparaged by Mick Jagger in “Memo from Turner,” the theme song of the 1970 film Performance: “You’re the misbred grey executive I’ve seen heavily advertised. . . . You’re the great grey man whose daughter licks the policeman’s buttons clean / You’re the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.”28 Jagger’s “Turner” had first met this example of the organization man at “the Coke convention in 1965,” and the latter’s occupation points up another oft-­satirized element of suburban culture: its obsession with, and promotion of, a soulless and feminized consumer culture. Although the (usually feminine) victims of this culture make their appearances in British rock music—­ for instance, the suburban housewife in the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper,” who swallows amphetamines by the handful to combat a typically suburban anomie—­advertisers and advertising itself are more often the satirists’ target. This is perhaps fitting, since in the postwar affluent society, advertising was increasingly omnipresent and, as a result, increasingly a menace. Laundry detergent in particular seemed to attract the disdain of the Rolling Stones, perhaps because it threatened the band’s unkempt, dirty persona. In a neat conflation—­and savaging—­of cleanliness and domestic responsibility, Mick Jagger once proclaimed to an interviewer, “Marriage?

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It’s alright for those that wash.”29 “Get Off My Cloud” finds the protagonist minding his own business, “when in flies a man who’s all dressed up just like a Union Jack” intent on selling him detergent.30 This had followed the group’s first breakthrough single, the anthemic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” in which Jagger similarly has his protagonist sneer at a man who “comes on [television] and tells me / How white my shirts can be / But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke / The same cigarettes as me.” Underneath the derision is an implicit confirmation of advertising’s baleful universality: while the protagonist may have successfully fended off one advertising ploy (for detergent), he has fallen for the second (for cigarettes) wholeheartedly.31 One could take solace, perhaps, in the notion that at least cigarettes were branded as masculine. To members of the British blues network, suburban conformist culture was always the adversary, to be avoided and escaped by the dynamic male protagonist looking for a more interesting and meaningful experience. This led to a gendered bifurcation of the world: the suburban neighborhood belonged to women and femininity and the urban cityscape—­and later the rural countryside—­to men and masculinity. Each was a stranger in the other’s world, and transgressing the carefully constructed barriers would only lead to problems. Thus, while the female antagonist of the Who’s “A Legal Matter” is portrayed as perfectly content to wallow in the trappings of the suburban bride and hausfrau (“Wedding gowns and catalogs / Kitchen furnishings and houses / Maternity clothes and baby’s trousers”), the male protagonist can only regard it as “a household fog” against which he must struggle so as not to become lost for good.32 Likewise, Robert Plant explained to Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe that the origin of Led Zeppelin’s song “Ten Years Gone” lay in an incident from Plant’s pre-­Zeppelin past. [A] lady I really dearly loved said, “Right. It’s me or your fans.” Not that I had fans, but I said, “I can’t stop, we’ve got to keep going.” She’s quite content these days, I imagine. She’s got a washing machine that works by itself and a little sportscar. We wouldn’t have anything to say [to each other] anymore. . . . Ten years gone, I’m afraid.33 With this anecdote, Plant neatly drew the dividing line between a feminized settled lifestyle, complete with the stuff of household consumer culture, and something more masculine, less tied down, and—­to young men like Plant—­ much preferable. Not only do the two sexes want completely different things out of life, but seemingly never the twain shall meet. Plant’s apocryphal girlfriend attempted to make him choose between the two, but now, years after

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he has chosen the life of freedom and license that only being a rock star can give him, the two can no longer even relate to each other as people. It stands to reason that, for young, middle-­class British men, the problem was not that normative masculinity was unstable or in danger. The problem was that normative masculinity was, quite simply, boring. And, unless something drastic happened, there seemed to be little hope of avoiding it. Rage at this imposed combination of impotence and futility fueled the work of the “Angry Young Men,” the misleadingly labeled assemblage of young male writers who emerged (largely as a creation of the media) in the 1950s.34 In John Osborne’s 1957 play Look Back In Anger, the main character, Jimmy Porter, rails against the ennui that he feels is the hallmark of postwar Britain. There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-­fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New nothing-­very-­much-­thank-­you. About as pointless and meaningless as stepping in front of a bus. No, there’s nothing for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.35 In their impatience with what they saw as the meaninglessness of postwar middle-­class culture, as well as in their fear of the allegedly baleful influence of “the women,” there are striking parallels to be drawn between the sentiments of the Angry Young Men and African-­American blues culture as expressed and interpreted by British blues musicians. In their antipathy toward the impotence and dreariness of suburban British culture, young middle-­ class British men became fascinated with America and enthralled with American “men of adventure,” especially the cowboy.36 Through their growing acquaintance with African-­American music, they soon discovered another one that they could emulate: the bluesman. “I’m a Man”: Masculine Power and Sexual Knowledge

For a generation of young middle-­class British men, the bluesman persona was a tonic. Before embarking on any involved discussion of what the bluesman did or did not supposedly do, know, sing, or represent, it is first necessary to point to his essential mystery and exoticism as being among his most appealing elements to the British. The African-­American bluesman was of a different racial, socioeconomic, and national context than his would-­be disciples. Because white, mainstream American society neither knew nor cared

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much about his life or his music (or so young white Britons told themselves), there was not a great deal of written information about him—­a problem that was compounded by the fact that any information that might exist was an ocean away and not readily available in Britain. What young white Britons managed to glean about the blues and the people who produced it was patchy and hard to come by, and it was also pretty heavily romanticized. For example, consider the album packaging and liner notes that accompany King of the Delta Blues Singers, the seminal 1961 compilation of Robert Johnson’s songs. There were two versions of the album art—­either a picture of a forlorn sharecropper’s shack or (on the original pressing) a stylized painting of a solitary guitarist viewed from above, seated on a chair and casting a long shadow across an empty field.37 On some level, the choice of artwork was one of necessity since no photographs of Johnson were known to exist until the 1980s. But the composition of the painting conjures up an image of a mysterious stranger, unrecognizable and inscrutable, concentrating intently on his music—­a man torn between “physical and shadowy reality.”38 On the back of the album sleeve, the listener encountered heavily romanticized and evocative liner notes by writer Frank Driggs. Starting from the premise that “today Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records,” Driggs attempted to rectify the situation. To do so, he relied partly on the testimony of recording engineer Don Law—­who supervised Johnson’s only two recording sessions in 1936 and 1937—­and partly on romantic waffle.39 The picture of Johnson that emerges from reading Driggs’s liner notes is that of a supremely talented but psychologically tormented loner; a rogue never without the company of at least one woman; a country naïf with little savoir faire who ended up a victim of the wild, unrestrained life about which he sang.40 Not much of it holds up under serious analytical scrutiny, although to savage Driggs for shoddy research is unfair. There were admittedly not many solid facts with which to work, and Driggs was certainly not the only one to over-­romanticize Johnson with a view toward selling records.41 His liner notes, though, were really one of the only sources of information to which fascinated young British men had access in the beginning. It was heady stuff, and it meant a young Eric Clapton or Robert Plant could have been hooked on the image of Johnson before he had even listened to the record. The reputations of other bluesmen who came to the British attention were perhaps less over the top than Johnson’s—­it helped the legend-mongers’ cause immensely that Johnson had been dead for a quarter century before the British came to hear of him and that there were no known photographs of

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him at the time. But to young British enthusiasts, these other bluesmen still came wrapped in almost inscrutable mystery and power. Even the bluesmen’s pseudonyms had their allure; they offered their user a chance to create an entirely new identity into which to escape, and they often sounded powerful and compelling to boot. Chris Dreja, rhythm guitarist/bassist for the Yardbirds, remembered such bluesy pseudonyms as “Jelly Roll Morton [and] Lightning Slim. I mean, these were extraordinary names. . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . What is a ‘Howlin’ Wolf ’ when you live in Surbiton?”42 Record producer Mike Vernon echoed this fascination with blues names: “You thought, ‘God, how could anyone be called “Muddy Waters”? Or “Howlin’ Wolf ”? . . . Or “Lead Belly”’? Where the hell did these names come from?”43 It is clear that, wherever these names came from and whatever they meant, young British enthusiasts found themselves sucked in by the power and mystery behind them and were willing to commit themselves to a great deal of hard study to learn the answers. Whatever his name, though, and however otherworldly it might have seemed to the Erics, Jameses, and Michaels of suburban Britain, the bluesman came across as knowledgeable, accomplished, virile, and seemingly unfettered by the demands of respectable society. In the words of author William Barlow, “Blues personas  .  .  . constitute[d] a black pantheon separate from—­and in many ways antithetical to—­the white heroes and heroines of middle-­class America”—­and, one might add, middle-­class Britain.44 The bluesman had little if any formal education; this fact was communicated to the British via the blues histories they read, all of which spent a good deal of time elaborating on the socioeconomic conditions that spawned the music.45 In spite of this lack of formal education, the bluesman boasted of earning a great deal of knowledge from experience. These boasts were supported by the fact that many of them were middle aged or older—­a function of the blues revivalists’ having rediscovered them after decades out of the limelight. Thus, at the time of the initial encounter, most of the rediscovered bluesmen were old enough to be their British acolytes’ fathers—­or even, as in the case of Eddie “Son” House, their grandfathers.46 Recall that Andy McKechnie reminisced about Howlin’ Wolf offering him and his bandmates “heart-­to-­ heart father-­like instructions for a good life.”47 The bluesman’s relatively advanced age spoke of his great experience; if his career traveling and performing in the Deep South or Chicago had begun before the average British blues enthusiast was born, surely he had learned a few things along the way. This knowledge gave him power; it was the main thing that served to mitigate his old age in a developing popular culture that would come to fetishize young manhood.

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Blues culture actively celebrated the bluesman’s attainment of knowledge and skill through experience. In “Young-­Fashioned Ways,” Muddy Waters boasts: A young hawk is fast, but a old hawk know what’s goin’ on You know, young hawks wanna race, but an old hawk stay up so long.48 The attainment of knowledge through experience was a major attraction of blues culture for young Britons. It fed a British fallacy that blues lyrics should be understood literally, as if what they described had actually happened to the singer. On the basis of this fallacy, British (and, admittedly, many American) rock stars developed the equally baseless idea that one needed to live the blues “lifestyle” in order to truly “feel” and master the idiom. It is useful to keep these two interlocking fallacies in mind when analyzing the British fascination with blues culture. They can help to explain why Britons had such unqualified admiration for Robert Johnson, who supposedly sold his soul to Satan in exchange for musical and sexual skill, and who died under shadowy circumstances at the age of twenty-­seven.49 Johnson’s tale seemed to suggest there was a shortcut for those who did not particularly wish to wait until they were middle aged to get what Waters had. Johnson had gotten it by the age of twenty-­five and via a simple supernatural transaction. British blues aficionados perceived that most of the bluesman’s knowledge was gained the old-­fashioned way: through ordinary life experiences. However, this knowledge was also augmented by a more supernatural brand of knowledge. In the blues idiom, the bluesman claims to have access to all manner of magical and voodoo talismans, the mere names of which—­black cat bones, mojo hands and teeth, the “High John the Conqueror” root—­ must have sounded like holy writ from some alien cult to the mostly Anglican or Nonconformist boys seated around their turntables.50 These fetishes were meant to supposedly give the bluesman control over the weather and the ability to read minds, to discern whether people are lying, and to predict the future. They could also—­and here, one imagines, was the real attraction for those teenaged boys—­make him irresistible to women.51 Another option was the one supposedly chosen by Robert and Tommy Johnson (no relation): the sale of one’s soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The voodoo route was material; it involved the acquisition and use of certain items kept on one’s person. On the other hand, the diabolical transaction was practical; it entailed the performance of a ritual to attain special powers. According to Tommy Johnson, an interested party

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could call forth the Devil—­who was actually more of an analogue to the African trickster god Legba than the Judeo-­Christian adversary Satan—­ simply by going to an abandoned rural crossroads at midnight. The Devil, often described as a “big black man,” would then come and tune his guitar; when the bluesman retook possession of the instrument, the deal was sealed and he could play anything he liked.52 The trope of the “deal with the Devil” is vastly more famous than the bluesman’s use of voodoo. This is partly because of the increased visibility later brought to the supposed practice by British rock and heavy metal musicians and partly because it was infinitely more fascinating to a culture that features such authors as Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and C. S. Lewis, all of whom wrote at some point about the interactions between man and either Satan or his minions.53 In 1960s Britain, a general cultural trend of literary fascination with the diabolical combined with a much more specific cultural trend of conflating lyrical expression and biographical fact, and both prepared the ground for the “deal with the Devil” myth to take hold. This is not to say that the myth was always understood literally. Eric Clapton, unable to believe that such beautiful music came “from an evil alliance,” understood the story more as a metaphor for the misfortunes that had befallen Robert Johnson as a youth and the fear he felt when he thought of the consequences.54 Keith Richards thought the deal with the Devil might be shorthand for the choices a man such as Johnson—­and by implication his bandmates, himself, and rock ‘n’ rollers in general—­made in rejecting society’s conventions in favor of the life of a traveling musician. After that bit of insight, however, the ever mischievous Richards intimated, “Maybe he actually met the cat!” and elsewhere said, “All his deals with the hellhounds and the bitches—­one of them will get you!”55 Eric Burdon, governed by his strong, if not always perfectly informed, opinions about American race relations, implied that the deal with the Devil is actually the black man’s encoded rejection of white social convention (whether it was by breaking the law, or, in Johnson’s case, simply choosing the bluesman’s life over a more conformist one).56 The knowledge that is boasted of in the blues idiom is often sexual. Sex is the most pervasive trope at play in the blues lyrical idiom; every bluesman worthy of the name sang at one time or another about it. As author James Marshall put it, even “tortured soul Robert Johnson took time out from playing hide-­and-­seek with Satan” to make bawdy overtures to his “sweet rider” in such songs as “Traveling Riverside Blues” and “Come On in My Kitchen.”57 As constructed in his songs, the bluesman is a seducer par excellence. For every song whose protagonist rhapsodizes about true love or bemoans his lack thereof, there are five or six wherein he brags about his previ-

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ous sexual exploits or attempts to seduce a new woman with promises of more to come. The most obvious example of the bluesman as sexual paragon is the eponymous hero of Waters’s “Hoochie-­Coochie Man” (1954) and its sequel, “Mannish Boy” (1955). Waters claims that his sexual prowess began even “before [he] was born,” when a “gypsy woman told [his] mother” that he was “gonna make pretty womens jump and shout.”58 On one night in particular, the Hoochie-­Coochie Man and his woman went at it so hot and heavy that they “made the moon . . . come up two hours late.”59 The bluesman’s capacities as a lover are so prodigious that, to hear him tell it, they alter the very motion of the cosmos. In order to pull off these spectacular amorous feats, the Hoochie-­Coochie Man is armed with the voodoo charms mentioned above (all of which can be viewed as phallic symbols) to make sure that he “never miss[es]” his target.60 In the blues idiom, it is often difficult to tell where the voodoo ends and the actual seductive technique begins. This deliberate blurring occurs in one of Muddy Waters’s best-­known songs, “Got My Mojo Workin’,” in which the word mojo is expanded from its literal meaning as a voodoo fetish to serve as shorthand for the entirety of the protagonist’s sexual animus—­which, interestingly, is for once frustrated (“it just don’t work on you”).61 The British zeroed in on the loaded image of the mojo, a fixation that is reflected by the fact that “Got My Mojo Workin’” was without a doubt the most covered song of the British blues boom, and that mojo with a small m became an important part of the vocabulary of 1960s youth culture on both sides of the Atlantic.62 Being in possession of so much knowledge and skill with regard to lovemaking often lent the bluesman a paternal or professorial air, which added to the overall impression of the bluesman being older and wiser than most men. A good example is the narrator of Waters’s 1962 hit “You Need Love.” He cuts right to the chase, flatly informing his quarry, “You got yearnin’, and I got burnin’. . . . Baby way down inside, woman you need love.” No one else has been able to give her what she yearns for, the “good things you ain’t gettin’.” But here, finally, is a man who can give her the proper “schoolin’” in the ways of lovemaking.63 There is admittedly a vague touch of the sinister to these kinds of blues. After all, Waters is informing the woman of what she needs, not what she wants, and of what he will do, not what he would like to do if given permission. Still, there is in “You Need Love” a kind of understated grace that has little in common with the rough machismo that comes across in a great deal of British blues-­rock, and certainly very little in common with the “thermonuclear gang rape” (in Charles Shaar Murray’s vivid phrase) conveyed by Led Zeppelin in “Whole Lotta Love,” its 1969 cover version of “You Need Love.”64

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It is hard to overestimate the visceral effect that all this had on a group of “dopey, spotty seventeen-­year-­olds” in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As musicologist Roberta Freund Schwartz has written, “It is tempting to dismiss claims that the appeal of R&B was rooted in aggression and sexuality as overly facile but many former fans think these elements were significant.”65 To wit: when asked by an interviewer what appealed to him about Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me,” Robert Plant began by referring to the “cool rhythm” and his belief that Williamson was “talking about everything.” Then he zeroed in on it: “The sexuality, the reliance, the need. . . . I had pain in the loins, I had fire down below, and I was diggin’ this old guy wailing.”66 Keith Richards, in his typically direct style, echoed Plant: “These bluesmen  .  .  . they’re talking about getting laid! And there’s me, studying what they’re doing, but I ain’t getting laid! I mean . . . there’s something missing in my life. . . . Obviously, to be a bluesman, I have to go see what this lemon juice is, running down your leg.”67 Sexual desire and frustration, and all the attendant power issues that go along with sex and sexual identity, provided a solid experiential common ground between black male performers and white British male consumers of the blues. In fact, sexual desire and frustration might have been among the only defensible areas of common ground. As young men, most of whom were heterosexual, all of these Britons could relate to feeling sexual desire for members of the opposite sex, as well as the trials and tribulations of trying to interact with them. “Son” House famously said that there “[a]in’t but one kind of blues, and that consists of a male and female that’s in love,” and the British took this statement of the lowest common denominator to heart.68 As a result, British interpretations of the blues zeroed in on sexual tropes, often to the exclusion of other forms of expression; historian Paul Oliver decried what he saw as the “lessening of social themes to the common denominator of sexual prowess and unrequited love” in white Anglo-­American blues-­rock music in his 1965 book Conversation with the Blues.69 As the very model of a modern paramour, the bluesman was a mass of contradictions—­horny yet fond, rough but gentle, cocksure yet gentlemanly, vulgar yet good-­natured. He was highly knowledgeable about the technical aspects of lovemaking yet not above employing crude euphemisms in referring to the sex act as “sporting,” “coffee-­grinding,” or “trucking” or to his penis as a “kingsnake,” a “lemon,” or a “little red rooster.”70 He was self-­assured to the point of swaggering, often suggesting—­ and sometimes baldly stating—­that he could have any woman he wanted regardless of whether she was already spoken for. The bluesman often seemed to pursue adulterous conquests with even greater relish. In “I’m a King Bee,” Slim Harpo asserted

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that “stinging” and “honeymaking” were best when “your man is not at home.”71 “Mississippi Fred” McDowell commanded his woman to send her man packing when she saw McDowell approaching her house.72 John Lee Hooker’s “Crawlin’ King Snake” imagined the protagonist as a serpent who, ignoring such trivialities as lock and key, would “crawl in through your window . . . [and] across your floor” to get to his prospective lover’s bedside.73 But if there was no open window, the bluesman might just break in. One especially vivid (and popular) lyrical metaphor for adultery in the blues—­ “another mule is kicking in your stall”—­attests to this sort of violent entrance.74 The bluesman, perhaps naturally enough, knew how to get out of the room as well as into it. Willie Dixon’s protagonist boasted that he knew “29 ways” to enter and escape his lover’s bedroom unseen, and, while Sonny Boy Williamson II’s protagonist in “One Way Out” might not have had nearly as many options, he used the one he had—­a window—­quickly enough to get out before the cuckold caught him.75 “I’m Movin’ On”: Mobility and the “Open Road”

Escape—­not just from a lover’s bedroom—­and exile were important tropes in the blues idiom as well. The bluesman was perceived by British listeners to be an outsider twice over: an oppressed minority in white American society; and, as a sinful practitioner of “the Devil’s music,” a pariah in his own community. However, in the blues idiom, this sense of alienation is often “spun” as positive—­as freedom and self-­sufficiency instead of rejection and loneliness. There were benefits to not being a full-­fledged member of one’s community: its morals and codes supposedly no longer applied to the bluesman, who was then free to wander to his heart’s content, taking on any identity he chose instead of the one society forced on him. In this respect, blues culture echoes that quintessentially American cultural medium, the Western movie, in which leaving “town” (a stand-­in for East Coast society) for the “frontier” throws identities into flux and often identifies the “outsiders” as the only characters with true merit.76 As a result, the metaphor of “the road” is among the most potent—­and most frequently borrowed—­in the blues idiom. The bluesman was never able to stay in one place for very long, before the urge to strike out again for points unknown seized him. Often, as in Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom” or “Big Bill” Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway,” this wanderlust is so strong that it shakes the bluesman awake in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, and compels him to leave immediately.77 Johnny Shines, a bluesman who

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is (perhaps unfairly) best remembered as the friend and traveling companion of Robert Johnson, characterized Johnson as [the kind of ] guy, you could wake him up any time and he was ready to go. . . . [You’d] say, “Robert, I hear a train. Let’s catch it.” He wouldn’t exchange no words with you. He’s just ready to go. . . . It didn’t make him no difference. Just so he was going.78 Johnson, it should be mentioned, although he was portrayed at the time of his posthumous encounter with the British blues enthusiasts as an untraveled country rube, in actuality had “ridden the blinds” as far as Kansas City, New York City, and even Canada.79 The bluesman could be very specific in his lyrics about where he was going—­to Memphis, Chicago, or even such faraway locales as the Philippines or Ethiopia—­or he might just start walking down the first road, or jump onto the first freight train, that he saw.80 Johnson imagined that he was being pursued by hellhounds, or accompanied by Satan himself, on his wanderings, but most bluesmen did not need anything nearly so diabolical to drive them from town to town; the lure of the “open road” was enough.81 The young British blues enthusiasts adopted this particular blues metaphor enthusiastically. They felt alienated from the conformism of middle-­ class British society and what they considered the useless banalities of popular culture.82 They sought freedom, the relaxation of oppressive social norms, and the wealth of sensory experience that could only be attained by traveling through open spaces. Britain in the early 1960s seemed woefully short of opportunity, but America—­so the blues and other forms of American popular culture seemed to announce—­had plenty. To the young British enthusiast, the African-­American bluesman seemed, in some ways, more the master of his own destiny, and he was a poverty-­stricken member of America’s underclass. This resonated with the British partly because of their own cultural heritage as an outward-­looking people, animated by a wanderlust that led them to earn and then jealously guard a mastery of the seas that allowed them to roam the world as they pleased.83 Appropriating the “rambling” of the African-­American bluesman just meant trading the high seas for the pavement. Looking back early in the twenty-­first century over his long up-­and-­ down career, Eric Clapton spoke of having an inner “gypsy,” saying, “I had a restlessness in me, which I still have, and however much I loved my roots of Ripley and Hurtwood, the road always beckoned.”84 In Clapton’s case, the urge to ramble translated not only into a desire to travel the world playing

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music but also in a seeming inability in the 1960s and 1970s to remain with any one band or project for more than a few years before quitting and moving on.85 The parallels between Clapton’s personal and professional life, on the one hand, and what he understood to be the lifestyle of his idols, on the other, point up an interesting aspect of the British blues enthusiasts’ affiliation with those idols: they felt that their lives had to mirror their art—­and vice versa. Both the British musicians-­in-­training and the ethnomusicologists of the day held the often erroneous notion that blues lyrics expressed events and emotions that should be taken as having happened to the bluesman personally. This is, of course, an interpretive fallacy—­and yet it stuck with white enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic. The British, especially, bought into the idea that they had to live the supposed lifestyle of a bluesman—­however impressionistic and romanticized that might have been—­if they wanted to realize the music that these men had made. Record’s Jonathan Gregg noted the British obsession (and that of Clapton specifically) with the “self-­destructive legend of . . . Robert Johnson,” writing that Clapton “gave the impression of an old man trapped in a young man’s body, doing his best to catch up with drugs and drink.”86 Clapton more or less confirmed this when he recalled his early 1970s heroin addiction. In spite of . . . warnings, I enjoyed the mythology surrounding the lives of the great jazz musicians, like Charlie Parker and Ray Charles, and bluesmen like Robert Johnson, and I had a romantic notion of living the kind of life that had led them to create their music.87 Likewise, Keith Richards implicitly bore witness to this perceived connection between the imagined blues lifestyle and cultural creativity in 1972. Richards had overcome an addiction to heroin earlier in the year, but in his opinion, and those of some of his bandmates, nothing of value was written or recorded during the following sessions (which eventually resulted in Exile on Main St.) until he went back on the drug. It was, as the guitarist told an associate, a matter of “[k]nowing that the work was there and the work required that level of decadence . . . that fantastic self-­confidence to create that incredible work.”88 It is no exaggeration to state that the contemporary mainstream image of the “rock star lifestyle” actually had its roots in the assumption made by a few dozen young men in Britain in the early 1960s that their idols actually lived the things about which they sang.89 The blues not only celebrated the mobility of the open road; it also extolled (some might say fetishized) the conveyances that allowed the blues-

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man to achieve that mobility, especially the train and the automobile. Both vehicles serve as testaments to speed, power, and modern technology. The pursuit of freedom was often portrayed in African-­American culture using train metaphors. For example, the network that conveyed runaway slaves to freedom in the North was dubbed the Underground Railroad. Such is the powerful resonance of this metaphor that the incorrect notion that it was actually a clandestine railway line has proven difficult to uproot from the American popular understanding.90 In the twentieth century, the image of the train as the chugging embodiment of freedom culminated in the Great Migration, when the railroad conveyed African Americans searching for better economic and social opportunities to northern industrial centers such as Chicago and Detroit by the thousands.91 Aspiring blues musicians were sprinkled in among these train-­borne throngs, lured north in the 1940s and 1950s by the promise of recording contracts and more money. Howlin’ Wolf was a notable exception—­he drove himself and his band to Chicago in a station wagon—­but almost every other important Chicago bluesman shared this formative railroad experience.92 Thus, it should not be surprising that the train—­both as a literal, sensory experience and as a metaphor—­should find a place of prominence in the bluesman’s lyrics. In his masterful work on the importance of the railroad in American culture, historian James A. McPherson writes that “its whistle and its wheels promised movement . . . a challenge to the integrative powers of their imaginations.”93 Literary scholar Houston A. Baker claims that “the signal expressive achievement of blues . . . lay in their translation of technological innovativeness, unsettling demographic fluidity and boundless frontier energy into expression which attracted avid interest from the American masses.”94 This translation can be heard in a multitude of train blues. Hopping on a railroad car seemed to assure the bluesman unlimited choice. In Lead Belly’s “Leavin’ Blues,” the protagonist sets off for the station in the early morning, determined to catch a train out of town, knowing that it is on the Chesapeake & Ohio line but not where it is headed—­but also not caring.95 The bluesman cared only that the train was taking him somewhere else. Historians have rightly accorded the train a prominent place in the development of the always elusive American psyche. James A. Ward neatly labels the Americans a “railroad people,” and George Douglas argues that trains “determined the essence of life” in urban, industrial America.96 In this respect, railroad culture provides another cultural common ground between American and British popular experience, and thus another point of entry for Britons into African-­American blues culture. A blues song like Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Smokestack Lightning,” which extolled the power of the locomotive,

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could resonate just as much with denizens of Birmingham as it would with those of Chicago. The proof lay in the literally dozens of versions of “Smokestack Lightning” hammered out by fledgling British blues bands (rivaling “Got My Mojo Workin’” and “I’m a Man” in terms of the frequency with which it was covered).97 As the twentieth century progressed, blues culture made room in its collective imagination for another modern conveyance, the automobile, which has held a prominent place in America since at least the 1920s. Like the train, the automobile exemplifies speed, power, and mobility. Unlike the train, it is a great deal more personal. It allows motorists the opportunity to experience the freedom of the open road by themselves, without having to adhere to a railway timetable, as long they have the money for a tank of gasoline.98 To Europeans, the automobile also exemplified America itself, taking its place in a representative bricolage that also featured jazz music, skyscrapers, hamburgers, and gangster movies.99 As the result of the innovations brought about in mass production techniques by automobile manufacturer Henry Ford in the 1910s and 1920s, the automobile was also heavily bound up, on both sides of the Atlantic, in intellectual discourses regarding the potential risks and benefits to modern industrial society of mechanization, mass culture, and technological progress.100 These issues, bracketed together under the shorthand term “Fordism,” came to stand for the ambivalent nature of American society and culture; thus, so did the automobile, as the product whose manufacture had given rise to Fordism in the first place.101 America’s “car culture” only intensified and further entrenched itself after the Second World War, and the African-­American bluesman was as active a participant in it as any other man with power and sex on his mind.102 Interestingly, blues culture’s most readily apparent tropic accomplishment in this regard was the conflation of automobiles with women. Cars have been feminized since their invention—­for example, Ford’s first Model T was nicknamed the “Tin Lizzie.” However, in blues culture it is often the other way around: the bluesman refers to his woman in terms one might use to refer to a car. Muddy Waters, for example, urged his woman to “put a tiger in your tank” (in the blues of the same name)—­not only co-­opting the perceived speed and power of the tiger but also equating his “loving” with the “fuel” the woman as automobile needed to keep going. Later the Esso oil company appropriated Waters’s lyric for its own well-­known advertising slogan—­another example of a bluesman not receiving proper remuneration for his words.103 Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” which suggests automotive maintenance as a euphemism for sex, goes a step further and establishes the protagonist’s expertise on two levels: that of the driver and that of the auto me-

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chanic.104 Suspicious that his woman has been cheating on him, the protagonist plaintively asks, “Who been driving my Terraplane for you since I been gone?”105 Without waiting for an answer, he suggests a few “tune-­ups” that he can perform for her now that he has her alone. I’m gonna heist [sic] your hood, mama, I’m bound to check your oil . . . Now you know the coils ain’t even buzzin’ The generator won’t get the spark Motor’s in a bad condition You gotta have these batteries charged. Apparently satisfied that his woman is “road ready,” Johnson settles in for a test drive—­“when I mash down on your little starter, then your spark plug will give me fire.”106 Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were so taken with Johnson’s double entendres that they composed “Trampled Underfoot,” which is inspired by “Terraplane” without being a cover version—­or, as was so often the case in Led Zeppelin’s work, a blatant lyrical larceny.107 British youths became as enamored of American cars as did their American counterparts.108 Luxury cars (especially Cadillacs) and sports cars were another example of things that many Britons simply assumed every American had as a matter of course.109 The supposed ubiquity of such cars, and the speed and power they conferred on their owners, was even extended to African Americans. Listening to his beloved blues records with his friends, Eric Clapton added another item to the “to do whilst in America” list he had been mentally writing since primary school. I would picture what kind of car [the bluesman] drove, what it would smell like inside. Me and Jeff [Beck] had this idea of one day owning a black Cadillac or a black Stingray that smelled of sex inside and had tinted windows and a great sound system. That’s how I visualized these guys living.110 Here is an example of British blues enthusiasts’ flights of fancy that were actually based on semisolid ground. It is true, as blues scholar Ulrich Adelt points out, that not all bluesmen owned fancy cars, being “more concerned with paying the rent than having smelly sex in expensive cars.”111 Not many ordinary African Americans could afford such cars either. But quite a few bluesmen did own the large luxury and sports cars about which Clapton and Beck fantasized. And the possession of such cars evoked the same combina-

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tion of pride in mobility and power, and of socioeconomic status, in its owners as it did for young British men across the Atlantic. Ownership of an expensive car was a visible sign that the owner had “made it” financially. Thus, when Buddy Guy signed his first contract with Vanguard Records in 1968, he took the fourteen-­hundred-­dollar advance and bought a Cadillac straightaway.112 Howlin’ Wolf contented himself with station wagons (a new dark green Pontiac every other year according to biographers James Segrest and Mark Hoffman), but his pride in them was clear—­especially when he boasted of his first trip from Memphis to Chicago, “I’m the onliest [sic] one [who] drove out of the South like a gentleman.”113 Once Wolf and his band made it to Chicago, they benefited from the famous, if dubious, largess of Chess Records owners Phil and Leonard Chess. The Chess brothers were known for buying their recording artists cars to commemorate the signing of a contract or the release of a new single. They bought Muddy Waters a “new red and white Oldsmobile 98” on the release of Waters’s “Hoochie-­Coochie Man.”114 Cars like these were paid for out of the artists’ future royalties, which has given rise over the last few decades to charges of paternalism and a “plantation mentality” on the part of the Chess brothers.115 I would like to sidestep this tricky debate if possible, except to say that for the purposes of this discussion it seems that how the cars were actually bought is rather beside the point. Luxury cars symbolized certain things, and ownership of luxury cars symbolized certain things—­namely, wealth, status, and power—­and some African-­American bluesmen did own them. This meant that the white British enthusiast’s notion that being a bluesman got one a flashy set of wheels was, for once, not far outside the bounds of possibility. Whether consciously or not, Rod Stewart emulated the bluesman’s experience in this way. Negotiating his first solo recording contract with Mercury Records in 1969, the singer was asked how much he wanted as a signing bonus. He had had his eye on a new yellow and white Mini Marcos (a British-­made sports car) and asked for the car’s exact price, thirteen hundred pounds.116 Whether one’s blues heroes had them or not, a big, flashy luxury or sports car came to symbolize “America” itself—­a land of youth, freedom, wealth, and masculine power—­and could be used to point up the contrast between the United States and enfeebled, sclerotic, emasculated Britain. A revealing incident from early in the Who’s career brings together these symbolic elements. Pete Townshend purchased a “large and conspicuous” 1958 Cadillac with his cut of the Who’s early royalties.117 The guitarist parked his pride and joy in London’s fashionable Belgravia neighborhood, in a street through which Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, happened to be chauffeured regu-

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larly.118 After a few passes through the neighborhood, the Queen Mother requested that the police have the car removed, as it “offended the royal eye.”119 The car was duly removed, and one imagines that Townshend had to pay a stiff fine to recover it. Townshend recalled to his biographer that it was this incident that inspired him to write the Who’s first breakthrough hit, 1965’s “My Generation,” a blistering attack on what cultural critic Kevin Davey calls “the unresponsive fusion of age and power, the ‘old’ which [Townshend] would rather die than become.”120 “Devil Got My Woman”: The Female “Other”

It is instructive, with regard to Townshend’s story, that the adversary was the Queen Mother—­and that, in a broader sense, Britain was ruled by her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. That is because, in addition to concocting the persona of the powerful, sexually dynamic, footloose bluesman, the blues idiom created his necessary foil, and frequent nemesis: a woman. Appearing in the vast majority of blues songs in various forms and with various attributes, women are the central adversaries or “Others” in African-­ American male blues culture. Women were portrayed in the blues as demanding, petulant, manipulative, and in general “just doggone crooked.” If mobility and freedom were the bluesman’s birthright, women and the settled lifestyle they seemed to personify were portrayed as the main threat to both. Often they were also unfaithful. In terms of the sheer number of lyrical references, being cuckolded—­even more than being evicted, shot at, arrested, or forced to give up drinking—­was perhaps the bluesman’s primary worry in life. Partly this was projection: he had been in plenty of other men’s bedrooms, so there could just as easily be another man in his. Thus, the bluesman felt the need to keep an eye on his woman at all times lest she give in to her baser passions. For example, “Outside Woman Blues” by Blind Joe Reynolds finds the protagonist planning in one verse to “buy me a bulldog [to] watch my old lady whilst I sleep” and in the next complaining that “you can’t watch your wife and your outside women too.” The bluesman’s lot was certainly a difficult one.121 Policing his woman’s sexuality could be taxing for the bluesman since he had to work during the day. In this respect the woman could also be seen as a personification of the bluesman’s social and economic responsibilities, although, in true blues-­boasting fashion, he exaggerated. According to him, she demanded that he make enough money to support them and also to allow her to buy luxury items such as jewelry and clothing. To satisfy her insa-

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tiable demands for the trappings of urban consumer culture, the protagonist in Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Sitting on Top of the World” had to work “all summer and all the fall,” even “spend[ing] Christmas in [his] overalls.” But even after all of that, she left him for another man with more money.122 In many blues songs, economic and sexual anxieties were interwoven. Bluesmen often attempted to exchange luxury items for sexual favors; in “Long Distance Call,” Muddy Waters offers to buy a woman “a brand-­new Cadillac / if you’ll just speak some good words about me.”123 In a kind of reversal of this sexual calculus, women threatened to leave if their men didn’t get jobs and buy them these things, as in “Little Johnny” Jones’s “Big Town Playboy.”124 Finally, the bluesman often expressed the anxiety that his woman was taking his hard-­ earned money and using it to buy the sexual favors of another man.125 The emergence in Western society of the teenage girl as a major player in mass consumer culture had an interesting cultural antecedent in the blues idiom’s tendency to depict the bluesman’s relationship with women that might, for lack of a more scholarly term, be labeled “nymphets.” This term was brought to cultural prominence by the Russian expatriate novelist Vladimir Nabokov to describe the eponymous femme fatale in his 1958 novel, a fourteen-­year-­old girl that the middle-­aged narrator, Humbert Humbert, kidnaps and serially rapes.126 It is an apt comparison to make with the numerous very young women about whom the normally mild-­mannered Waters once boasted (in “She’s Nineteen Years Old”), “I get so carried away with [them] that I’ll kill anybody ’bout one of ’em.”127 The “blues nymphet” is in many ways an accentuation of tropes that we have already seen in action in the blues idiom. I have discussed how the bluesman, by virtue of his age and accumulated wisdom, took on a paternal or professorial persona; by complement, then, the object of his desire would be younger and less experienced. Thus constituted as the sexual opposite of the older bluesman, the blues nymphet had all the attributes one might associate with a teenage girl—­exuberance, attractiveness, and innocence but also petulance, self-­centeredness, talkativeness, and immaturity. She was unnecessarily cruel in Sonny Boy Williamson I’s “Good Morning, School Girl”; at first dismissive, then difficult to please in Waters’s “She’s Nineteen Years Old”; and spoiled by both parents and would-­be suitors in Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.”128 Thus, the blues nymphet also manifested the complexities and contradictions of her older sisters, all the while placing the bluesman in uncomfortable proximity to the legal system (which did not hesitate to put Berry in prison in real life for allegedly “transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes” in 1958, coincidentally the same year in which Lolita was published).129

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To explain why exceedingly young women seemed to enjoy such a prominent place in the blues lyrical idiom would require a deep sociological analysis of pre-­1950s African-­American society that I am not qualified to undertake. Whatever the reasons for her prevalence, the greater point is that the British enthusiasts took to her with disturbing alacrity. Part of the basis for this lay in the literal fact that, as much as they might have wanted to play at being black men in their forties and fifties, they were still white boys in their late teens and early twenties. So, too, were the young men that dominated the growing blues fan culture in Britain.130 Thus, at the moment they first became fascinated with the blues, they also found themselves in pursuit of adolescent girls, who, in the context of the larger consumer culture, had a much greater chance of being materially spoiled than their mothers and older sisters did. Whenever a bluesman sang about having problems with a demanding, self-­centered young woman, young British men felt that they could empathize with him. This fascination deepened with the British enthusiasts’ burgeoning popularity. Their music began to become popular among first British and then transatlantic audiences, many of which were composed of adolescent men like themselves whose experiences with women were similar. British musicians began to surpass their audiences in terms of these experiences, however, as they gained sexual access to three distinct groups of young, previously unavailable transatlantic women—­aristocrats’ daughters, fashion models, and later groupies—­to all of whom the persona of the blues nymphet could be applied at some level. Both aristocrats’ daughters and fashion models were conspicuous participants in consumer culture without having to work very hard (or at all) to pay for it; both were used to having their every demand gratified. All three groups of women were invariably young—­American groupies, especially, were often underage, somehow managing to sneak out regularly enough to fulfill their parents’ worst fears since 1965, when Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham planted the purposefully alarmist headline “Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Rolling Stone?” in the English music magazine Melody Maker.131 Art and life began to imitate one another, ad infinitum. Mick Jagger and fashion model Chrissie Shrimpton (then eighteen) formed the British music scene’s first “power couple.” Their relationship was stormy, and she constantly quarreled with the singer, sometimes even hitting him (not that Jagger was an aggrieved innocent; he often hit her back).132 Shrimpton was purportedly the inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ mid-­1960s sequence of misogynistic put-­downs of shallow, immature girls, most notably “Under My Thumb” and, straightforwardly enough, “Stupid Girl.”133 (As far as shallow, imma-

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ture, underage girls went, Jagger’s protagonist also tried to entice a fifteen-­ year-­old girl and a presumably also underage friend upstairs to his apartment for a romp in “Stray Cat Blues,” telling them, “I don’t want your ID,” and assuring them that what he wants is “no capital crime.”)134 During and after his days with Cream, Eric Clapton took up first with French fashion model Charlotte Martin (then twenty years old), and then British heiress Alice Ormsby-­Gore (sixteen), the daughter of a British diplomat.135 This was a long way indeed from merely performing the blues song “Good Morning, School Girl” as a Yardbird. It was Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, however, who took both real-­life and artistic relationships with blues nymphets to the furthest extreme. Plant assumed Waters’s professorial role on “Whole Lotta Love” and the paternal role on the band’s cover of Williamson II’s “Bring It On Home,” in which the young girl calls Plant “Daddy” before leaving home to get her loving elsewhere.136 After dallying with young girls on vinyl, the group went on tour and surrounded itself with groupies, many of whom were teenagers. This was especially true of Page, who seemed to revel in the company of teenage girls, two of whom—­Pamela Miller (eighteen at the time) and Lori Maddox (fourteen)—­served on separate occasions as his unofficial “road wives,” traveling and staying with the guitarist whenever he was in America.137 These sorts of experiences in turn led to more songs about teenage groupies, most notably “Sick Again,” in which Plant crows about but then demeans a favorite fifteen-­year-­old conquest in Los Angeles.138 Life experience aside, the blues nymphet trope can be seen to resonate with the British blues network on an intellectual level. She serves as the mirror image of the powerful and dynamic bluesman, serving to define and empower him by being everything he is not. She is immature and inexperienced whereas he has the benefit of years of accumulated knowledge and experience; she is capricious and petulant whereas he is stable and balanced. However, at the end of the day, it is she who maintains a noticeable degree of control over the bluesman. No matter what his skills or powers, he cannot or will not leave her, and, although he complains in song that she makes him miserable, he usually does what she asks. Finally, on top of all the other tribulations the bluesman’s woman puts him through, there is always the possibility of the coup de grâce: she might try to murder him. Such a grim threat was at the center of quite a few blues songs, including Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “Too Young to Die,” in which the protagonist confesses to being “scared of that child.” Note again his infantilization of his woman, even as he concedes that she has the “unwomanly” desire and ability to kill him.139 Even in blues songs in which the blues-

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man is able to countenance his death by his woman’s hand, he is still able to situate both parties in their normative gender roles: while a man would have used a gun or a knife, the woman, aside from a few notable exceptions, resorts to poison. This is the modus operandi at work in Howlin’ Wolf ’s “I Asked for Water (and She Gave Me Gasoline)” and Muddy Waters’s “Iodine in My Coffee.”140 To the bluesman, poisoning is of a piece with the rest of the behavior he imputes to her; just as she sneaks around behind his back to cheat on him, she will try to kill him in much the same underhanded manner. “Your Funeral and My Trial”: Violence and Power

A central aspect of the adversarial relationship between the bluesman and his woman, and one at which I have thus far only hinted, is physical violence. This is also a key element in African-­American blues culture in general, which, according to blues historian Adam Gussow, “is, or was until recently, a culture permeated by intimate violence, both figurative and real, threatened (or promised) and inflicted.”141 Decades before rap music provoked a public hue and cry against its seeming glorification of violence—­ especially against women—­many of the same tropes were being expressed in the blues.142 The expression of blues violence had its roots in the day-­to-­ day experiences of the men (and women) who performed the blues. Whether or not the individual blues musician was actually singing about violent acts that he had seen or had happened to him, in point of fact the “jook joint” was just a violent place. Lead Belly and Charley Patton both had their throats cut (though not fatally) in the course of various “jook joint” altercations.143 Lead Belly and Eddie “Son” House were themselves convicted murderers.144 Robert Johnson died of poisoning, although for years inaccurate versions of the story (believed and passed on as gospel truth by several white chroniclers) claimed that he had been shot or stabbed to death.145 A musical form arguably permeated with violence, the blues was born in the rural South, which, along with the “Wild West,” has long been culturally signified as more violent than the rest of America.146 In turn Europeans have long perceived American society to be more violent than their own—­this has been a central concern since colonial times.147 Whatever serious flaws it suffers from in terms of archival research, historian Michael Bellesiles’s controversial book Arming America is fundamentally correct in identifying a powerful gun culture at the center of American life and in dating its large-­scale emergence to the post–­Civil War period when the United States was in the

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throes of the modernization that would make it a world power by the outbreak of the First World War.148 Not coincidentally, this was precisely the period in which jazz and the blues emerged as distinct musical forms. The glorification of violence in American culture—­or at least its centrality as a method of solving conflicts and demonstrating masculinity—­was articulated by those forms of American mass consumer culture that young British men latched onto in the postwar period: Western movies, films noir, and comic books.149 The supposed centrality of violence to masculine identity is also articulated in the blues, which features almost as much boasting about violence as boasting about sexual encounters. By and large, it is intimate violence—­that is, violence between domestic or sexual partners—­that seems to predominate in the blues lyrical idiom. The bluesman threatened his woman with violence for a whole catalog of sins: cheating on him, staying out too late, spending his money, or simply mouthing off. In “.32-­20 Blues,” Robert Johnson lumped all of these together as shooting offenses.150 Such were the perceived tribulations with which the bluesman was beset by his troublesome woman that even mild-­mannered Muddy Waters got into the act, fantasizing about “snapping a pistol in your face” and “let[ting] some graveyard be your resting place” in “I Can’t Be Satisfied.”151 Waters even seemed to revel in the violence to which his woman had driven him; in “Oh Yeah!” he gloats that he will “whup my baby in the mornin’ and beat my little girl . . . in the afternoon.”152 In this culture of intimate blues violence, the women often gave as good as they got. In a few notable cases, these women even managed to evade the “proper” gender roles into which they were often inscribed. We have seen how Waters and Wolf indicted their women for attempting to murder them with poison—­apparently the “proper” way for a woman to kill a man. However, after listing all the things his woman did that made him reach for his “.32-­20,” Robert Johnson admits that she had a gun of her own, a “.38 Special.” Johnson’s magnanimity has its limits, however: her gun is certainly no match for Johnson’s own “.32-­20.” Besides, somehow Johnson also has a Gatling gun—­making the point that, when it comes to blues armaments, size does matter.153 These were sentiments of which Jimmy Porter, concerned with being “butchered by the women,” might well have approved. Compared to the many references to bluesmen either committing or threatening to commit acts of violence against their women, references to the bluesmen coming after the men who have cuckolded them are thin on the ground. In John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Mad Again” we find the protagonist trying to decide on the appropriate vengeance for the man he has caught with his wife—­drowning him and shooting him are listed among his favored op-

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tions.154 There are a few more in this vein—­Williamson II’s “One Way Out” and the Willie Dixon–­penned “Back Door Man” immediately come to mind—­sung from the point of view of the “outside man” as he hastens to leave the woman’s bedroom before her husband or boyfriend returns. Dixon’s protagonist in “Back Door Man” even admits to having been shot by one.155 Blues like this are quite rare, however. Perhaps bluesmen maintained with each other a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” that caused them to be lenient with each other in their lyrics, knowing that it could just as easily be them looking down the barrel of a jealous lover’s gun. What many of these songs have in common is the status their protagonists enjoy as free agents in a society in which black men were rarely permitted such unqualified autonomy, the threat of violence the protagonists seemed to personify to white America, and the resulting high esteem in which they were held by many in their own community. Through his violent challenges to respectable society, the bluesman fits easily into what historian John W. Roberts calls the “badman” or “bad nigger” tradition in African-­ American culture.156 Epitomized by the murderous folk hero Staggerlee (alternately, Stack-­o -­Lee), the badman was an attractive figure to emulate because, like his white counterpart the cowboy, he carved out his own destiny and achieved a hard-­won mastery over his circumstances using violence.157 Gussow argues, invoking theorists Robin D. G. Kelley and Elaine Scarry, that intimate violence was a way of “taking back the black body,” of affirming the “somebodiness” of the violent man by means of his demonstration that, far from being a passive victim in a racist society, he could alter his world in the most fundamental way possible—­by removing a life from it.158 Not only that, but, in the blues idiom at least, white authority figures had no power to stop him. The badman had achieved freedom, and it was this “[c]omplete indifference to the consequences of liquor, reefers, drugs, gambling, women and assorted crimes [that lent] the badman boaster a kind of wildman glamour.”159 The strong possibility did exist, of course, that the badman would be arrested, convicted, and executed for his crimes, and this points to another quarter from which the bluesman could potentially encounter violence: the legal system. While certain members of the black community may have approved of Staggerlee’s murderous swagger, the sheriff and the courts certainly did not.160 Living in a racist society meant that prison and capital punishment (to say nothing of lynching) were facts of life for many African-­ American men. As mentioned earlier, both Lead Belly and Eddie “Son” House were imprisoned for murder. And, although no notable bluesman was ever the victim of a lynch mob, “Southern justice” touched the lives of several

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(including Willie Dixon and Josh White) indirectly, and its specter, as Gussow argues, haunts both the culture and the idiom.161 Death on the orders (or at least with the connivance) of the state, then, was the other side of the coin—­the “non-­intimate” violence of African-­American blues culture. Being faced with a death sentence was a power struggle just like anything else in the bluesman’s universe. The forces of law and order—­the policeman, the judge, the executioner, and the lynch mob—­had the power to take away the bluesman’s freedom and end his life. But the bluesman had the power to resist. Flight is the option taken by the protagonist in the Leaves’ “Hey Joe,” which Jimi Hendrix covered in 1967. Having caught his woman in bed with another man, he gets his gun and murders her. In the final verse, the protagonist makes plans to flee to Mexico, beyond the clutches of the hangman.162 The protagonist of Lead Belly’s “Gallis Pole,” however, is not so lucky and thus tries another option. Standing at the gallows (gallis), he offers the hangman gold, silver, and his sister’s company if only he will untie his ropes.163 Perhaps the most outlandish method for resisting capital punishment occurs in Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Drinking Man Blues.” Wheatstraw, who referred to himself as “the High Sheriff of Hell,” tells of how, after a night of drinking, his protagonist shoots a policeman, claims his pistol and badge, and then walks the dead man’s beat! Rather fantastically, the judge lets him off easy, with only a six-­month sentence.164 For sheer audacity, however, it would be difficult to top the feat described in Dixon’s “Back Door Man.” In fact it is perhaps the most flamboyantly subversive commentary on the matrix of sex, power, race, and justice in the entire blues canon. On trial for his life, Dixon’s protagonist finds himself sponsored by two powerful white women, who plead with their husbands for his release. I was ’cused of murder in the first degree The judge’s wife cried, “Let the man go free!” . . . The cop’s wife cried, “Don’t take him down I would rather be in six feet of ground!” I am the Back Door Man.165 Once again the bluesman’s power and autonomy are expressed in sexual terms—­and in public, no less. Here it is the bluesman’s ability to sexually satisfy the wives of two of the town’s white authority figures that saves him from his fate, allowing him to resume his existence (for the moment) as a free man. The outlandishness of this claim—­in the real world, black men were not even permitted to whistle at white women, much less have sex

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with them, much less have it announced at a public hearing—­only adds to its mythic resonance.166 The near simultaneity with which Dixon’s protagonist is first charged with murder and then saved by his sexual prowess puts an exclamation point on the links in blues culture between violence and sexuality. It should be noted that numerous blues go further, positing the gun as a powerful phallic symbol. On hearing the title and the first two lines of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” (“Boom boom boom boom, gonna shoot you right down”) one might think that this is merely another blues lyric glorifying gunplay. In reality it is a seductive boast, with “shooting down” a euphemism for having sex with his woman.”167 This ambiguity is also present in “Little Walter” Jacobs’s “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights!” It is unclear whether Jacobs intends to shoot at the woman, beat her, or have rough sex with her.168 The last word belongs to Robert Johnson. When, in “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” Johnson boasts “The stuff I got’ll bust your brains out / It’ll make you lose your mind,” he could just as easily mean his gun or his penis.169 Certainly Mick Jagger was untroubled by the ambiguity; his Rolling Stones covered the song on their double-­album monument to Deep South sexuality and violence, Exile on Main St.170 Conclusions

Whatever intellectual work the blues was meant to accomplish in the community that originally produced it, it is clear that among young British males in the 1960s the idiom and its cultural trappings provided a blueprint for an alternative masculine ideal to the normative bourgeois masculinity that had been reinscribed in the postwar period. The bluesman was an artistic persona constructed by African-­American blues performers, but young white British enthusiasts either were unaware of this or did not care. To them the bluesman was everything they were not and perhaps—­especially since the windup of the Empire and the “repression of ambition” in postwar Britain—­could never be. He had attained power through accumulated knowledge—­some of which had been gained through experience and perhaps some supernaturally. He had achieved freedom through mobility, especially via the train and the automobile, and had asserted his masculine independence from the “woman as Other” who served as his foil and often his nemesis. The bluesman was adept at defending that independence through violence—­primarily, and disturbingly, against the opposite sex but sometimes against the forces of law and order. Here was an archetype that

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the young Briton in search of his own masculine independence could contrast favorably with the boring, conformist, suburban “organization man” of 1950s Britain. Here was an American “man of adventure” like the cowboy, whom they perceived as skilled, confident, and sexually dynamic—­all the favorable attributes they associated with America itself. The bluesman was thus to them a preferable role model, and over the next few years they would do their level best to emulate him. This project of emulation might seem odd, if not ludicrously or offensively so. In fact several of those who engaged it were aware enough of the incongruence that they jokingly referred to southern England as the “Surrey Delta” or the “Thames Valley cotton fields.” There may have been little on paper to link white, middle-­class Britons living in a former global power with black, working-­class Americans living under oppression and racial violence. In terms of a whole host of indices such as race, class, nationality, affluence, and power within society, this was all wrong. This did not stop the young men who comprised the British blues network from making this psychological leap anyway, whether by claiming “emotional poverty” or “imprisonment” within Britain’s suffocating class system or just relying on a common heterosexual male desire for and frustration with the opposite sex. What is more, they made this psychological leap together, as a collective of brothers. Like actual brothers, young British blues enthusiasts interacted on a variety of levels: like, dislike, jealousy, camaraderie, and rivalry. It is this multifaceted relationship whose bonds were often forged by shared “affiliation” with blues music and culture—­not to mention the ways in which it resulted in great cultural creativity in the mid-­to late 1960s—­that is the subject of the next chapter.

4  •  Blues Brothers Camaraderie, Collaboration, and Competition in the British Blues Network We were kings, and we were all just at the prime, and we all used to . . . meet each other and talk about music . . . [and] it was like—­like a men’s smoking club. Just a very good scene. —­John Lennon1 There was this great sense of brotherhood, a sense of, “Hey, we’re all in this together,” and “Let’s go to America and kick ass,” y’know. —­Eric Burdon2

Of all the Greater London nightclubs that served as petri dishes for the burgeoning British blues scene, Eel Pie Island in Twickenham may have been the most influential. It was certainly the most peculiarly named—­and it may also have been the most like an actual petri dish inside. The club was located on a small island in the River Thames. To access it, customers had to pay a toll to cross a rickety wooden footbridge from the mainland (or buy a membership card that waived the toll). Once there, however, they were invariably treated to a powerful show. Cyril Davies’s R&B All-­Stars, “Long John” Baldry’s Hoochie-­Coochie Men, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, and Led Zeppelin all performed on various occasions at the club, which regulars called “Eelpisland.”3 Not only did most British blues and rock bands play at the club, but the audience would also be packed with British blues enthusiasts hanging out, drinking, chatting up female patrons, and appraising their compatriots onstage. Many were either in bands themselves or soon would be. It is no exaggeration to state that most of the young men who would eventually become British rock stars were likely to be in the audience or onstage at clubs like Eel Pie Island on any given night in 1965. Rod Stewart, who served as a backing singer in Baldry’s Hoochie-­Coochie 106

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Men and the Steampacket, affirmed this with a rather grim flourish in his 2013 autobiography. That’s how tight it seemed to be in those days; at any time, almost everyone who would later matter would be standing around in the same place. One unfortunate gas explosion under the wrong club on the wrong night, and three-­quarters of the history of British rock music would have been taken out in one go.4 Fortunately for the history of postwar popular culture, this explosion never happened. However, the personal closeness, shared socializing, and eventual cultural impact of these young nightclub goers were very real. The British blues network was a cohesive group of roughly seventy to one hundred young British men whose social interconnectivity allowed them to collaborate on the project of blues emulation and, in time, innovation. With a few exceptions, all its major figures were born either during the Second World War or during the immediate six years that followed it—­important years in determining the social, political, and economic future of Britain after two decades of depression and war. As was discussed at length earlier, young men of this generation were shaped by similar upbringings and cultural, economic, and political circumstances and were poised to take advantage of Britain’s newfound affluence after decades of privation and rationing. Having gained access to rock ‘n’ roll and then blues music, many were attracted by the musical and intellectual qualities they perceived to exist in the music and the mythology surrounding it. A minority of these young men actively affiliated with the lifestyle and culture they believed were being presented in the blues, in preference to the middle-­class British milieu in which they had grown up. Many of these sought to learn as much as they could about the music and its practitioners, and of these a minority took the unique step of forming their own bands to actually play it. Eventually these young men, operating at first on their own, became aware of each other’s existence and began forming homosocial bonds based on their shared love of blues music and perceived shared status as misunderstood, anti-­mainstream cognoscenti. The social network that began to take shape was instrumental in providing wider access to blues texts and ideas, and it allowed its members to trade and talk about records, books, and music magazines that they might not have to buy for themselves. The social spaces they inhabited—­record shops, art school common rooms, living rooms, pubs, and coffee bars—­became incubators in which cultural producers could collaborate and compete to come up with music that would initially impress

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the group and later be sold to the general public. (Not that better or more salable songs were the only thing over which to compete. Like actual brothers, British blues enthusiasts found ways to compete over almost everything: recording contracts, media coverage, attention from women, and even wardrobe items.) This chapter begins by situating this kind of interpersonal cultural network in the rich historiography that has dealt with the formation and impact of similar networks over the last few centuries in Europe and the United States. It then discusses the British blues network specifically—­the milieu in which it emerged and the ways in which individual blues enthusiasts became aware of each other, came together in Britain’s suburban and urban spaces, and forged the homosocial bonds that held the network together. It examines how ideas were spread throughout the network and how musical knowledge was created and regulated. Using the late 1960s musical call-­and-­response between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as a case study, it discusses how the seemingly contradictory (but in fact complementary) forces of camaraderie, collaboration, and competition among the network’s members impelled them to pursue cultural creativity. Finally, the chapter considers three North American “bands”—­Bob Dylan, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Band—­ and the way their “fraternal” influences on the British blues network in the aftermath of the British Invasion helped to transform an emulative “British blues” into an innovative “British blues-­rock.” Social Interconnectivity and Creativity in Modern Cultural History

The instrumental link between social connectivity and cultural creativity has been the subject of a rich and varied historiography—­certainly not limited to popular music but extending to other areas of intellectual and cultural activity. For example, historian Peter Gay has dealt with the role of interpersonal networks in the collective work of, among others, the Enlightenment philosophes and the “cultural outsiders” of the German Weimar Republic.5 Gay’s work provides a conceptual framework with which to understand the ways in which social interconnectivity has inspired creativity in other contexts. Especially helpful has been his depiction of the Enlightenment’s philosophes as a “family,” a diverse collection of intellectuals with different interests and opinions but the same overall goals, forged by similar collective experiences—­notable, says Gay, “for their general harmony, not their occasional discord.  .  .  . neither a phalanx nor a unified school of thought.”6

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To Gay the Enlightenment comprised multiple—­ though messily defined—­generational cadres, each of whose intellectuals mentored, collaborated with, and often butted heads with each other. Other historians have examined more compact groups of intellectuals and focused on the notion of shared generations in forging the kind of social and intellectual connections that drive creative thought. Shared service in—­or at least experience on the home front of—­the First World War was an especially fruitful generational adhesive. Historians Jeffrey Herf and Robert Wohl have discussed its formative influence on “conservative revolutionary” technocrats in Weimar Germany (Herf ) and writers and intellectuals in France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and Spain (Wohl).7 Their contention is that it was not enough for these intellectuals to have experienced the war; it was more crucial that they had experienced it together, as young men of a certain age, and that afterward they could fall back on the lessons they had learned during this shared experience in trying to make sense of postwar society.8 Cultural commentator John Leland has echoed Gay in noting the crucial role played by urban environments in providing coherent social spaces in which intellectuals and cultural producers can socialize, bounce ideas off one another, and one-­up each other. Leland has identified three distinct features of urban spaces to which he attributes their amazing fertility as cultural incubators. First, being as populous as they were, cities like London, Paris, and New York greatly increased one’s chances of finding like-­minded individuals with whom to collaborate. “A book or play,” Leland asserts, “that shocked mainstream sensibilities could find a constituency in a city . . . [whereas] in a small town it would just be weird.”9 Second, urban populations were ethnically, racially, politically, and economically diverse, with many residents having recently arrived from the hinterlands. Thus, cities threw together different kinds of people—­and their ideas—­in ways that small provincial settings could not. Finally, the sheer size and diffuseness of cities made it hard for any one group to completely police nonmainstream ideas or expression. For these reasons, cities were ideal laboratories for the kinds of comparing, collaborating, and competing that result in interesting modes of expression.10 In addition to explaining “why” social interconnectivity breeds cultural creativity, one must also explain “how”—­the actual methods by which creative individuals become inspired to create through their social relationships. Texts and cultural artifacts played a central role in inspiring cultural creativity, and in many cases so did the actual methods by which individuals were exposed to these texts by associates. The emphasis on texts and methods of inspiration has been used fruitfully by writer Dan Franck in his discussion of the apartment building known as the Bateau-­Lavoir and its role as a resi-

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dence and meeting place for some of the founders of modern art in late-­ nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­century Paris. It is well known among art historians that Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other modernists were inspired to create cubism by the example of supposedly “primitive” African art. Franck, however, also discusses how Picasso et al. might have been exposed to the African art in question. He argues that were it not for the close social proximity of those artists, which allowed them to see, display, and discuss discrete pieces of African art, this process of inspiration and creation might have been delayed or not have happened at all.11 In both their overall commitment to what they viewed as a forgotten yet instructive culture of the past and the interpersonal network in which they operated, there are also comparisons to be drawn between British blues enthusiasts and the humanists and artists of the European Renaissance. Humanities scholar Stephen Greenblatt has analyzed the coterie of young humanists who shared a fascination with Greco-­Roman antiquity, as well as a smug disdain for what they thought were the banalities of their own society.12 They were also essentially obsessive treasure hunters, scouring the monasteries and markets of Europe for seemingly lost or forgotten Greco-­Roman manuscripts and objets d’art. Furthermore, their social interconnectivity drove them to greater efforts, for they knew their fellows were also “on the hunt” and would brag incessantly if they found something the others had not. A different era, a different country, and an entirely different textual medium (record albums not marble sculptures), but at their core there is not so much to differentiate the early-­fifteenth-­century Italian humanist from the mid-­twentieth-­century British blues enthusiast. According to Greenblatt, what marked Renaissance era humanists—­and what else they have in common with British blues “hands-­ on preservationists”—­was an insistence that antiquities should not simply be preserved and then copied scrupulously. What was needed was not to sound exactly like Cicero or Lucretius but rather to “fashion a new and original voice . . . by taking those masters into the self.” The goal was to build anew on the foundations of the old—­exactly the project that British rock musicians set themselves.13 This was in contrast to those in the British folk and blues scene, known by their detractors as “moldy figs,” who insisted on strict note-­ for-­note authenticity and adherence to the sound of the old blues records. Meanwhile, art critic and historian Jonathan Jones argued that the creative rivalry between Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti was the engine that drove some of their most influential work.14 To Jones the creation by each artist of such “seemingly antithetical” and unrelated works as Leonardo’s anatomical drawings and Michelangelo’s

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Sistine Chapel ceiling was directly linked to their desire to outdo one another in the public eye of fifteenth-­century Florence.15 The rivalry between the two masters was personal as well as professional; contemporaries called it the sdegno grandissimo (great disdain). The two hurled bitter public insults at each other, which seem to have been grounded in something besides the notion of who was the superior painter. According to Jones, not only did this rivalry help inspire great works by Leonardo and Michelangelo, but it also set the terms of discussion for narrative painting for members of the next generation, including Raphael. The competitiveness between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or any of their compatriots on the scene, might not have been as vitriolic, but it was an equally important influence on the direction blues-­ based rock music took in Britain and the United States for at least the next half century. In works such as these, historians have enriched our understanding of intellectual thought and cultural production by recognizing that it mattered that thinkers knew each other personally—­that they ate, drank, and cohabitated with each other, and that their work would have been noticeably different—­and perhaps worse—­without such peer influences. British blues enthusiasts were shaped not only by collective experience and mission, but also by what was, in its own way, a collective creative trauma. In a metaphorical way, British blues enthusiasts chose, at least at first, to disavow their own cultural heritage and affiliate themselves with someone else’s. Cultural creativity has been fueled by less dramatic fissures than this in the past. Finally, this combination of sociability, competition, and collaboration could be seen in the production and performance of Chicago blues. Chicago’s South Side boasted a constellation of nightclubs and recording studios similar to those that would come to serve London’s blues network. On the Chicago blues scene, competition over gigs, money, and acclaim could be fierce. Eric Clapton spoke of the relationship among close personal interaction, competition, and creativity in a 1995 interview with film director Martin Scorsese. Most of the players that came to Chicago [from Mississippi] . . . had, actually, a way to become sophisticated, I think . . . [for] they had competition. . . . The guys would come up, and they’d visit Muddy in his club, and they’d see how sharp he was, the kind of suits he was wearing, and the kind of money he was getting, and they’d have to revise their act. It would speed up the [creative] process, and it would bring out the best, the absolute best, in everybody.16

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Within this high-­stakes urban milieu, Chess Records itself benefited from collaboration, camaraderie, and competition in creating the kind of music that inspired British blues enthusiasts, as well as many others in the States.17 For example, much of the songwriting at Chess was handled by producer, bass guitarist, and lyricist Willie Dixon, who was responsible for the lion’s share of the hits recorded by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Chess Records’ biggest-­selling artists by far, Waters and Wolf enjoyed a fruitful professional and personal rivalry over a quarter century.18 Like many supposed feuds between well-­known cultural producers, that between Waters and Wolf was most likely embellished, if not blown out of proportion entirely, by the media and the recording industry in order to drive consumer interest. Contemporaries recall that their relationship was mostly friendly—­the only exception being an occasion on which Waters attempted to “poach” Wolf ’s guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, for his own band.19 However friendly, the rivalry motivated both Waters and Wolf to improve their music to get the better of the other. Dixon recalled writing songs specifically with one of the two singer-­g uitarists in mind and manipulating their ferocious competitiveness through reverse psychology. Each musician suspected that Dixon was giving the other the choice songs to record. Thus, if Wolf seemed uninterested in a song that Dixon had written for him, Dixon would tell him, “‘This is a song for Muddy.’ . . . He would be glad to get in on it by him thinking it was somebody else’s, especially Muddy’s.”20 Given that many of these Chicago blues musicians traveled to Britain and interacted with both their young white acolytes and each other, it is more than likely that their rivalries came to the Britons’ attention. After all, Waters was known to tell young aspiring bluesmen, half-­jokingly, “That Wolf, he’s crazy. You stay away from him.”21 More viscerally, “Long John” Baldry (singer/guitarist for Cyril Davies’s R&B All-­Stars, among others) told the story of how the years-­long rivalry between harmonica players “Little Walter” Jacobs and Sonny Boy Williamson II resurfaced in a London hotel lobby while both were on tour in 1963. A heated argument between the two rivals over which was the superior harmonica player escalated to the point where both men were threatening each other with switchblades before calmer heads apparently prevailed.22 Given that young British enthusiasts wanted to emulate what they understood to be the bluesman’s lifestyle and persona, it also stands to reason that they imbibed a particular lesson: to be a real bluesman meant to compete and collaborate with one’s fellows on the scene. It helped that, by 1964, they were already thinking and acting in these terms.

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“Come Together”: Forging Homosocial Bonds in the Blues

The British blues network was constructed from dozens of friendships, acquaintances, and budding rivalries across Britain. Blues enthusiasts met and became friends (or at least fellow travelers) in a variety of ways, typically when they were in their late teens and early twenties (although, in the case of two sets of actual brothers—­Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks, and Steve and Mervyn “Muff ” Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group—­the bonds were forged much earlier, and not by choice).23 What is most striking about the male bonding that led to the British blues scene of the early 1960s is that much of it would probably not have occurred without blues or rock ‘n’ roll music as the primary cement. The music was why they were in the record shops in the first place. The toil of searching through dusty bins in those shops for rare treasures gave them a shared sense of purpose, almost as treasure hunters. With blues records as rare as they were in Britain at that time, the music also sharpened enthusiasts’ sense of competition (friendly or otherwise). Furthermore, the music was why third parties offered to introduce enthusiasts to each other. And it was why, having met, the enthusiasts made plans to socialize later and more deeply. For example, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other as young children, and their meeting on a train in July 1960 as teenagers—­after years of not seeing each other—­was sheer chance. However, if Jagger had not been carrying an armful of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records (and if Richards had not been so keenly interested in them), it is likely that their conversation would have been limited to a brief greeting and nothing more; the Rolling Stones might never have formed.24 Likewise, Eric Burdon and John Steel both attended the Newcastle College of Art—­an educational choice that had nothing to do with music. But the two began the transition from vaguely acquainted classmates to close friends and eventual bandmates when Burdon announced during one lunch period that he had an extra ticket to a Muddy Waters concert and Steel offered to go with him.25 It is not merely true that members of the blues network relied partly on a shared love of the music to spur their collaborative creativity; it is also true that without that shared love they might not have met in the first place. It is also striking where many members of the blues network first came together. Most of the initial encounters occurred in three very specific social settings: British art colleges, music shops, and pubs. It should be kept in mind that these were only the most common site of initial encounters. Once the blues enthusiasts became acquainted, all kinds of other sites came into

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play: flats, parents’ living rooms, coffeehouses, men’s boutiques, and so on. However, Britain’s art colleges, record shops, and pubs were the sites where the British blues boom began. “Revolt into Style”: The Role of British Art Colleges

British art colleges, like British society itself, underwent something of a postwar transformation. Before the Second World War, art colleges had existed, of course, but young men like Eric Clapton would likely not have attended them. In the words of historian Shawn Levy, these schools were “the province of the wealthy . . . a thoroughly toffee-­nosed [i.e., aristocratic] pursuit.”26 However, postwar education reforms established a system of secondary schools that all citizens could attend free of charge; this system offered art schools as an option alongside grammar schools, secondary modern schools, and technical colleges.27 This meant that working-­class and middle-­class boys who had not scored well enough on the “Eleven-­ Plus” examinations to be placed in grammar school, could both avoid the socially humiliating secondary moderns and technical colleges and enjoy “some simulacrum of the privileges previously enjoyed by boys from old families.”28 The main privilege was freedom—­a relatively unfettered social life, the ability to express oneself creatively, and the chance to delay entrance into the workaday world for a few more years. The avowed intent of the art college was to teach both technique and aesthetic sensibility to Britain’s future painters, sculptors, and printmakers; many leading lights of the so-­called pop art and kitchen sink movements of the 1950s and 1960s earned their stripes in this way.29 However, the main contribution of the British art schools to Western popular culture lies in what many of their students learned outside the classroom: blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll music. David Jones, who started out as an aspiring blues musician before achieving superstardom under the pseudonym David Bowie in the 1970s, remarked, “In Britain, there was always this joke that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar.” Art dealer Barry Miles concurred, saying, “You came out of [art school] knowing a lot more about rock ‘n’ roll than you did about art.”30 The list of young men who met in art classes, listened to blues records in art school common rooms, and played their first gigs in art school pubs is impressive. Kingston Art College alone was home to, at one time or another, Eric Clapton, Paul Jones and Tom McGuinness of Manfred Mann, and four of the original five Yardbirds. Pete Townshend and Ron Wood both at-

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tended, however indifferently, the Ealing College of Art. Keith Richards, expelled from technical college, found himself at Sidcup Art College with Phil May and Dick Taylor, who later formed the Pretty Things. John Lennon attended the Liverpool College of Art, and Burdon and Steel of the Animals met at the Newcastle College of Art. Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Ian McLagan, Jimmy Page, and Charlie Watts were veterans (if not always graduates) of other assorted Greater London art schools. Why was the art school scene in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s so fertile? The aforementioned institutional freedom must be given due credit. In stark contrast to the more structured, goal-­oriented teaching style usually favored in secondary and postsecondary education, the British art school tended to champion a much more indulgent approach.31 Steeped in the Romantic-­ bohemian notion that “genius”—­or at least creativity—­could not be shackled to a time clock or forced to produce on command, British art school instructors often refrained from imposing much of anything in the way of a work ethic or deadlines on their students.32 In theory this meant that young artists would feel completely at liberty to better exercise their artistic genius, and the result would be better (or at least “truer”) art. What it meant in practice, however, was that a student could while away days at a time listening to blues records, perfecting his guitar technique, and talking music with comrades without once picking up a pencil or a paintbrush and without much faculty reprimand.33 The British art and design world’s loss was undoubtedly Western popular music’s gain. However, the freedom many students found in British art schools is only part of the answer. The British art student could have done many different things with his leisure time and lack of conformist pressures. As it was, more often than not he opted for a deeper education in the blues. Another part of the explanation is that British art students began to identify with blues musicians because they felt that they shared important commonalities with their newfound heroes. The African-­American bluesman, as conceived and idealized by British art students, was creative and ingenious and told the honest truth, but he was an outcast twice over—­an oppressed minority in white American society and, as a sinful practitioner of “the Devil’s music,” a pariah in his own community.34 Meanwhile—­and it would be ludicrous to equate this with institutionalized racism—­the young men who made up the bulk of art school populations felt like pariahs in their own way. They were creative and talented but often felt awkward in, and misunderstood by, a mainstream society that branded them social failures for not performing well on the Eleven-­Plus examination. The art school track was pub-

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licly intended for the creative and talented, but, as Richards has suggested, it was also a place where the educational system could put misfits—­“the ones they didn’t know what to do with.”35 Clapton has referred to himself as a “seven-­stone weakling,” one of the “outcasts” at his secondary modern school, and he has said that he developed a sizable chip on his shoulder as a defense mechanism against what he interpreted as people’s inability to like or understand him.36 The blues allowed him to empathize with, and in time emulate, what he later said was the solitary “pride and . . . courage” of “one man with his guitar . . . completely alone, and with no options, no alternatives whatsoever other than just to sing and play, to ease his pain.”37 However, Clapton’s developing “lone wolf ” persona was complicated and enriched by his experiences at art school. The social scene at Kingston enabled him to meet and fit into a network of other young men who felt and did likewise—­in his words, “a certain crowd of people, some of whom played guitar.” His ability to use music to connect with and impress his fellow enthusiasts provided him with yet another defense mechanism. Kingston Art College also provided Clapton with his first audience; decades later he told an interviewer that his tenure at the school was “the first sign of anything that was in my being that could garner some respect, even if it was momentarily.”38 This was an impulse that would only grow as Clapton began playing in pickup bands, and eventually the Yardbirds, an impulse that, though not lit by membership in a social circle, was definitely stoked by it. “Rather Be With the Boys”: The Forms and Rituals of Masculine Sociability

Beyond the confines of art school, British blues enthusiasts cemented their initial acquaintances by engaging in other forms of sociability: occupying shared living spaces, playing records and live music for each other, and consuming alcohol together. Each of these activities tended to deepen their knowledge of and interest in the blues and to increase their sense of community and shared experience. When Keith Richards, Brian Jones, and Mick Jagger agreed to move into a flat in Chelsea in late 1962, their decision was mostly motivated by economic necessity; besides Jagger’s monthly student stipend, the three had little money, so it made sense for them to split the rent.39 What resulted was an extended period of male bonding conducted in the midst of disgusting squalor (Stones manager Andrew Oldham later referred to the flat as a “revolting fried-­up lino pisshole”) that enabled the three fledgling Rolling Stones to indulge in the bohemian fantasy that they were underfed, jobless urban bluesmen living on Skid Row.40

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On a more pragmatic, technical level, it also led to the two guitarists, Jones and Richards, becoming quite proficient at playing with and off each other, since there was little to do besides listening to and playing along with their blues records.41 John Mayall and Eric Clapton provide another example of the way a shared living arrangement, however temporary, could not only deepen the social relationship between men but also result in a deeper understanding of the blues. Clapton admitted in a 2003 interview that after he quit the Yardbirds in March 1965 he spent a “three-­week period, or a month, unsure of what I was gonna do, and then John [Mayall] called me” with an offer to join his band, the Bluesbreakers. Clapton accepted, and accepted as well Mayall’s offer to stay in a spare bedroom at his home in the London suburb of Blackheath. He spent his time under Mayall’s roof determined to listen to and learn how to play along with as many of Mayall’s records as he could.42 This vital period of “woodshedding” no doubt paid off, as within a very short time of joining the Bluesbreakers, Clapton became proficient enough that admirers began to proclaim his divinity in graffiti on walls all over Greater London.43 Mayall’s sizable record collection provided a social and discursive space for more than just Clapton via regular weekend record-­listening parties Mayall held at his home.44 Half-­joking, drummer Mick Fleetwood referred to these and similar get-­togethers as “definitely our version of the Tupperware meetings”—­a neat gendered inversion in that both kinds of gatherings combined sociability, knowledge sharing, and access to objects of consumer culture.45 Record-­listening parties provided an invaluable service to young men who wanted to broaden their blues education but were prevented from doing so because either they lacked the discretionary income to acquire their own copies or the records they wanted were not available in large numbers in British shops. On one level, what brought this particular social network together was a shared love of one kind of text—­recorded blues and rock ‘n’ roll music—­and a desire to gain access to those texts, to develop and then demonstrate knowledge of them, and to use that knowledge for one’s own particular ends. Record-­listening parties were crucial rituals on all those levels. Most operated on a “potluck” basis, where attendees could supplement the pool of records to be played by bringing their own favorites and putting them into rotation with whatever the host had.46 This allowed attendees to display their prized wares and create invidious comparisons. Besides being skilled at playing one’s instrument, this was the most guaranteed way for a blues enthusiast to earn the temporary respect of his compatriots: to own an album that had either not been known to exist in Britain or had not yet been found by anyone else.47

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However, attendees who brought their records to the potluck could only hope that their offerings would be included in the rotation. Most of what was eventually played invariably belonged to whoever hosted the party. This individual in essence benefited doubly from serving as host: not only did he enjoy the status of patron, the provider of space, food and drink, and convivial company, but he could also play disc jockey, controlling what was played and talked about and what was not. To a large extent, British blues enthusiasts’ knowledge of their sacred texts was determined by what Mayall played for them. Today he is regarded, along with Korner and Davies, as one of the “godfathers” of the British blues boom.48 Only part of the reason for that legacy was his leadership of the Bluesbreakers and his role in developing the careers of young musicians who played in that band. The other large factor in his legacy was his stewardship of formative record-­listening parties. In dozens of subtle ways, attendance at Mayall’s (or later Jimmy Page’s) record-­listening parties also forged or reinforced social bonds among blues enthusiasts by creating a shared social experience that was at once public and private. Historian Roger Chartier has ably demonstrated that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reading aloud and in public (even among small groups of acquaintances) became a valuable and popular exercise in forming social bonds and fostering “convivial social relations.”49 This was the case even as the ability to read silently to oneself became more common, to the point that by the eighteenth century it became and has remained the default mode of reading. Some three centuries later, revolving around vinyl albums and reel-­to-­reel tapes instead of the printed word, it is clear that similar processes of social bond formation were at work at record-­listening parties among members of the British blues network. One final example of how records demonstrated shared musical tastes and forged homosocial bonds will suffice. In the summer of 1968, Jimmy Page was trying to recruit band members for his “New Yardbirds,” which eventually morphed into Led Zeppelin. After fruitlessly scouring the network for available candidates, singer Terry Reid suggested that he go and see a young Birmingham singer named Robert Plant. Page was impressed with Plant’s talent but worried that “there must be something wrong with him, personality-­wise.”50 So Page invited Plant to his boathouse in the London suburb of Pangbourne to “suss him out”—­and the most reliable method by which Page could think to do this was for the two men to listen to, and talk about, records. Hearing Plant sing, and having a third party recommend him, was not enough for Page. It required getting to know Plant and verifying his taste in records in an intimate social setting; the “synchronicity” of

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Plant choosing to play the “exact records” that Page wanted to play was enough to convince Page that Plant would be a good fit.51 The record-­listening parties continued even after their attendees became full-­time performers and, eventually, rich and famous. Chartier also argues that reading aloud and in public provided a middle ground of sorts between “pleasures taken . . . in solitude [or] with the multitude.”52 Playing records in the privacy of one’s home or practicing one’s guitar alone were certainly possible but less enjoyable. And all high-­minded talk of “deepening one’s education” and “verifying one’s tastes” aside, these parties provided a bunch of young, middle-­class men the chance to hang around, talk, eat, and drink. In short, they were fun. At the other end of the spectrum lay playing music for the multitudes—­that is, getting up onstage in front of larger and larger paying crowds, many of whose members, especially as time went on, seemed less interested in the music being played than in the cultural cachet of being there or the physical characteristics of the musicians. The more popular British bands became, the greater share of their time they spent playing in this type of setting. Playing records in the company of a small, close-­knit fraternity of like-­minded enthusiasts represented a necessary alternative. “Those Were Wino Days”: British Blues Drinking Culture

The British blues network, in addition to being a record-­swapping collective and communal listening society, was a drinking culture, congregating around drinking establishments and claiming to draw both sociability and inspiration from innumerable bottles of brandy, English bitter, and brown ale.53 This claimed connection is nothing new to students of intellectual and cultural history, who have seen it at work in creative interpersonal networks dating back to the ancient Greek symposia, the all-­male wine-­drinking and philosophical societies.54 Examples of thinking networks that were also drinking networks have certainly existed throughout modern history as well, with the tavern-­haunting American Founding Fathers or the café-­ frequenting French Modernists springing to mind.55 Furthermore, members of the British blues network self-­consciously placed themselves in this cultural lineage. John Lennon told Rolling Stone interviewer Jann Wenner in 1971 that he, Eric Burdon, and Brian Jones “would be up night and day, talking about music, playing records, and getting drunk. . . . like they must have done in Paris, talking about paintings.”56 This culture began in the art school and university common rooms, where empty bottles were as much a part of the spartan furniture as acoustic

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guitars and stacks of record albums, and moved into the student union pubs, where fledgling British blues bands often had their first gigs. Indeed, it was for spending far more time in this sort of establishment than in the classroom that Eric Clapton was asked to leave Kingston Art College in 1963.57 In time Britain’s blues enthusiasts graduated to the pubs and nightclubs of the cities. Phil May, lead singer of the London blues group Pretty Things, pointed up the centrality of alcohol as both an initiator and solidifier of homosocial bonds and a creative spur for art college friends like Keith Richards and Dick Taylor. [I]f you were stuck with a painting or a drawing, I mean, they would give you five bob and say, “For God’s sake, don’t stand around in front of the easel, get yourself a half-­pint and get something to put on the paper and come back” . . . That was great, we’d have a beer and . . . get some experience. So it was great.58 In addition to the European cultural tradition, blues enthusiasts also looked to their usual source of inspiration, African-­American bluesmen, in constructing a culture in which drinking and creativity supposedly went hand in hand. British enthusiasts convinced themselves that African-­American blues culture centered around drinking establishments that were also performative spaces—­either the Southern “jook joints” or the Northern nightclubs in which musicians plied their trade to a mostly African-­American clientele.59 John Lee Hooker had celebrated Henry’s Swing Club, a favorite stomping ground on Detroit’s Hastings Street, in his song “Boogie Chillen,” and his British acolytes did much the same for their own haunts.60 Belfast’s Them rhapsodized about the drink-­fueled rowdiness of the Maritime Hotel, where they got their early start, in “The Story of Them.” Meanwhile, Newcastle’s Animals also paid tribute to their town’s Club A Go-­Go—­a seedy nightclub owned by their manager, Mike Jeffrey—­in a song of the same name.61 Further proof of the mutual reinforcing influences of the blues and British drinking culture can be seen in the 1965 formation of a joke fraternity called the SLAGs (Society of Looning Alcoholic Guitarists).62 Founded by Eric Clapton (who elected himself president) and Melody Maker’s Chris Welch (as scribe), SLAGs held its meetings at the Cromwellian pub in South Kensington, with Steve Winwood, Steve Marriott, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, and the Animals’ Hilton Valentine among its members. The business of SLAGs seemed to revolve solely around getting drunk and discussing the finer points of blues guitar.63 Clapton later told historian Steve Turner that the mid-­1960s “were wino days. Everyone was

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drinking wine by the gallon and getting wiped out at three o’clock in the afternoon”—­before presumably waking up in the evening ready to play a gig or record a few tracks in the studio.64 The drinking culture in which British blues enthusiasts engaged was premised on the notion that drinking and drunkenness produced greater cultural creativity. This idea, though drawing also on earlier European traditions, was inspired by the supposedly autobiographical example of the African-­American bluesman. The life about which the bluesman sang, and the creativity and power of the music he made, were taken by young British enthusiasts to be irretrievably linked. Indeed, the former was taken to be the source of the latter. And since drinking to inebriation was a conspicuously common activity in blues lyrics (e.g., in John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” and Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues”), it was thought that it must be a contributing factor to the richness of the music as well.65 And so British blues enthusiasts like Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart made hard drinking a conspicuous aspect of their project of blues emulation. It was a subtle and perhaps rather fallacious logical leap but an important one. The question of whether drink actually fuels cultural creativity is elusive, and probably unanswerable. Many authors and musicians have certainly perceived the connection to exist, and artists like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards actively indulged in drink and drugs as a means of “living the bluesman’s lifestyle.” So perhaps there was a kind of placebo effect at work: they thought drugs and alcohol would bestow some of the bluesman’s genius on them, so it may indeed have inspired their work. In more prosaic terms, the members of the British blues network sometimes used inebriation simply to embolden themselves to perform in front of people. For example, Mick Jagger only felt bold enough to sing a few numbers with Blues Incorporated after he had several drinks in him.66 The same was true of the Faces, whose members had all performed in public before—­even touring America—­but still had to get alarmingly drunk on Mateus rosé wine in their dressing rooms before their first concert to overcome a crippling case of stage fright.67 Even after they overcame this, they replicated their drunkenness in subsequent performances, believing that their “boozy, cavalier approach” made them looser and gave them the freedom to be more creative.68 (If something went wrong, they could blame the drink.) Finally, if nothing else, alcohol consumption did initiate and encourage sociability, male bonding, and fellow feeling, which in turn actually did fuel cultural creativity. By 1965 a social geography had begun to emerge, comprised of the places where these men might be found drinking and socializing nearly every night

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of the week. It began locally, often in the suburbs. In a reversal of the way popular culture usually spreads, it then turned inward to points within metropolitan London. Many of these were found within the square mile of Soho, the old West End bohemian stronghold, at blues clubs like Studio 51 in Great Newport Street and the Marquee Jazz Club in Oxford Street.69 There was also the Flamingo in Wardour Street, famous as a colorful, no-­holds-­barred nightspot for African-­American GIs and West Indians.70 The Ealing Blues Club was home to Blues Incorporated.71 Vying for second place after Eel Pie Island in the “most peculiarly named blues club” derby were Klooks Kleek in the Hampstead Railway Hotel and the Ricky Tick in Windsor, both of which played host to visiting American jazz and soul luminaries in addition to their typical local blues schedule.72 Finally, there was the Crawdaddy, run by impresario Giorgio Gomelsky. Operated first out of the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey (before it was evicted due to noise violations), it then moved to a nearby Athletic Association clubhouse. During its memorable existence, the Crawdaddy enjoyed the services of the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Who.73 “R&B From the Marquee”: Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, and Blues Incorporated

Starting in 1960, a small minority within the fledgling blues networks that were springing up in London and other British metropolitan areas underwent a drastic and important transformation. Heretofore they were ardent admirers, collectors, and amateur historians of blues music—­aspiring sons of African-­American fathers. To say that they were passive would be wrong, as what defined and motivated the art school conversations and endless sorties into secondhand shops was a very active, searching, acquisitive zeal. But it is safe to say they stuck to being consumers of the blues. In 1960 a few of them took the unique step of learning to play instruments and forming bands so they could produce their own versions of the music they had come to love. In retrospect, the switch from admirer to emulator might be seen as inevitable. Jazz trumpeter Chris Barber put it very directly. “Enjoying it is not enough,” he said. “Feeling it’s not enough. You got to learn how to do it properly, you got to feel like you know how it’s done.”74 Richards echoed this sentiment, saying: Once you start to play, you realize there’s something he’s doing, that “I gotta know how he did that.” I mean, this man just bent the string, three yards! . . . it’s just something you got to do.75

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For those who wanted to reverse adopt African-­American bluesmen as their replacement fathers, it only made sense that aspiring sons would want to follow in their footsteps and to play like them. Aside from that, there was also a basic supply-­and-­demand issue; British blues enthusiasts wanted to hear live blues music, and there simply was not enough of it. Muddy Waters traveled to Britain only twice before the British Invasion (in 1958 and 1963); John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson II each spent the better part of a year in Britain, but not until 1963, by which time the Rolling Stones had been performing for almost a year. Basically, if British blues enthusiasts wanted to hear live blues, they would have to wait—­or they would have to make their own. In the past few decades, those who took this step (and became well known enough to be interviewed about it) have repeatedly stressed that it was not a decision taken lightly. Many have emphasized a central problem that weighed heavily on them as they made the shift from admirer to emulator: the possibility that emulating the blues would be sacrilege, that the blues was far too precious a cultural idiom to be—­in Yardbirds guitarist Chris Dreja’s words—­ “bastardized” by a bunch of rank amateurs.76 Eventually, quite a few enthusiasts overcame their reservations and began the process of becoming blues musicians, of acquiring instruments and learning how to play them—­neither of which necessarily had to happen before forming a band and securing one’s first gig!77 Here skiffle helped ease their way by already proving that one did not need to have great technique or state-­of-­the-­art equipment to pay homage to African-­American music, excite a crowd, attract girls, and enjoy oneself all at once. So, too, did the belief—­held by most aspiring blues players (even if quickly abandoned on actually learning how to play)—­that the blues was a simple music to learn how to play.78 Two Britons who made the leap into playing the blues themselves, and played a crucial role in encouraging other enthusiasts to do the same, were Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. They were atypical godfathers. They were notably older than the young men under their tutelage, as godfathers must be (in 1961 Korner was thirty-­two and Davies twenty-­nine). Korner’s résumé, though, did not initially suggest a blues enthusiast in the making; he was a dignified, upper-­class Austro-­Greek transplant who had lived in Paris and North Africa before moving to London during World War Two. Davies, a gruff, no-­nonsense, working-­class Welsh panel beater, played much closer to type.79 However, in many other respects, they were quite typical of the blues boom they helped spawn. Their friendship was forged in trad jazz, where they both played in Chris Barber’s influential band (Korner played guitar, and Davies played harmonica and sang).80 They shared a mutual “road to Tarsus” moment, having been inspired by Muddy Waters’ controversial electrified concert in 1958. In 1961, after performing as a duo for two years, Ko-

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rner and Davies formed a band called Blues Incorporated; this band is the root from which the entire British blues-­rock scene stems.81 To Eric Clapton, Korner’s influence was simple and elemental: he claims that Korner was the first Englishman he ever saw playing an electric guitar, which at least hinted to Clapton that he, too, could learn to play the instrument without embarrassing himself.82 Beyond that, Korner and Davies made three indispensable contributions to the cultivation of the British blues network. First, through the weekly “R&B Nights” they sponsored at the Ealing Jazz Club, they provided a social-­discursive space in which enthusiasts could meet, socialize, and hear and learn about the blues. Second, through Blues Incorporated, they gave numerous untried and aspiring performers a chance to cut their teeth on a public stage. Finally, by performing on the BBC and consequently being asked to record a blues album for Decca Records in 1962, they served as a powerful example of what could be.83 If British blues was allowed on the BBC, then surely anything was possible! Blues Incorporated operated, personnel-­wise, on a revolving and open-­ door basis. Musicians could remain in the band as long (or as briefly) as they liked, mastering their technique or performance style. Once they felt confident enough, they would leave to form their own bands—­often with other alumni of Blues Incorporated and usually with Korner’s and/or Davies’s blessing. They would be rather easily replaced, for by 1962 there was a readily available talent pool in the burgeoning London scene to choose from, and outgoing members often had a friend to recommend for their vacancy. In addition to the time servers in the band, Blues Incorporated was augmented nightly with anybody who had the courage (“liquid courage,” in the case of Mick Jagger) to get up and perform a few numbers. What this meant in practice was that there was never a fully fleshed-­out, permanent lineup to which the historian of this scene can point—­just Korner and Davies, horn player Dick Heckstall-­Smith, and a constantly changing cast of five to twelve other blues musicians per gig.84 The number of future British rock stars who either sat in with, or temporarily belonged to, Blues Incorporated actually exceeds the aforementioned number of those who attended British art colleges. To employ a confused metaphor, Korner and Davies served as midwives to the creation of the first top-­selling, somewhat stable London bands: the Rolling Stones (formed in June 1962) and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (formed in January 1963), both of whose founding members met and assessed each other’s potential talents within the welcoming confines of Blues Incorporated.85 Very quickly there formed a critical mass of young enthusiasts who had logged at least some time onstage with Blues Incorporated—­or with the R&B All-­Stars, the band Davies formed after leaving Korner in October 1962

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over a disagreement about musical direction.86 Just as a residency at a prestigious hospital is an indispensable item on a doctor’s résumé, so, too, was playing with Korner and/or Davies for a young blues performer hoping to make a name for himself. It also became something of a sine qua non to be considered a candidate for joining a newly forming band or filling an open slot in an existing one. To be sure, some bands did advertise for members in music publications such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express. However, the incestuous British blues scene, like any social network, generally relied more on word of mouth to fill vacancies; far more regularly, one asked one’s friends and acquaintances if they could recommend someone off the tops of their heads. Likely, both the recommenders and the recommended would be alumni of Blues Incorporated. In addition to its many other facets, then, it is useful to view the British blues network as a kind of nepotistic “temp agency,” filling personnel vacancies almost entirely from within a predetermined social network. When Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds in 1965, he recommended friend and fellow Surrey resident Jimmy Page as his replacement. Page demurred and recommended Jeff Beck. (Beck repaid the favor by convincing Page to finally join the Yardbirds after bass guitarist Paul Samwell-­Smith quit in 1966.)87 Furthermore, when the Rolling Stones decided to part ways with Brian Jones in June 1969, Mick Jagger got in touch with John Mayall, who recommended his newest “hotshot” guitarist, Mick Taylor. With his bona fides established by Mayall, Taylor found himself hired immediately, seemingly without even needing to audition.88 When Taylor himself quit the band in 1974, the hiring process was slightly more inclusive but not by much. Although the rumor mill had it that almost every “famous ax hero” in Britain was being considered, including Beck, Clapton, and Pete Townshend, the job eventually went to ex-­Faces guitarist Ron Wood. Hardly an unknown quantity himself, Wood had spent a good deal of time in the early 1970s getting drunk with Keith Richards (the deciding factor in the hire, according to some).89 In some ways, the British blues network functioned as a kind of guild for and eventually the practice—­ of the consumption and custodianship—­ American blues music in Britain. Membership was not strictly controlled—­an aspiring blues enthusiast did not need to demonstrate any proficiency at his craft, much less the years of training required of a medieval master cooper or blacksmith. However, to some extent the blues network did fulfill (if unofficially) some of the functions of a medieval guild: creating and attempting to shape discursive and performative knowledge about blues music; and conferring on its members the bona fides necessary to be taken seriously by other enthusiasts, especially as concerned prospective musical employment.

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“A Very Good Scene”: The Provincial Blues Networks Converge on London

At first each of the six major metropolitan areas under discussion (London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, and Belfast) developed its own blues scene—­its own constellation of social spaces and its own small knot of devoted enthusiasts. London’s was the biggest, but at first only by a matter of degrees. It was perhaps inevitable that eventually at least some of the members of each provincial blues network would find their way to London. By virtue of being Britain’s largest city, as well as its capital, London not only boasted the biggest population of native “blues freaks,” but it also served as a lodestone for provincial devotees. Tom McGuinness, the guitarist for Manfred Mann, described the creation of local blues scenes in the provinces and then of the broader national scene based in London in astronomical terms, telling an interviewer in 2009, “It was like sort of the formation of a solar system. . . . You know, the dust gathers together, and stars form.” Meanwhile, to Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds, the pull that eventually drew enthusiasts to each other, and then south to London, was just as inexorable as galaxy formation, although he worded it less romantically: “It was like The Night of the Living Dead—­people sort of migrating to whoever had this thing that you’d been turned on to.”90 The attractions of London for a provincial blues enthusiast—­especially one in a group—­were legion. It was the cultural and economic nerve center of Britain, home to the most recording companies, publishing houses, nightclubs, and record shops. For centuries, London had been the place where British writers, artists, and performers, no matter how successful they were in the provinces, needed to go to prove themselves—­to really matter.91 The emergence of Korner and Davies’s Blues Incorporated only served to increase London’s gravitational pull. And so, in the 1960s, young blues enthusiasts went to London. They sought to prove themselves to record company executives looking for the “next big thing,” but first they had to prove themselves to a much more exacting lot: each other. Not all the relationships that formed among the hardcore members of the British blues network were friendly—­which is not to say they did not yield positive creative results. Just because the network’s members shared a deep love of African-­American music did not mean that they always (or ever) got along. There was an infinite number of factors that could result in less than affable relations between blues enthusiasts. Even before British blues bands began achieving commercial success in the wake of “Beatlemania,” the blues boom was always a commercial—­and thus a competitive—­enterprise. There

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were gigs to secure, recording contracts to negotiate, and the affection of fans to maintain. Once the British Invasion was under way, placement on the pop charts and American sales figures (and accompanying royalties) formed new points of contention between and within bands. Mick Fleetwood recalled the “Swinging London” nightclub scene as one of friendly (if wary) competition for bragging rights among the top bands. The energy in London, and the energy around the music . . . there was this ongoing battle, which was [based on the fact that] they were all down the clubs together, but it was all, like, “Where are you on the charts today?,” and it was all very real, you know. And they were pumping records out, and they were so prolific.92 The close-­knit and competitive nature of the British blues network ensured that mere days might pass between bands trying something new onstage or on their latest single and their friends and rivals attempting to either emulate or—­more likely—­build on what they had done in order to one-­up them. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt, but in a cultural network such as this one, it also breeds what Thorstein Veblen called “invidious comparison” and increased creative production.93 It is worth noting that on at least one occasion romantic jealousy and competitiveness also led to cultural creativity. In the mid-­1960s, Eric Clapton became close friends with Beatles guitarist George Harrison, and in so doing he also became smitten with Harrison’s wife, fashion model Pattie Boyd. Caught in a love triangle that eventually resulted in Boyd and Harrison’s divorce in 1977 and her marriage to Clapton in 1979, Clapton, obsessed with Boyd, claimed that he began using heroin to deal with his emotions.94 He also expressed these emotions through his music with Derek and the Dominoes, especially on the seven-­minute-­long electric blues ballad “Layla.” On one level, the song was inspired by a twelfth-­century Persian tale about a young man who falls in love with a princess and goes mad when she marries someone else. On another, though, it was about Clapton’s feelings for Boyd. Since Boyd and Clapton were both celebrities, it is likely that they would have met even without the mutual connection to Harrison. However, without the added emotional conflict provided by his friendship with Harrison, Clapton’s unrequited affections might not have been quite so painful. And they might not have resulted in the searing intensity that Clapton expressed on such songs as “Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues” (which was also, obliquely, about his feelings for Boyd).95 Sometimes it was more than just competitiveness or differences in musi-

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cal opinion that created friction between blues enthusiasts; occasionally members of the blues network simply, actively, and strongly disliked each other on a personal level. Brothers or not, Ray and Dave Davies reputedly spent much of their time in the Kinks flat-­out hating each other, even as they continued to make records and perform. All four members of the Who endured what could charitably be called difficult interpersonal relationships, especially Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. It is not unreasonable to posit that the angst and anger that infused the band’s music derived in some part from the friction between its members. At the very least, the friction was an indirect catalyst in the formation of Led Zeppelin. That band grew out of a 1967 jam session between guitarists Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, bassist John Paul Jones, and disenchanted Who members Keith Moon and John Entwistle, who claimed to be sick of the group’s constant fighting. After recording “Beck’s Bolero,” Moon and Entwistle returned to the Who, but Page and Jones wanted to continue working together and recruited a singer and a drummer for the band, initially known as the New Yardbirds.96 Finally, there was the example of Cream, perhaps the starkest example of how great creative collaboration and friendship need not go hand in hand. Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, and Clapton came together based on the dubious principle that if the most skilled musicians joined forces they would produce the best music, irrespective of whether or not they got along personally. Thus, the formation of Cream willfully ignored the fact that Baker and Bruce hated each other. The pair had already tried unsuccessfully twice to work together (in Blues Incorporated and the Graham Bond Organization); this had resulted in onstage screaming matches, passive-­aggressive tactics, and Baker once threatening to kill Bruce with a knife.97 Each member was loath to allow his bandmates a greater share of the limelight. As a result, every drum solo by Baker was inevitably followed by a longer and more sophisticated bass solo by Bruce, then a pyrotechnic guitar solo by Clapton, then back to Baker, and so on.98 Cream concerts thus quickly turned into long instrumental workouts in which each musician felt obliged to be as creative as possible, if only to one-­up his disliked bandmates. Clapton claimed to be unaware of the antipathy between his bandmates on forming the band and asserted that a camaraderie existed between them that “only a really tight family type of group can really experience or understand.”99 Nonetheless, the group became well known for ill-­concealed hostility, so much so that interviewers regularly asked the musicians how they managed to get along from day to day. On one occasion, Bruce replied with high-­minded talk of maturing for the purpose of “making Cream a good band.” Baker then cut straight to the chase: “One day we did some drinking

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together”—­demonstrating once again the role of drinking in forging homosocial bonds, even between two musicians who otherwise hated each other.100 This is just one concrete example of how jealousy and dislike could actually impel creativity—­although Clapton’s frustration with the ongoing Baker-­ Bruce feud was one reason why he quit the band. With the exception of his very next project, in which he teamed again with Baker in Blind Faith, Clapton’s next two ventures were partly determined by the desire to work with musicians with whom he actually got along—­first with John Lennon in the Plastic Ono Band and then with the American rock and soul duo Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. “The Bush Telegraph”: The Spread of Ideas and Knowledge

The British blues network also functioned as a discursive and conductive medium through which knowledge and techniques could be discussed and then easily disseminated among socializing members. While hanging out in college common rooms, nursing drinks in the pub, waiting for the next train, or resting between sets of their own performances at the local blues club, committed blues enthusiasts talked. They swapped gossip, traded technical tips, debated the relative merits of various records or performers, and made grandiose claims about what they would achieve when they recorded their next album or began their next tour. In the intervening five decades, British rock musicians have placed even more emphasis on the amount of verbiage that passed among them about the music they loved and were in the process of creating. Thus, to hear John Lennon tell it, all the former Beatle ever did during the mid-­1960s was drive around and sit drinking in pubs, talking music—­and seemingly only with Eric Burdon. And Lennon is certainly not unique in this regard. It makes one wonder where time was found to sleep, much less perform, write, and record the music for which we know them today! All this talk was responsible for the spread of much of the precious knowledge enthusiasts had about the music to which they had committed themselves. Blues albums were relatively rare (though less rare if augmented by John Mayall’s store of reel-­to-­reel tapes). Literature about blues and African-­ American culture in general was even harder to come by. Nowadays listeners can use Internet services such as iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora to sample and acquire new music, learn everything they might want to know about the artist that produced it, and to find similar artists. Obviously, none of these methods was available to British blues enthusiasts in this era—­and had they been made to rely on their ability to purchase and learn about blues music on

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their own it is arguable that the British blues scene would not have materialized when and how it did. Enthusiasts borrowed from one another—­but even more so (and in a way that is almost impossible to quantify) they learned about music and musicians by talking to their fellows. As socially connected and cohesive as the network was, the rate of diffusion for musical ideas was only as long as the time it took for one band to play something, a member of another band to hear it, and the second band to work out an adaptation in rehearsal and then play it at its next gig. Sometimes this kind of diffusion could occur over the span of a couple of days. A discussion of stylistic, lyrical, or performative elements that were thus diffused among bands and enthusiasts in the hothouse of the London nightclub scene could go on for pages. Pete Townshend remembers “borrowing” his trademark arm windmill, which helped him create the “power chords” that formed such a central part of the Who’s sound, from hanging around with Keith Richards backstage at Rolling Stones gigs. Richards would do a modified version of the windmill in order “to get his blood going” before taking the stage. Partly because he thought it looked impressive, Townshend appropriated it for his own act.101 Meanwhile, according to guitarist/singer Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, a young Robert Plant served for a time as the band’s “gofer” and general hanger-­on, from which position he watched the band, absorbing their techniques and overhearing their discussions. This stood Plant in good stead years later when, according to Marriott, he copied Marriott’s singing style and even “nicked” the band’s arrangement of Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love” for Led Zeppelin, which made it famous as “Whole Lotta Love.”102 Furthermore, news about upcoming musical developments was spread by word of mouth throughout the social network via what Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones called the “bush telegraph.” For example, when the American Folk Blues Festival came to Manchester for its sole British booking in October 1962, it was relatively poorly advertised by its promoters, who did not believe there would be as much demand for African-­American blues music in Britain as there was in France and West Germany. The promoters were proven quite wrong when word-­of-­mouth advertising caused dozens of southern enthusiasts to organize impromptu ride shares and travel north to the concert. So many southerners made the trip north that the promoters booked several London dates for the 1963 festival. The trip back to London after the concert was, according to friend and blues enthusiast David Williams, the occasion when Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Brian Jones met Jimmy Page for the first time. It should not require a great deal of guesswork to imagine what they spent those hours on the M1 motorway talking about that night.103

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Between Apollo and Dionysus: The Beatles and Rolling Stones as Friends and Rivals

It is too simplistic to describe any set of relationships in the British blues network as friendly, competitive, jealous, or rancorous completely or even all the time because, as is the case in most human relationships, British blues enthusiasts probably felt a combination of emotions toward each other; these shifted, kaleidoscopelike, by the month or even the week. In other words, it was complicated, and there is perhaps no better example of a complicated interpersonal-­cum-­professional relationship serving as an engine for innovative cultural development than that of the friendly rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The two bands were marketed and consumed as polar opposites—­the Beatles clean, charming, sunny, law-­abiding, and good; the Rolling Stones dirty, unpresentable, surly, violent, law-­breaking, and evil. The music of the Beatles has been classified as Apollonian (structured, reasoned, and based on light) whereas that of the Stones has been classified as Dionysian (darker, primal, sexual, and chaotic).104 Although it did not very accurately represent the bands in reality, this dichotomy stuck and has come to define the extremes of this revolutionary cultural decade. Teenagers advertised their cultural tastes by declaring themselves to be Beatles or Stones fans; liking both equally was deemed impossible. Novelist Tom Wolfe captured the dichotomy in a famous one-­liner: “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn down your town.”105 On a fundamental level, however, the Beatles and Rolling Stones were far more similar than the media would ever have allowed them to appear. Both bands were comprised of working-­and lower-­middle-­class white Britons who grew up with a fascination for African-­American music (even if the Beatles’ tastes ran noticeably more toward rock ‘n’ roll and Motown soul than toward the kind of urban and rural blues beloved by the Stones). Both bands were motivated by the desire to “borrow” African-­American music in order to escape—­as critic Robert Christgau put it—­“their middle-­class suburban mess of pottage.”106 Both wanted to spread the “gospel” of African-­ American music—­first in Britain, and then in America.107 Early on, the Beatles could have drawn all the rhetorical salvos that were eventually fired at the Rolling Stones. The Beatles took the stage unkempt, dressed in leather, and surly and strung out, whether from hangovers or amphetamines. They ate, drank, and smoked cigarettes between and during songs. More than once, a number came to a full stop because members started or resumed an argument among themselves or with someone in the audience.108

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This image was “cleaned up” by manager Brian Epstein to make way for the more acceptable Beatles with their matching suits, haircuts, and cheerful attitudes. The makeover worked, of course, but the Beatles quickly came to envy their London counterparts for doing, wearing, and saying what they liked. As producer George Martin put it, “They really wanted to be as rough and tough as the Stones.”109 Fanzine publisher Sean O’Mahony summed up the bands’ images succinctly, if a bit simplistically: “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes, and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by [manager] Andrew [Oldham].”110 And biographer Philip Norman thought that the friendship between the bands was rooted in their shared experience of having to live up to an image that was the opposite of the way they actually were—­and in the knowledge that they had essentially swapped personas with the others.111 Especially in the beginning, the individual Beatles and Stones enjoyed social relations that were more or less friendly, though inevitably tinged with wariness. Once the Beatles relocated to London, members of each band attended the other’s gigs, then as often as not moved on to a nightclub or trendy restaurant.112 The Rolling Stones partly owed their mainstream success to their friendship with the Beatles. Their breakthrough second single, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” was written by Lennon and Paul McCartney. At that point, in October 1963, the Rolling Stones were—­according to Oldham—­ struggling to find a suitable follow-­up to their modestly charting debut single, “Come On.” Based partly on their budding friendship with the Stones themselves, the Beatles’ songwriting team agreed to “lend” their unfinished song to their counterparts. The Beatles’ own version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” featured drummer Ringo Starr on vocals and was never released as a single.113 However, the Stones’ version reached number 12 on the UK singles charts and more or less secured the group’s reputation as something other than a vaguely interesting “one-­hit-­wonder” blues band.114 In 1964 the Rolling Stones followed the Beatles across the Atlantic and found commercial success, largely on the aforementioned premise that they were the “anti-­Beatles.” From 1964 to 1968, the two bands engaged in a very productive call-­and-­response with each other. During this period, the Beatles generally did something first, and the Stones followed, sometimes within mere weeks, with a single or album that seemed to emulate what the Beatles had just done. According to both Richards and McCartney, this was often “stitched up in advance”; the two bands would coordinate whose records came out when so as “never to clash.”115 Mostly the call-­and-­response took the form of new and different musical elements such as an atypical musical instrument or a different recording technique. However, it could be a matter

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of image; McCartney noted that Jagger began wearing makeup onstage only after noticing the Beatles putting it on in their dressing room.116 Looking back from a distance of seven years (and the perspective of his band having famously and rancorously dissolved), Lennon sneered to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, “I’d just like to list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every fuckin’ album and every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us.”117 It is hard to argue with Lennon’s assertion when considering the music that the two bands produced between 1965 and 1967, a stretch often referred to as the Beatles’ “middle period.” Under the influence of, among other things, Bob Dylan’s “flashing-­chain imagery” (not to mention the marijuana he introduced them to), the Beatles began exploring more thoughtful and meaningful material.118 On the albums Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), they also began to “expand the conventional instrumental parameters of the rock group,” according to reviewer Richie Unterberger.119 For example, guitarist George Harrison used a sitar on “Norwegian Wood,” and producer George Martin played a piano made to sound like a harpsichord on “In My Life.” Within six months of the release of each Beatles album, the Rolling Stones came out first with Aftermath and then Between the Buttons.120 Both albums were heavily influenced by the Beatles’ new lyrical ingenuity and musical eclecticism and appeared to many to be direct attempts to copy the “Fab Four.” Reviewers such as Billy Altman were at least willing to grant that “the Beatles would do something, and the Stones would do something in a similar vein, but also different and controversial that set them apart.”121 Then, in June 1967, the Beatles released their massively influential psychedelic concept album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which earned mostly rave reviews. Critic Langdon Winner gushed that the week of the album’s release was “the closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” so uniform was the applause.122 The album used various technological effects in the studio to create otherworldly sounds and, to some, either re-­create the experience of having taken the psychotropic drug LSD or enhance that experience—­in a kind of music that came to be called “psychedelic.”123 The Rolling Stones responded to Sgt. Pepper by releasing a single (“We Love You”) and an album (Their Satanic Majesties Request) in a similar vein. “We Love You” was marketed as a “thank-­you” to the fans who had stood by Jagger and Richards during their recent trial and imprisonment on drug charges, although it was also taken by some listeners as a paean to the Beatles. To cement the idea of a symbiotic relationship between the two bands, Lennon and McCartney sang backing vocals on the single.

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On the single’s B-­side was the “nursery-­rhymish” “Dandelion,” “the Stones’ contribution to Flower Power and the Summer of Love.”124 However, the Stones were not done “contributing” with just two sides of a single. In December 1967, the band released Their Satanic Majesties Request (hereafter referred to as Majesties). This album was indebted to Sgt. Pepper in a number of ways, but perhaps nowhere is it more obvious than in a comparison of their cover art. Sgt. Pepper’s cover features a pop art collage of random figures, including artists, authors, boxers, and film stars, next to the Beatles. Majesties features a maze puzzle surrounded by a “Hieronymus Bosch collage mixing floral designs, Indian imagery, Renaissance painting fragments, and science-­fiction motifs.”125 Not only did the Stones borrow Sgt. Pepper’s overall concept, but they even hired the same photographer, Peter Blake, to compose it!126 Sgt. Pepper’s shadow also looms over the music. Both albums featured breathtaking eclecticism, showcasing a wide variety of instruments, from sitar to harpsichord to violin. Both also experimented liberally with studio effects so as to disorient the listener. The music did not sound tremendously different from that found on the Stones’ previous two albums, but for many the issue was how much Majesties sounded like . . . Sgt. Pepper. The reviews of Majesties were less than kind. Paul Nelson of Hullabaloo magazine was one of the few who reviewed the album favorably, complimenting the Rolling Stones on having “[held] their rock-­band image in hand like a mirror and then deliberately shatter[ed] it into bits by dropping it onto a strange and electronic floor.”127 Nelson was greatly outnumbered by those who disparaged what they felt was the album’s rushed quality, its lack of creativity, and what historian John McMillian calls their “parody” and “imitation” of Sgt. Pepper.128 Even a few of the Stones dismissed it. Jagger told one TV interviewer that the album contained nothing but “dirgy toe-­tappers” and later shrugged it off as having been made “under the influence of bail,” that is, to make enough money to pay off their mounting legal bills.129 Brian Jones and pianist Ian Stewart predicted to everyone they knew that the album would “bomb.” Bad reviews aside, it sold half a million copies before Christmas.130 A notable casualty of the Majesties recording sessions was manager Andrew Oldham. As he had discovered the band and essentially created and sold its bad boy, “anti-­Beatle” image to Britain, no one—­not even Muddy Waters—­can make a stronger claim to having “made them what they were.”131 However, relations between band and manager had been fraying prior to 1967, and Oldham had become exasperated by what he perceived to be the band’s “directionless music” and poor work ethic. The feeling was becoming

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mutual, too, as the band felt constrained by Oldham’s lack of aptitude in the studio control booth. (Said Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, who had seen Oldham in action: “He’s an idiot. He has no idea about sound. He couldn’t produce a burp after a glass of beer.”)132 During a particularly sloppy recording session, Oldham walked out, and suddenly the Rolling Stones needed a new manager and record producer. Stung by Majesties’ lackluster reviews, the band members also insisted that they needed a change of musical direction. They took a major step in solving their problems by hiring the American record producer Jimmy Miller in early 1968. Miller had come to Jagger’s attention because he was producing Traffic’s album Dear Mr. Fantasy at the studio where the Stones were recording Majesties. Jagger and Richards were—­typically—­friends with the members of Traffic and were impressed with Miller’s work.133 The Stones hired him, and he then produced three of the band’s most influential albums: Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), and Sticky Fingers (1971).134 The result of this partnership was both a major musical resurgence for the band after its “psychedelic debacle” and the arrival of the moment when “the Stones were poised to finally step out of the shadow of the ‘Fab Four’ and make a run for ‘Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World’ status.” All of this came about largely because of the countervailing influences of the blues network—­the desire to out-­do one group of friends and rivals (the Beatles), on one hand, and the desire to remake their sound by hiring the producer of a second group of friends and rivals (Traffic) on the other.135 The general mood among the Stones after Majesties was a desire to get “back to basics” and away from imitation in general and psychedelia in particular—­directions in which, hindsight being 20/20, Jagger and Richards argued they never should have gone in the first place. To the Rolling Stones, “the basics” was always the old blues that had inspired them in the first place.136 Ever the inveterate record hounds, the Stones found that their access to blues records had steadily widened since the days when Jagger had to order them from Chess by mail. Partly this was because the Stones had been to America—­and thus gained periodic access to American record stores. Partly it was because American labels had continued to unearth and rerelease compilations of old, “lost” blues music. Although the Stones did do blues covers on the three Miller-­produced albums (including one of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain”), it must be pointed out that “going back to basics” did not entail a regression into producing “authentic,” note-­for-­note covers of their favorites. Rather, it involved reimagining, and in some cases recombining, elements of blues and R&B into songs that strain the definition of “cover version.” In the case of Beggars Banquet and

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Let It Bleed, at least, it also involved infusing the music with a blend of violence, tension, and chaos that came to perfectly mirror the troubled sociopolitical circumstances of that era. Not a few commentators have argued that the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was the song that encapsulated the “global turmoil” of 1968 and 1969 and that somehow neither song nor era would have been the same without the other. Rolling Stone’s James Miller (no relation to the producer) called it an “enduring musical image of turmoil.”137 To James Miller and other reviewers, these three albums were creative triumphs—­evidence that the band had proved it could remain at the “cutting edge of musical fashion” without trying to engage the Beatles on the latter’s terms.138 On the Beatles’ part, it is facile to argue that they now began to imitate the Stones, for even in a state of terminal degeneration, the Beatles in 1968 were still able to make creative music that cannot truly be said to have been copied from anyone. Cultural producers do not necessarily have to craft different versions of the same thing in order for us to consider them in creative competition. After all, Michelangelo did not attempt to paint a better Mona Lisa than Leonardo, nor did he need to. However, it can be argued that the Beatles largely abandoned Flower Power psychedelia themselves and adopted some measure of the toughness and chaos to be heard on the Stones’ new records. They even responded on some level to the Stones’ “back-­to-­the-­blues” approach (for the Beatles, something of a new direction, since they had never embraced the blues to the extent that others had). What were arguably the first directly bluesy Beatles songs (including the rather tongue-­in-­cheek “Yer Blues” and the swamp-­blues-­inflected “Oh! Darling”) were released on 1968’s The Beatles (The White Album) and 1969’s Abbey Road, respectively.139 By 1969 the Rolling Stones seemed to be in the ascendant, and this possibly put a strain on the bands’ relationship, at least on the Beatles’ end of things. Furthermore, Brian Jones, the Beatles’ best friend among the Stones, was fired from the band in June 1969 and died a month later. And the Beatles themselves were falling apart as a unit, while the Stones simply changed guitarists and kept going as though nothing had happened.140 Add all this up, and it seems likely that it was in this light that Lennon’s 1971 hostility about his former fellow travelers in the British blues network should be viewed. Call-­and-­Response: The Influence of American “Blues Brothers”

One of the British blues network’s many remarkable qualities was its relative absorbency—­its ability to welcome outsiders into the discursive and performative activity of the group. The temptation to maintain the network

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as a secretive clique—­what a recent BBC documentary about British blues called “a hip Masonic lodge”—­must have existed.141 And when the matter of employment arose, either in new bands or in existing ones with a personnel vacancy, the network functioned somewhat as a guild; if you were a known quantity within the network, you would be considered for a slot. However, as long as jobs were not on the line, blues enthusiasts by and large did not give others the cold shoulder but instead welcomed them on the basis of shared credentials as “hands-­on preservationists.” Londoners were even generally able to welcome northerners, and, given the historic mutual disdain between northerners and southerners throughout England’s history, this is indeed somewhat remarkable.142 The blues network generally operated on a “the more, the merrier” footing; the more members in the network, the more people there would be to argue, debate, and sharpen your ideas with. Furthermore, this policy increased the audition pool for your band’s soon to be open guitarist slot and provided more people from whom to “nick” promising musical ideas! By the mid-­1960s, in the wake of “Beatlemania,” the geographic scope for meeting like-­minded hands-­on preservationists with whom to continue the project of creativity, collaboration, and competition was vastly widened. British blues and R&B bands (e.g., the Rolling Stones and Animals in 1964, the Yardbirds in 1965, and the Who in 1967) began performing in the United States, which was enormously influential in their continued development as musicians and interpreters of American culture. Up to this point, British blues and rock musicians had been fascinated with American culture generally, and African-­American culture specifically, from afar. Now they were actually seeing the “real” America, interacting with real Americans, and eating real American fast food. The other major way in which actually going to America influenced British musicians was in their personal interactions with American musicians. Initially, London blues enthusiasts had welcomed northern enthusiasts into their circle and found their discussions and musical directions deepened. The same thing happened again when the “British invaders” came face-­to-­face with black and white American musicians. They learned not only that their original assessment of white Americans as knowing nothing about the blues was wrong, but also that some white Americans were better (or at least comparable) hands-­on preservationists than they. Three North American acts in particular—­Bob Dylan, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Band—­ influenced and were influenced by British rock musicians from 1964 to 1970.143 In some cases, the British took the opportunities these three acts posed to reconsider what they themselves were doing musically. This formed

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part of the foundation of the creative rock music made by both British and American groups operating more in dialogue. Dylan’s impact on the British blues network lay in his expansion of blues-­ based rock music’s capacity for lyrical sophistication and artistry. His use of Surrealist-­influenced “flashing chain” lyrics and his roots in the blues tradition inspired his British counterparts—­especially the songwriting teams of Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards—­to emulate him in interesting and meaningful ways.144 It was not simply Dylan’s musical example that was brought to bear on the British; Dylan also provoked their creativity by taunting them, as when he riled up Keith Richards over whether the Stones were as good as his backing group, the Band, in London in 1966.145 In at least one way, the influence was mutual. Dylan radically reinvented himself circa 1965, especially by “going electric” (adopting electrified instead of acoustic instruments). His decision to do so was at the very least hastened by the impact of the British Invasion, which had shown him the possibilities for dynamic, energetic, electrified music.146 The impact of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band rested on what might be called a sort of “sibling rivalry.” Irish-American harmonica player/singer Butterfield and Jewish-American guitarist Michael Bloomfield established themselves as the other “sons” of blues “fathers” like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf by virtue of living near the bluesmen in Chicago and playing with them, which caused the British no small concern that the white Chicagoans were thus more technically proficient and “authentic” blues players.147 It is important to note that we are talking about British perceptions. It is entirely possible that Butterfield’s and Bloomfield’s proficiency had little to do with their proximity to Waters and Wolf and that they were no more “authentic” in the eyes of black bluesmen than the British were. However, the British thought these things were true, and they acted accordingly. Since there seemed to be little point in trying to match the Butterfield Band’s technical proficiency or blues authenticity, British bands took the bold step of branching out from “hands-­on preservation” and aiming instead to reconstruct and innovate the blues. This was a tendency toward which British bands were already leaning, and they were impelled to go further by the example of Butterfield and other American musicians of the period.148 Meanwhile, as the Band was four-­fifths Canadian, it occupied a position of proximity to and distance from American culture similar to that of members of the British network. However, by touring for years in America (two of them with Bob Dylan), the Band earned a fluency in “Americana” that gave its members a perceived advantage over their British counterparts.149 They created two monumental albums that vividly explored some of the

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Americana that British bands were exploring. Record producer Joe Boyd also saw in the Band’s first two albums a “rebuke” to the British and their attempts to articulate Americana: “You want to play American music? Well, try playing something as American as this!”150 One example of their impact was their role in hastening the dissolution of Cream in 1968. Eric Clapton felt that the overly complicated “maestro bullshit” that Cream was playing had been shown up embarrassingly by the “just good, funky songs” on the Band’s Music from Big Pink.151 Beyond Cream, the emergence of the Band and other like-­sounding American groups seemed to betoken the rise of a new genre: country rock. This faltered as a genre but left a major imprint on Anglo-­ American rock music by stressing a return to the source (whether that meant 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, country-­and-­western, or the blues) and lighter and more understated arrangements.152 Furthermore, they influenced the British specifically by inspiring them to construct an imagined Britain just as they had embraced an imagined America. The inspiring and often challenging examples set forth by Bob Dylan, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Band helped members of the British blues network take some interesting and innovative steps. The first was to conceive of blues-­based rock music as a vehicle for expressing more sophisticated sentiments than the typical “boy-­meets-­girl” clichés of standard pop music or the evocative yet self-­limiting conventions of the blues and R&B. The second was to begin to deviate from the purism and orthodoxy to which they had self-­consciously adhered during the first years of the British blues boom in favor of eclectic bricolage and creative repackaging. The third and final step was to reconceptualize their musical direction—­partially by returning to the sources of their music and partially by adopting a more musically conservative approach, which they hoped would correct some of the excesses of self-­important “psychedelic” and “progressive” rock. Conclusions

Young, white, mostly middle-­class British blues enthusiasts of the postwar period interacted with the African-­American blues music that fascinated them via a process that, borrowing from Edward Said, I have termed “affiliation.” Young aspiring bluesmen like Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger very earnestly wished to reverse adopt blues heroes like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as replacement fathers—­to present themselves, no matter how great the geographic, socioeconomic, or racial distance, as their adoptive sons. It only makes sense that this coterie of somewhere between sev-

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enty and one hundred sons of the same reverse-­adopted fathers would also come to see each other as brothers. By extension, it makes sense that this fraternity would act like one by socializing, drinking, and discussing and collaborating on music with each other. Brothers—­blood or otherwise—­ may or may not like one another; in fact, their feelings toward one another may vary widely depending on mood and circumstance. They might spend much of their time competing with one another, as the British blues brothers most certainly did. Whether or not they like each other, brothers grow up together, and these young blues-­mad Britons most certainly did that. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing for most of the next decade, British blues enthusiasts formed an interpersonal cultural network whose social interconnectivity would result in much of the creativity and innovation that accompanied the transition from blues to blues-­rock in the later 1960s. The blues network was vital to the diffusion of musical and artistic ideas throughout Britain—­first in provincial cities like Manchester and Newcastle and then in metropolitan London as the provincial boys converged on the capital. The network was made up of young men who had grown up in mostly shared circumstances, with a similar cultural inheritance—­they were white and of the middle or upwardly mobile working class, navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of first rationing and then (relative) affluence, struggling to make sense of a diminished international role and a daunting but often fascinating new American superpower. Their relationships were often forged in the blues. Often the process of searching for music and precious information about it brought the searchers to each other’s attention and gave them further shared experiences. Bonding over music and alcohol solidified the network and allowed knowledge to diffuse throughout it. Once formed, the connectivity provided by the network encouraged close collaboration, competition, and rivalry. Knowledge about the blues, its practitioners and their circumstances, and the music’s interpreted meanings was disseminated much quicker than would have happened if the participants had not been socially connected. Without the interpersonal element, the desire to outdo one’s fellows for benefits such as attention, gigs, record sales, and women would either not have existed or not been as strong; the creativity would have suffered. Two of the defining characteristics of the British blues-­rock network were creativity and eclecticism. Its members were arguably talented, creative individuals on their own, but it took the formation of groups to really bring out those talents and creativity. We will never know if Eric Clapton could have produced the searing emotion of “Layla” without the love triangle he entered into with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, and we will never know what

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the Beatles and Rolling Stones would have produced during their late 1960s musical pas de deux without each other. What we do know is that the blues network did exist, that its members did spur each other on creatively, and that the results did innovate popular music for the next five decades and more. The British blues network operated by borrowing and then synthesizing musical ideas and techniques. Only infrequently would the British flat-­ out copy their mentors or peers note for note. And when, in response to white American “hands-­on preservationists,” British musicians stopped worrying so much about their personal and musical proximity to, and distance from, the blues (to say nothing of whether or not they “sounded black”), popular music became much more of a two-­way, transatlantic dialogue. This dialogue, and its attendant processes of borrowing, synthesis, and creative maturation, is the subject of the next chapter.

5  •  I Just Can’t Be Satisfied Between Authenticity and Creativity I want English kids to be English kids, not . . . bogus imitation Americans. . . . The thing is to support the local product . . . we’ve got to produce our own variety and not imitate the Americans. —­Colin MacInnes1

Between 1966 and 1970, with the firm foundation of the blues beneath their feet, British and American rock musicians—­now in closer cultural dialogue with each other—­used African-­American blues to create a body of rock music that was both creative and innovative and came to dominate popular musical expression. This chapter examines three related processes that were at work during this period, processes I refer to as experimentation, refiliation, and augmentation. Experimentation saw British rock musicians absorb lessons from other, non-­American musical traditions, especially those of the peoples of their former Empire—­and also absorb various psychotropic, “mind-­expanding” chemicals that affected their music. Refiliation entailed British musicians returning to their own cultural inheritance by expressing “British,” and not just “American,” cultural tropes—­mostly by creating an “imagined” Britain full of British characters speaking in specifically British voices. Augmentation meant “supercharging” the blues—­ amplifying it, volume-­wise, and enhancing its tropes of sex, violence, and power. In her write-­up of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 double album Exile on Main St., critic Jody Breslaw wrote, “[t]he Stones are in the midst of what might be called their Hellenistic period: the classical grandeur of Athens’ (rock’s) Golden Age overlaid with frills and eclecticism.”2 The underwhelmed tone of the rest of the review suggests that she did not mean this as a compliment. During this period, British rock musicians’ unwillingness to be creatively satisfied led them to indulge their eclectic tendencies and maintain, even enhance, the “grandeur” they heard in the blues. In so doing, they created a 142

I Just Can’t Be Satisfied  •  143

blueprint for a form of Anglo-­American rock music that was much greater than the sum of its constituent parts. And lest we forget, it was during the Hellenistic period that Greek culture enjoyed its widest international reach to that point in history.3 Intimations that British rock musicians were about to embark on such a seismic cultural shift can be traced as far back as August 1966, when Animals lead singer Eric Burdon told an interviewer that strict adherence to the blues format was no longer satisfying to him as a developing artist. [T]his is why I’m branching out by myself, because I realize now that I’ve gone through the schooling period of learning from the American Negroes but now I want to try and advance and use whatever English influences there are inside me and develop the two. Which means almost trying to develop the pretty side of myself, as well as the dumb-­ gut side, if there is one. I want to combine the two . . . because I think it’d be a goof to try and keep on singing blues the rest of my life.4 Burdon’s declaration, while certainly problematic in its essentializing equation of “black” with “dumb-­g ut” and “white” with “pretty,” was an amazing expression of creative self-­confidence on the part of a young and presumably still maturing performer. In late 1963, with his Rolling Stones having only just burst onto the music scene with their Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed covers, Mick Jagger had scoffed to an interviewer, “Can you imagine a British-­composed R&B song? It just wouldn’t make it.”5 And, to be sure, what Eric Burdon was now proposing to do was not to start composing straight R&B. But neither was he advocating the route traveled by British proto-­rockers like Cliff Richard, for whom R&B was just a formative phase before he “matured” into the world of banal pop compositions and “family entertainment.”6 Rather, Burdon’s avowed mission, now that he had achieved a measure of commercial stability, was to develop the lessons he had learned from the blues and integrate them with as wide an array of other musical influences as possible. Truly, if the cultural commentator were looking for a manifesto for the “art” and “psychedelic” blues-­rock movements to come, this statement might be as good as it gets. Beginning roughly in 1965, due to a variety of developments that I have previously discussed, the bands that made up the British blues network began to feel that their apprenticeship at the feet of the blues masters was nearing its end and if they did not want to become the proverbial “one-­trick ponies” they would do well to think about expanding the creative boundaries of their music. To John Mayall, this was all to the good.

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I found it logical. . . . Everybody was very young and drawn to the electrification of the guitars and the music . . . [but] they had to find their own way of expression. That kind of led them into the areas that just happened to make them very popular on the rock and roll pop scene. In all cases, everyone ended up finding their own identity. The blues was their starting point.7 However, it would be wrong to characterize this attempt at development as a betrayal of the blues or of the formative influence of the idiom on the likes of Burdon. The blues tropes that had fired young British enthusiasts’ imaginations would still play a prominent role in their expression after 1966; it was the eclecticism that the British had imbibed along with the blues that enabled them to experiment so wildly, and often so successfully, in the years to come. To understand the extraordinary creativity that burst forth from the British blues-­rock network during these years, one must first understand some technological developments and changes in the music industry. This is not to argue for structural or technological determinism; even with these structural changes in place, the agency of British and American rock musicians as creative producers was still of paramount importance. Technology did not make the music by itself. One technological advance was the use of multitrack recording, which was often used to strengthen and/or layer the sound of certain instruments or voices. Another advance was the development of the modular synthesizer and the Mellotron, two devices that allowed musicians and producers to incorporate a wide variety of sounds into their music without requiring the presence of other instruments or musicians. Both of these developments played a meaningful role in the production of the Beatles’ landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). The opportunities presented by multitrack recording and modular synthesizers to play with sound effects fit hand-­in-­glove with a strong British predilection toward technological tinkering. As blues-­rock metamorphosed into other musical subgenres in the 1970s, this love of tinkering may help explain why “progressive” rock, which valued technological proficiency so highly, was almost entirely the province of young, middle-­class British musicians. In their growing penchant for experimentation, British rock musicians were doubtless helped along by the fact that the music industry was loosening up—­if ever so slightly. Since the beginning of the British Invasion, managers, producers, and executives were generally perceived by musicians as obstacles to the musicians’ ability to develop creatively and play the sort of music they wanted. But now there was a small but growing breed of execu-

I Just Can’t Be Satisfied  •  145

tives who were either genuinely more progressively minded or at least realized the financial benefits of allowing their artists more creative license. Many of these were crucially situated as both “outsiders” and “insiders” vis-­à-­ vis the larger, London-­based pop management and recording superstructure. They were all insiders in that they were all white British men. However, they were usually also outsiders because of their geographic provenance. Cream manager Robert Stigwood was Australian, for example, and Island Records manager Chris Blackwell was Jamaican. The emergence of these young, male “insider-­cum-­outsiders” gives solid credence to theorist Thorstein Veblen’s argument that creativity has often been helped along by individuals who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the larger sociocultural milieu. Perhaps the most striking example of what could happen when management and executive types allowed bands greater economic control and creativity was Led Zeppelin. The band’s manager, Peter Grant, was arguably the most successful of the “new breed.” Believing that musical creativity would only be possible if the band were financially stable, he secured it a then unheard of 90 percent cut of the receipts from live performances. He also shielded his charges from the hype and exploitation that traditionally forced bands to do what the industry wanted. Thus, Led Zeppelin hardly ever released singles, rarely appeared on television, and toured when and where it pleased. Such unprecedented control over the musicians’ creative and financial destinies led to a greater ability to experiment in the studio and to do and say only (and exactly) what they wanted. Led Zeppelin’s incredibly wide creative latitude owed a great deal to the imagination of Jimmy Page and the often violent business tactics of Grant, but it was also due to the indulgence of Atlantic Records. One of the two undisputed giants of 1950s R&B and soul music (along with Motown), Atlantic began in the late 1960s to expand its reach to embrace white blues-­ based rock music. Label boss Ahmet Ertegün came to feel that the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page represented a natural progression of blues and soul music—­that, and he found that white blues-­based rock was more lucrative. By early 1969, the label once known as the home of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles also boasted the services of Cream, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and others. The role that Ertegün and his company served for these white bands was to reinforce their blues training and encourage their more experimental impulses in the studio. A good example of this is in the recording of Cream’s second album, Disraeli Gears. Ertegün felt that the first album, Fresh Cream, was far too “poppy.”8 For the Disraeli Gears sessions, beginning in April 1967, Ertegün brought in two “more progressive” men to

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supervise: engineer Tom Dowd and producer Felix Pappalardi. As a result of this combination, Disraeli Gears was a much better synthesis of the band’s eclectic mix of blues, jazz, Dada, and pop sensibilities. Experimentation: Outside Sources and Influences

One outward indicator of British rock musicians’ increased eclecticism was their facility for borrowing elements from other musical and cultural traditions and then combining them in a bricolage that bore traces of the traditions from which they had been culled without descending into out-­and-­ out pastiche. Joe Boyd described the developing sound of the Rolling Stones as “shopping” in other cultures, and the metaphor is an apt one, especially for a group of young men who were so heavily involved in mass consumer culture.9 Just as a young Mod might construct a wardrobe out of bits and pieces unearthed at the various small boutiques in the King’s Road in Chelsea, the psychedelic songwriter might piece together lyrics inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Johnson, or William Blake and set them to music that melded a blues chord progression and an Indian sitar riff.10 This penchant for musical borrowing began with British enthusiasts’ absorption of the blues. We have seen how young Britons felt at liberty to lift verses or even single lines of lyric from any number of separate blues songs and combine them into one. Having achieved some measure of creative stability, British musicians felt comfortable extending this approach outward. “The C-­I-­A Influence”: British Musical “Shopping” in Non-­Western Musical Cultures

Perhaps not surprisingly, young British musicians turned to the former Empire as a major source of musical borrowing. Jimmy Page often refers to the “C-­I-­A Influence” at work in Led Zeppelin’s music.11 This stands for “Celtic-­Indian-­Arabic,” and it is noteworthy that all three of these cultures were once (or are currently) part of Britain or its empire. In some ways, this was nothing new to Britons living at the center of a diverse global empire. Historian Deborah Cohen has demonstrated that many middle-­class British consumers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries purchased and decorated liberally with furniture and bric-­a-­brac from throughout the Empire.12 This approach continued in the musical “shopping” of the 1960s. Starting in 1965, British bands began to inject Indian influences into their music through the use of sitars and tabla hand drums.13 Contrary to popu-

I Just Can’t Be Satisfied  •  147

lar belief, George Harrison did not introduce the sitar to Western popular music, although his use of the instrument is the most famous.14 Page claims that folk legend Davy Graham was the first to try to make his acoustic guitar sound like a sitar and to introduce what he called “raga tunings” into English folk music.15 Page also claims that he himself was the first among his peers to own a sitar, “certainly before George Harrison.”16 The general consensus, however, is that the first use of a sitar on a rock record came courtesy of Ray Davies, who played it on the Kinks’ “See My Friends.”17 Davies, it was rumored, was so enamored of Indian raga music that he regularly ate in tandoori restaurants “purely to hear the music.”18 In the late 1960s, Indian influences were plentiful in British rock music. Harrison played a sitar on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “Love You To,” as did Brian Jones on the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black” and “Mother’s Little Helper.”19 However, the instrument’s real impact on popular music was actually the result of guitarists tuning their guitars to sound like the sitar. Jeff Beck used this technique on the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” as did Jimmy Page on the instrumental “White Summer,” which was part of his repertoire with both the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.20 By the time of sitarist Ravi Shankar’s much-­acclaimed performance at Woodstock in August 1969, the sitar—­or an approximation of it on guitar—­could also be found in the work of Traffic (throughout much of its debut album, Mr. Fantasy) and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (on its thirteen-­minute-­long raga jam “East-­West”) among others.21 Going beyond the sitar, Page and Plant went to India in 1972 and tried to record an entire album with musicians from Mumbai (then Bombay), but the project came to naught because of confusion between Western and Indian musicians about time signatures. Following this, Page and Plant tried to record a Led Zeppelin-­only album in “either Cairo or India”; this project also foundered due to logistical problems.22 The British postcolonial “shopping trip” also visited the musical cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. British rock musicians partook of a cultural tradition of “desert-­loving Englishmen” that dates back to the eighteenth century and included the likes of Charles Doughty, Lord H. H. Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell (a desert-­loving Englishwoman), and latterly Beat poet role models William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. British rock musicians felt a strange attraction to these desert lands, appropriating their supposed exoticism and sensuality for their music.23 Again the Yardbirds seem to have been in the vanguard; its “Over Under Sideways Down” (1966) features Beck once again using his guitar to emulate an Eastern sound—­this time a distorted riff that evokes what Beck biographer An-

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nette Carson calls a “manic, skirling Moroccan dance.”24 Brian Jones, who showed a remarkable facility for learning to play any outré musical instrument, became enamored of the pipe-­and drum-­driven folk music of Morocco. The doomed Rolling Stones guitarist’s last project before his death in 1969 was to record the so-­called Master Musicians of Jajouka, who lived in the mountains outside Tangier.25 Finally—­and perhaps most famously—­the allure of this region manifests itself in Led Zeppelin’s monumental “Kashmir,” which celebrates the endless desert through which Robert Plant fantasized about driving in an open-­topped sports car.26 Several considerations guided British rock musicians in their appropriation of the music and culture of their former imperial outposts. First, and most basically, this music was foreign to them. As they grew in aptitude and confidence, it made sense for these musicians to want to develop and expand their sound as far as possible, as well as to prove that they could master sounds that were so different from the ones with which they had grown up. However, due to more than three centuries of cultural appropriation, as well as the post-­1945 influx of Indian, Caribbean, and African immigrants to Britain, this music was familiar to Britons as well.27 For example, Plant married an Anglo-­Indian woman and reminisces fondly of time spent at her family home, “a soulful scene full of hot curries and great people.”28 In a way, Britons’ appropriation of non-­Western sounds from the former Empire was a lot like their appropriation of American blues: there was just enough distance to make it exotic and interesting and just enough proximity to make it familiar and accessible. Indian and Middle Eastern instruments and sounds were only two of the tools at British and American rock musicians’ disposal as they helped to create “psychedelic” rock in the late 1960s. Psychedelic rock is often assumed to be merely an expression of the late 1960s’ burgeoning “hippie” drug culture, which arose sui generis as an attempt by disaffected Western youths to secede from a mainstream “straight” world that they perceived as racist, sexist, greedy, and hypocritical and whose nuclear armaments were in danger of obliterating humanity at a moment’s notice. The ways to achieve this secession were to reject conventional standards of fashion, morality, and sexuality and, above all, to engage in the recreational use of psychotropic drugs.29 Over time the sexual and hallucinogenic aspects of late 1960s youth culture have come to loom largest in the public imagination.30 It should be stated that, at least in terms of the music and the musicians themselves, these were not the only aspects. Psychedelic music was about more than simply recreating or enhancing the experience of “getting high,” and it had very real cultural remit and antecedents.

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Revolution in the Head: “Psychedelic Rock” and the European Classical Tradition

In its desire to discover and make use of nonmainstream ways of seeing and knowing, psychedelia reflects blues culture, which seemed to place a premium on magic, voodoo, and dealing with the Devil. This affinity, rather than just the happy accident that they all were the proper age during psychedelia’s first flowerings, goes a long way toward explaining why so many British blues-­rock bands “went psychedelic” with such enthusiasm. In terms of deriving power from seeing and knowing, psychedelia was just the blues with a more colorful wardrobe and better drugs. In presenting first the black bluesman and then the increasingly white rock musician as a virtuoso, psychedelic rock was also taking its place in a cultural lineage that, again, dates back to the nineteenth century and the Romantic tradition. Italian violinist Nicolò Paganini and Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt were both accorded heroic status on the strength of their personal charisma and instrumental virtuosity and flamboyance. Of Paganini it was also heavily rumored that he had acquired his genius by selling his soul to the Devil. The provenance of Paganini’s musical gifts notwithstanding, audiences saw him (as well as Liszt) as an individual whose skill and mastery over his instrument had allowed him to transcend the social constraints against which the Romantics struggled.31 As ethnomusicologist Edward Macan has argued, this Romantic tradition was passed down to the post-­1945 era via jazz and then blues; indeed, it was the primary intellectual framework for understanding the life and legend of Robert Johnson.32 Blues-­rock and then psychedelic rock added the names Clapton, Hendrix, Page, Green, Richards, and Townshend to the pantheon but expanded the scope for virtuosity. Now drummers, bass guitarists, and keyboardists could all become (and earn the reputation of ) virtuosos. In fact the entire concept of the “supergroup” is premised on this possibility. The archetype of the virtuoso instrumentalist was not the only point of interaction between psychedelic music and the European classical tradition, however. Rock musicians, seeking simultaneously to clothe themselves in musical sophistication and respectability and to provide a necessary structure to their growing creative experimentation, borrowed liberally from the classical canon.33 With the exception of Steve Winwood, however, none of the biggest names in British rock music had had much serious musical training; their knowledge of classical music was as self-­taught as their knowledge of the blues. At the most basic level, the inclusion of classical influences can be seen in the usage of classical instruments—­harpsichords, pipe organs, vio-

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lins, and sometimes entire string sections. Jimmy Page, who worked a great deal with orchestral musicians on the London session circuit, achieved perhaps the most bizarre instrumental marriage of all. Acting on the suggestion of a violinist acquaintance, Page played his electric guitar with a violin bow, either striking it against or dragging it across the strings.34 Both approaches created a distinctive dissonant sound that left its mark on such Led Zeppelin hits as “Dazed and Confused” and “In the Evening.”35 British psychedelic rock musicians also appropriated the style and form of classical music. In much the same way as the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century British composers and conductors who came before them, however, they did not merely copy the symphonic form but welded to it the musical lessons they had already learned. One example of this musical welding was the powerful “Beck’s Bolero,” recorded by Jeff Beck and a one-­off “supergroup” featuring Page, John Paul Jones, and Keith Moon.36 The song, which was heavily influenced by French composer Maurice Ravel’s orchestral piece Boléro, makes use of the same cut-­and-­paste technique as did many of the blues covers produced by British musicians. “Beck’s Bolero” is divided into three sections. The first and third sections feature an electric guitar and steel acoustic guitar playing different melody lines over a bolero rhythm. The second section dispenses with the bolero rhythm, instead featuring distorted guitar riffs and powerful drumming of the kind for which Moon was famous with the Who. This shotgun marriage of orchestral music and riff-­driven hard rock provided a blueprint for numerous emerging progressive and heavy metal bands, not to mention Beck’s and Page’s subsequent groups. Usages of the classical tradition’s forms and structures appear elsewhere in psychedelic and progressive rock. Possibly the most famous example of the use of classical themes in rock music is the “rock opera,” which attempts to tell a unified, if loose, narrative using the language and musical accompaniment of rock and the structure of opera. In 1969 the Who recorded the first rock opera, Tommy, the story of a disabled boy who leads an unsuccessful religious sect after being miraculously healed.37 This ambitious yet ill-­starred work was followed by the Kinks’ Preservation, which was even less well received.38 The concept of the rock opera was (and to some extent remains) one of the most controversial developments in popular music history. It suffered much abuse from those critics and fans who believed that the self-­ conscious sophistication and overblown artistry of the form was a betrayal of rock ‘n’ roll’s essential populist and amateurish “authenticity.”39 This criticism only intensified as progressive rock employed and even furthered many of rock opera’s more outlandish devices. When naysayers cast about for the

I Just Can’t Be Satisfied  •  151

causes of rock’s perceived decline in the mid-­1970s, the rock opera bore much of the blame. It is important to note that, whatever these tendencies might have led to, the employment of classical music influences began as an attempt to add legitimacy and weight to the enterprise of psychedelic blues music. However, psychedelia also owed a strong debt to Dada and Surrealism, which on one level were about as antithetical to weighty, legitimate tradition as can be found within European art. The connections between these two artistic “movements” (if Dada indeed merits such a restrictive label) and psychedelic rock music are legion. The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” for instance, is rife with surreal imagery (“looking-­glass ties,” “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” “newspaper taxis”).40 Meanwhile, Cream’s bizarrely titled “She Walks Like a Bearded Rainbow (SWLABR)” references a picture with a mustache, which is evocative of—­if not explicitly referencing—­Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919), which portrays a mustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa.41 Going further, Clapton recalls that “the initial agenda was that Cream was going to be a dada group,” with “all these weird things” and “mad props” onstage, not the least of which was a giant stuffed bear, which the group purchased at a London junkshop.42 In keeping with Dada’s de-­emphasis on binding names and strict categories, the innovators of psychedelic rock music refused to provide rock journalists and critics with any assistance in labeling the music they were making. Jimmy Page insisted on releasing Led Zeppelin’s fourth album without a title or any wording that would identify the band other than four mysterious runic figures.43 Of Traffic’s music, Steve Winwood said, “You won’t be able to put a name to what we’ll be playing.”44 Although the amount of hype attracted by psychedelic rock musicians varied widely during this era, the intent—­at least initially—­was to declare that labels and categories were useless; how the musical bricolage sounded and what it meant to those playing and listening to it were the only considerations that mattered.45 Ginger Baker, echoing Winwood, insisted, “I’ve never put a name to [our] music. You play yourself.”46 Refiliation: Putting the “British” in British Blues-­Rock

In the late 1960s, many British rock bands began to “play themselves” (in both their music and their public personae) as white British men, creating British voices and characters operating against a British cultural and historical backdrop. This deployment of British culture, constructed mainly

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out of English cultural tropes, with some elements of Celticness mixed in, was an important, if never quite dominant, component of British rock music until the late 1970s. The irony, of course, was that the members of the British blues-­rock network had begun their careers by rejecting their unsatisfying British cultural inheritance in favor of identification with America and American culture. But now, as these young men matured in terms of both age and creativity, they found aspects of that inheritance that were worthy of their attention. One of the primary means by which members of the British blues-­rock network began to express “Britishness” and “Englishness” through their music was through the construction of an imagined “Britain.” In doing so, they essentially reversed the practice, cribbed from African-­American bluesmen (as well as white musicians like Bob Dylan and the members of the Band), of constructing an imagined “America.”47 This deployment of “Americana”—­ that is, America’s myths and landscapes—­was now reapplied to the other side of the Atlantic to construct something that could easily be called “Britannica.” Britain’s landscapes, populated with archetypical characters congregating in certain identity-­affirming spaces such as the country house and the rural countryside, came through in the British rock of this era with the same vividness that had previously been the hallmark of American roots music. There were several reasons for this newfound appreciation. For one, the massive transatlantic publicity machine that basically invented and then launched the British Invasion played up the uniqueness of its product by defining and selling groups as British in part by cobbling together various “typically British” odds and ends. This played on many Americans’ vague, rather stereotypical understandings of what Britishness or Englishness meant. The entire concept of a British Invasion, for one, worked because it was an oblique reference to the American ur-­narrative of the Revolutionary War. For the cover of its 1965 single “My Generation,” members of the Who were photographed in front of Big Ben, with Pete Townshend wearing a Union Jack blazer; onstage, Townshend also took to draping the flag over the arsenal of amplifiers behind him.48 The media made sure to comment whenever possible on British musicians conforming to a stereotypical diet; witness the Times’ Philip Norman pointing out that Robert Plant drank tea onstage at London’s Earls Court or Crawdaddy magazine’s Barbara Charone remarking on Eric Clapton’s “peculiarly English habit” of ordering baked beans on toast from hotel room service.49 Rather bizarrely, the public relations company hired to “break” blues band Ten Years After in the United States played up the latter’s upbringing in Nottingham to take advantage of Americans’ presumed name recognition of Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the villainous sheriff.50

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This process of selling the British Invasion in national cultural terms, coupled with the inevitable realization of difference that occurred when the musicians actually experienced America and met American people, had the effect of driving home to British rock stars the fact that they were in fact white Britons. As Townshend told an interviewer almost fifteen years later, “[W]e went there [to America] to be English.”51 Townshend’s experience, and by extension that of many of his “Invasion” mates, was rather similar to that of many American expatriates in Europe. As African-­American author James Baldwin, who spent most of the 1950s in Paris, put it, “It was the American in myself I stumbled upon while trying to discover Europe.” As a black man, Baldwin had perhaps good reason to disavow his American identity, yet no matter how much he consciously tried to forge a European identity he was still as “inescapably American as a Texas G.I.”52 This process applied, albeit in reverse, to members of the British blues-­rock network: by trying to understand and articulate America and American culture, they ended up learning how to better express themselves as Britons. Another, related factor that spurred the British bands to begin looking inward was the successful deployment of Americana by the bands discussed in the previous chapter. Bands like the Rolling Stones, which had made their names singing about Chicago, found themselves confronted by bands made up of young men who were actually from Chicago. By and large, the response of many British groups was to open up the discourse to include idioms in which they could speak with the kind of authenticity or fluency they heard in the music of Dylan or the Band. After all, could Paul Butterfield claim to know Birmingham’s “Black Country” better than Robert Plant, who grew up there? In the late 1960s, British rock groups spent considerable effort trying to do for Britain what Music from Big Pink had done for America. Numerous British records have been trumpeted as “the British answer” to that monumental album, and various bands have been anointed as “English version[s] of The Band.”53 All of this contributed to a gradual diminution of self-­consciousness about being white men playing in a black musical form (slight though that self-­ consciousness had ever been). Upon the formation of Cream in 1966, Clapton proclaimed confidently, “I’m no longer trying to play anything but like a white man. The time is overdue when people should play like they are and what colour they are.”54 This was a dramatic turnaround for the young man who had quit the Yardbirds in disgust over their use of the harpsichord.55 But it was not merely a shift toward playing like “what colour they are” that Clapton and his fellows were undertaking by the mid-­1960s; they started trying to play like what nation they were from, too. In fact, in the lead vocals of the haute-­

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bourgeois Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones had already been occupying this racial and national territory for quite some time. To record producer Joe Boyd, this was one of the band’s real sources of strength. Americans, he said, “were obsessed with sounding like black men, whereas Mick showed them how to sing blues and be unashamed of being white and being a kind of tarty little English schoolboy. There wasn’t the same awkwardness.”56 To at least one concert reviewer, in fact, a lack of awkwardness (combined with what Boyd would have called “tartiness”) on the part of Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood of the Faces was one of the things that encoded them as English in the first place. What seems particularly ‘English’ about [the Faces] is the unabashed intimacy of it all, something American men seldom show us because they think it’s “queer” to exhibit that much closeness to other men. Our male hang-­ups don’t hold down Rod and Ron, and their freedom shows through in their clothes as well, an important component of the English look. While many American rock stars, protecting their masculinity like mother hens, hide themselves under jeans or leather, Rod is really male, forgoing caution for adventure and buckskin for [haute couture designer] Arnel.57 Such a statement could just as easily have been made about Jagger and Keith Richards or any of the lead singer/lead guitarist pairings in late 1960s and early 1970s British blues-­rock. Henceforth, British musicians, following Jagger’s and Stewart’s example, would undertake their blues excursions secure in their white British masculinity—­however androgynously that masculinity might be expressed—­and open to the numerous cultural and sonic possibilities that their racial and national identities afforded them.58 In exploring and using British cultural tropes, British rock musicians were also inspired by a folk and folk-­rock scene that developed almost contemporaneously. There was a folk revival in Britain after the Second World War, just as there was in the United States. Its leading advocates corresponded with one another and shared the same leftist political sympathies.59 Although they shared in the common cultural origins of American and English folk music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the American arm of the transatlantic folk revival tended to center on Appalachian jug band music and country blues, while its British counterpart specialized in the old folk traditions of England and the so-­called “Celtic fringe.”60 This meant giving attention to sixteenth-­century madrigals, Anglican church hymns, sea chanteys, and Irish jigs and reels. Mining the rich veins, so to speak, of British

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source material was of crucial importance in British rock musicians being able to refiliate with their own cultural inheritance decades later. British musicians could draw on a centuries-­long folk music heritage comprising four distinct yet related traditions—­English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh.61 Although these traditions had also influenced American music, the influence was arguably more direct in Britain due to a deeper grounding in and a greater proximity to them. British folk and folk-­rock musicians’ primary significance for this study lies in the strong influence they exerted on the British blues-­rock network in terms of lyrical substance, musical structure, and further education in the common ground between American and British musical expression. British folk and folk-­rock groups drew on a long-­standing tradition of British literature set in the countryside and dealing with rural themes (especially children’s fiction) that also inspired the likes of Traffic, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones. For example, in an interview with biographer Colin Harper, folk guitarist Bert Jansch named J. R. R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, and Kenneth Grahame—­all three of whom conjured up rural British scenes for consumption by a mostly young reading public—­as among the major influences on his songwriting during this period.62 In terms of musical structure and arrangement, Led Zeppelin was perhaps most directly influenced by British folk—­not surprising considering that Jimmy Page had been an eager student of British folk guitarist Davy Graham dating back to Page’s days as a session guitarist.63 It has been widely noted that Graham’s guitar instrumental “Angi” provided the descending chord progression on Led Zeppelin’s anthemic “Stairway to Heaven.”64 Even more direct appropriation can be seen in the band’s instrumental “Black Mountain Side,” which flat-­out lifts entire passages from Graham’s “She Moves Thru the Bizarre,” as well as Jansch’s “Blackwater Side.”65 To cement this connection, it should be noted that, on its mostly acoustic third album, Led Zeppelin invited folk-­rock singer Sandy Denny to sing a duet with Robert Plant on the epic “The Battle of Evermore,” which combined medieval lyrical subject matter with twelve-­string guitars and mandolins in folk’s characteristic DADGAD tuning.66 There were nonmusical lessons to learn from the folkies as well. The entire project of rediscovering and reviving British folk music had necessarily educated both listeners and performers in the common origins of some British and African-­American folk songs and lore. This was a positive development overall, although it also indirectly provided bands like Led Zeppelin with a sort of ethnographic “get out of jail free” card when they “borrowed” (often without attribution) African-­American blues for their own repertoires. Rob-

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ert Plant, who has elsewhere defended his band by claiming that borrowing and adaptation is all part of the oral blues tradition,67 seized on the theory of Anglo-­American musical commonality in a 2008 interview. After paying his usual homage to Lead Belly, who he said was “intrinsic to the development of Led Zeppelin,” Plant argued that “Gallows Pole,” a Lead Belly song that Led Zeppelin “borrowed” in 1970, was originally a folk song “from Cornwall or Scotland”—­implying that Lead Belly had stolen it first, and from Plant’s homeland on top of it, and that what Plant had done was simply a matter of stealing it back.68 Given the eternally politically charged nature of black-­ white cultural transmission (especially regarding the issue of unpaid royalties), such a statement is problematic to say the least. “A Bustle in Your Hedgerow”: Imagined British Landscapes and Characters

Another way in which British “folkies” provided inspiration to British rock musicians was the ways in which they conjured and peopled an imaginary Britain—­images of which had been culled from folk songs and literature dating back at least to Elizabethan times. The imagined Britain conjured by British rock bands was more or less defined spatially (Britain’s urban and rural landscapes but most definitely not its suburbs), as well as chronologically (Britain’s past but most definitely not its postcolonial present). Of the wide sweep of British history, conspicuous, often nostalgic attention was paid especially to the Elizabethan and Victorian periods. This makes sense as both were periods of historical and cultural pride for Britain (or England, since Great Britain did not exist until the 1707 Act of Union), both were periods during which England/Britain made great strides in terms of territorial conquest and imperial reach, and both were periods of great British literary and scientific achievement. Thus it makes sense that young British men living in a postcolonial, post-­ global-­power Britain that had “not yet found a role” would seek to reenact these particular eras in their imagined Britain. One constant thread uniting all these diverse historical eras in British rock was that the action was increasingly set against the backdrop of the rural spaces of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Pastoralism, also known as “rural romanticism” (as cultural theorist Raymond Williams termed it in 1973), has played a central role in British political, as well as social and intellectual, life since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.69 Put simply, it is the fervent belief that the essence of Britain is in the countryside,

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and that the increasingly industrial and urban society in which the majority of Britons find themselves is somehow an aberration—­an idea that has held fast, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.70 In the twentieth century, an entire chorus of politicians, poets, novelists, and cultural critics gave voice to this belief. In 1926 Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin waxed lyrical about “the sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough-­team coming over the brow of a hill.”71 In 1935 author Philip Gibbs declared that “England is still beautiful where one slips away from the roar of traffic and the blight of industrialism,” which in his opinion had almost “bitten into the soul of England [and] poisoned its brain.”72 And in the middle of the Second World War, George Orwell conjured a portrait of England that, although it made room for “smoky towns [and] red pillar [mail] boxes,” seemed mainly to consist of “winding roads, green fields [and] old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.”73 Beginning in the late 1960s, Britain’s rock and folk-­rock songwriters picked up the thread. Although even more British people lived in the cities and suburbs than ever before, Britain was still, to hear the likes of Traffic or Led Zeppelin tell it, essentially a nation of proud country squires, yeomen, and peasants drawing strength from the ancient countryside. British rock pastoralism often registered frustration with urban and suburban life or, at the very least, the desire to escape it for a short time so as to recharge one’s batteries. This was the central theme of several rock songs of the period. In the song of the same name, the Kinks eulogized the bucolic village green, “far from all the soot and noise of the city,” where the protagonist had spent time as a youth.74 In “Drivin’,” they extolled the British countryside as a necessary tonic to the stress of the workaday world and the anxieties of Cold War politics (“It seems like all the world is fighting”). The protagonist is moved finally to set off with his family to the countryside to enjoy a picnic lunch—­including such quintessentially British staples as tea, warm beer, and gooseberry tarts.75 Or take Traffic’s “Berkshire Poppies,” whose protagonist longs to be in rural Berkshire County, “where the poppies grow so pretty.” A trip there would relieve him of all his cares. However, the protagonist cannot get away and has to content himself with an afternoon in a small city park—­the closest the urban wage slave can seemingly get to the great outdoors.76 Later on the same album, on the mostly instrumental “Giving to You,” the protagonist has better luck and is able to escape to the country by car.

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Movin’ and groovin’ through country so soothin’ My mind catching fire now and then Relaxed at the wheel, I’m beginnin’ to feel That life is worth livin’.77 Subtly, Winwood implies that were it not for the chance to exchange the urban/suburban miasma for the invigorating countryside life would most assuredly not be worth living. It is a “Swinging Sixties”-­era elaboration on a deeply held British idea. The Birmingham natives who comprised Traffic had had the kind of formative experience about which they now wrote songs. Traffic was formed in late 1966, and its four members rented a cottage in Berkshire County to plot the new musical direction they wanted to take. The influence of the experience on this new direction cannot be overlooked.78 Winwood has said that “John Barleycorn Must Die,” one of Traffic’s most characteristic evocations of rural Britain, was the product of months spent living amid “acres of wheat and barley.”79 Other musicians adopted Traffic’s approach, and by early 1967 the Berkshire cottage represented something of a British rock scene in miniature, as luminaries such as Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and Pete Townshend either stopped by for jam sessions or rented nearby cottages themselves.80 Likewise, members of Led Zeppelin used the British rural countryside as a retreat in which to plot a new musical course and refresh themselves after the crush of constant touring. In May 1970, after fifteen months of highly lucrative (yet massively draining) touring across America, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant repaired to Bron-­Yr-­Aur (pronounced “Brom-­ RAWR”), a small cottage in South Snowdonia, Wales.81 Plant had been to the cottage on family holidays as a child, and the idea was to go there and rest, “soak[ing] up the country vibes of peace and quiet.”82 After days spent prowling around the Welsh hills, the evenings were spent, according to Page, “sitting around log fires, with hot pokers being plunged into cider. As the nights wore on the guitars came out and numbers were written.”83 Out of this Welsh idyll came the mostly acoustic blend of blues, country-­and-­ western, and Celtic music on Led Zeppelin III. That album marked a dramatic departure from the electrified blues bombast that had been the defining characteristic of the band’s sound for the previous two years. Plant later told an interviewer that the retreat to Bron-­Yr-­Aur had enabled him and Page to “get that real Californian, Marin County blues, which we managed to do in Wales as opposed to San Francisco” on songs like “Bron-­Yr-­ Aur,” “Tangerine,” and “Immigrant Song”—­as clear a statement of this

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English band’s project of mingling American blues with British cultural tropes for which one might hope.84 However, it was not enough for the British rock network to conjure up an imagined Britain, whether urban or rural. The achievement of North American bands such as Bob Dylan and the Band had been to populate their “imaginative map” with distinctly American characters; Britain had its own distinct characters, too, whether workaday or heroic, abstract or concrete, mythical or anonymous, ancient or modern (though not too modern). Ancient Celts and Norse invaders (e.g., in Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”) share the imagined Britain with yeomen farmers (such as the protagonist in Elton John’s “Country Comfort”), venal politicians (the title character in Cream’s “Politician”), train conductors (Ivor the Engine Driver in the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away”), and well-­meaning priests (Father McKenzie in the Beatles’ “Penny Lane”).85 Even an abstract personification of barley and the alcoholic beverages made from it makes an appearance in Traffic’s “John Barleycorn Must Die.”86 Although many of these characters could be from the present day, just as many are clearly historic or mythic figures. Whereas Dylan and the Band filled their “invisible republic” with cowboys, Civil War generals, and “steel-­ driving men,” the British reached into their stockpile of imperial heroes to populate their “invisible monarchy.” Admirals, sailors, generals, colonels, and enlisted men all make appearances in British rock music. The Kinks’ loose concept album, Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), has songs featuring references to Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria.87 This, no doubt, is a lasting legacy of a culture that glorified the British Empire and attempted to instill the values that its builders supposedly embodied in decades of boys and young men.88 By the early 1970s, the construction of distinctly British characters and their deployment into distinctly British landscapes was increasingly commonplace in rock music. What is more, young, mostly middle-­class, white British men, along with their values and outlooks, had achieved a central presence in an American cultural idiom. Rock ‘n’ roll had emerged to express American masculine identity against an American backdrop; even when it was transplanted across the Atlantic, it continued to do so via British interlocutors. Now, however, rock ‘n’ roll music expressed Anglo-­American identity against an increasingly transatlantic backdrop. Down the Manor: British Rock Aristocrats

British rock musicians’ desire to populate their music with distinctly British characters, combined with their attraction to all things pastoral, led to one

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of the most distinctive developments in postwar popular culture: their re-­ creation of themselves as British aristocrats, with all the pastoral trappings inherent in aristocratic culture. The gradual construction of a distinctly British musical identity was often assisted by similar developments in the musicians’ actual lives. Since the emergence of the “star” phenomenon in the 1920s, culture heroes on both sides of the Atlantic have generally splurged on similar things: clothing, automobiles, drugs and alcohol, technological gadgetry, and expensive houses.89 However, Britain’s nouveau riche rock stars also set their sights on distinguished-­sounding names and impressive, often centuries-­old pedigrees. Not content to dominate the growing transatlantic aristocracy of music, film, and fashion, British rock stars actively aspired to present themselves as actual English aristocrats. Perhaps the first British rock star really to do this was Who drummer Keith Moon, who, it must be admitted, put some serious work into crafting an entirely new public persona for himself. In a manner vaguely reminiscent of Sonny Boy Williamson II on his 1964 tour of Britain, Moon decked himself out in expensive top hats and tails or smoking jackets with long cigarette holders—­even wearing them to the recording studio where no one but his bandmates and studio personnel would see him.90 He hired a chauffeur to drive him around London in luxury cars—­a logistical necessity given how much he drank. He even affected an upper-­crust Etonian accent instead of his original broad Cockney, using the phrase “dear boy” to address friends and strangers alike. Biographer Tony Fletcher surmises that part of the appeal of an aristocratic alter ego for Moon was what he perceived to be the aristocrats’ “licence [sic] to behave so irresponsibly and get away with it.” More than this, though, “to not act the proper British gentleman was to go back to the coal mines, or go back to where his father had come from.”91 And it was this way for many of Moon’s compatriots in the British blues network as well. However, most nouveau riche British rock musicians were content to ape the aristocracy by investing in country estates in the rural south of England.92 To this end, Steve Winwood found an estate in rural Gloucestershire, whilst his friend and future bandmate Clapton bought the immense Hurtfield Manor in his home county of Surrey. In the early 1970s, as Clapton struggled with heroin addiction, he also began increasingly to fulfill another British trope—­that of the aristocrat who holes up in his massive country home, rarely answering his phone or his door and emerging only for brief wanders through the garden.93 The urge to buy ancient rural estates was especially acute among the Rolling Stones. Bill Wyman bought a thirteenth-­century “cottage” named Gedding in Suffolk, which, according to historian Shawn Levy, “entitled him to call himself Lord of the Manor of Gedding and Thor-

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mwoods.”94 Keith Richards’s twelfth-­century Sussex estate, Redlands, even came with a medieval moat.95 This was arguably the pinnacle of the British blues network’s project of personal reinvention. Having first transformed themselves from disaffected lower-­middle-­class suburban white boys into dynamic, powerful urban bluesmen on the make, young British rock stars now used their money and cultural visibility to remake themselves again: as young lords to the manor bought, if not born. The transatlantic mass media generally cooperated in this project of portraying rock stars as English country gentlemen. In 1970 Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott, who traveled to Pete Townshend’s “quiet and unassuming 18th Century house” for an interview, found that the Who’s guitarist was absent. In the resulting article, Cott rhapsodized, in almost Austenian terms, “It was one of those lazy afternoons when spring promises and river scents set you in the mood for an 18th Century English gardener to say something like ‘Sir, I for my part shall almost answer your hopes, but for this gentleman that you desire to see has stretched his legs up to town.’”96 Meanwhile, Sounds’ Penny Valentine informed readers that when he was not onstage, Townshend’s bandmate Roger Daltrey spent “cosy weekend[s]” on his Sussex farm, “feeding his horses” in a “polo neck sweater, his hair blown in the cold autumn wind.”97 Just over a decade later, Musician magazine’s Timothy White proved that this journalistic mini-­tradition still had life when he painted the following bucolic scene. [U]nder a shifting midsummer sky, the grey and yellow quilts of clouds that hover above the English countryside showing neither approval nor disapproval; properly they evince a benign, atmospheric British frown. . . . Many miles deeper into the countryside, outside a lovely manor house, “dating back to the Doomsday Book [sic]” . . . and nestled in the vicinity of Highgrove, official residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Steve Winwood sips a cup of tea in a typically English garden. . . . A country gentleman residing in his dream house.98 White thus neatly combined five core elements of the image that had crystallized of the English rock star turned country gentleman: an impeccable pedigree, a bit of ancient history, gentility by association with a royal residence nearby, the ubiquitous cup of tea taken in an English garden, and the “benign . . . frown” of English weather. Here, in the strangest of places, we find an unconscious echo of author and social critic J. B. Priestley’s claim that “nearly all Englishmen are, at heart, country gentlemen.”99

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But why should this have been the common aspiration of so many of Britain’s rock musicians, who were supposedly the incarnations of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s new, young, classless, meritocratic Britain in the immediate post-­imperial period? For one thing, the readiness to absorb and enfold upwardly mobile bourgeois elements into itself has been a defining feature of the British aristocracy since the eighteenth century, if not before. This readiness was how the aristocracy was able to replenish both its stock and its coffers and defuse any bourgeois notions of social uprising. Indeed—­according to historian David Cannadine—­it allowed the aristocracy to survive into the post-­ Second World War world, albeit in altered form. 100 And it became built into the mind-­set of the British bourgeoisie: enriching oneself financially led to social advancement and potential ascent into the upper classes. In this way, while the spectacle of long-­haired bohemian musicians receiving MBEs and buying country manors might have caused members of the Establishment a spot of apoplexy, it was really not too different from what self-­made brewers and captains of industry were doing seventy or eighty years earlier. Second, the British aristocracy was the nearest model to hand of how nouveau riche rock stars should comport themselves once they began to make a great deal of money. Here was an area in which the example of their blues mentors could not offer any guidance; Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf had certainly never made the type of money that the Rolling Stones and Beatles were making. The power of the British aristocracy as a cultural model lay in its very proximity. This was especially true with the emergence of a subset of young aristocrats who began “slumming” in the British popular culture demimonde. Thus, John Lennon and Paul McCartney careened around town in a sports car driven by Guinness brewery heir Tara Browne. Various members of the Yardbirds and Beatles could be seen in chic London nightclubs dancing with Jane and Victoria Ormsby-­Gore, the daughters of a former British ambassador to the United States.101 Contact with these young aristocrats was on one level an education in how aristocrats spent their money, and British rock stars were quick learners. Thus, the young British rock musician’s pursuit of a country abode and social gentility can be seen as being very much in sync with a long, venerable British tradition. Can’t Find My Way Home: Reconceptualizing “Home” Vis-­à-­Vis the “Open Road”

An irony inherent in this situation must not be overlooked: cultural tradition or not, British bluesmen had started off wanting to renounce the idea of “home” and “settling down” entirely and now were paying high prices to

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become established homeowners. In the blues, generally speaking, home was anathema to the errant bluesman as adventurer. Home was where one started out but left as soon as possible to “ride the blinds” in search of freedom, adventure, and a more fully realized masculinity. Since traditionally a man’s place was the “public sphere” and a woman’s, the “private sphere,” going home and settling down was read as defeat. It entailed a tacit surrender of the freedom of the “open road,” and an acceptance of the trap of domesticity—­for young British men, most likely in the suburbs. In blues such as “Blind Willie” Johnson’s “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed,” home was simply where the man of adventure went to die.102 However, with the development and deployment of “British” cultural imagery, along with the incorporation of country-­and-­western influences, there came a reconceptualization of home in a British context. This began to take some of the edge off the blues’ purely negative representations of home and helped to create a discursive space in music where home and the open road were no longer always anathema to one another. Occupying a prominent place alongside this reconceptualization of settling down at home was the claim that the volte-­face had occurred because British rock stars had grown tired of wandering. They could now appreciate home in a more positive way because they had tried the alternative. In Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley,” the protagonist reflects, “I think I know what’s making me sad.” It’s a yearning for my own backyard I realize maybe I was wrong to leave Better swallow up my silly country pride . . . Going home, running home Down to gasoline alley where I started from103 Stewart further embroidered on this theme with the Faces in “Bad ‘n’ Ruin.” The protagonist’s desire to escape his hometown for a romanticized bohemian lifestyle in an urban slum has come up against the unpleasant reality of actually living that way—­it is too expensive and lacking in basic amenities like running water. Now, very much the prodigal son, the protagonist wants nothing more than to return home—­that is, if his mother will have him back.104 Traffic went a step further and overtly linked this world-­weariness and longing for home to the rock musician’s constant touring. In “Rock ‘n’ Roll Stew,” Steve Winwood laments “sitting in a transit all night long. . . . LA to London is a mighty long time,” and wishes he was “home again, sipping my wine.”105 Returning home—­

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and to Britain specifically—­was the much yearned after cure to the malaise wrought by constant touring around the world. In Penny Valentine’s previously quoted depiction of Roger Daltrey, she emphasized that the “five months of the hectic year” he spent on his Sussex farm were necessary for the singer to recover from the “tour and all the hassles it entails,” to “see his seven-­year-­old son,” and, simply to “be his own man.”106 A compelling depiction of the way in which many British rock stars had come to imagine themselves, their lives, and their homeland comes at the outset of Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert film The Song Remains the Same. In one of the film’s extended dream sequences, Robert Plant roams his Welsh farm, walking stick in hand, with his wife by his side and his young children splashing away in a small pond. John Paul Jones is a backwoods highwayman, returning to his country manor to play his seventeenth-­century pipe organ and read fairy tales to his children. Jimmy Page reclines on a blanket in some out-­of-­the-­way field, reading books of occult spells and warning away intruders with glowing red eyes.107 In essence, the band members are portrayed here as rural squires, content with home, family, and countryside. However, the idyll is broken by the constant demands of touring and the urban noise, chaos, and commodified mass consumer culture that accompany it. (It is telling that the concert that drags the band members away from their country homes in this particular instance takes place in New York City, the epitome of urban America.)108 The message of this introductory dream sequence—­ that Britain in here represents a pastoral respite from the ravages of the open road out there—­is clear, and it portrays in gigantic celluloid what the music had been saying for years. Ironically, this reconceptualization reached its highest point at the very moment when, in the early to mid-­1970s, many of Britain’s rock musicians no longer called their own homeland home. British Inland Revenue’s taxation statutes required high-­income earners—­a status that many of Britain’s rock stars now enjoyed—­to pay an amazingly steep percentage of their earnings in income tax. To avoid doing so, many bands arranged to spend the majority of any given year either touring or outright living abroad.109 For example, the Rolling Stones spent 1972 in the south of France, where they recorded their double album Exile on Main St., and then spent much of the remainder of the 1970s in New York City.110 Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, and the members of Led Zeppelin chose California as their adopted home and tax haven.111 The escape from “the police and the taxman” that Pete Townshend had sung about in the Who’s “Going Mobile” had now become the literal truth, and the result was what the Tory member of Parliament (MP) Sir Geoffrey Howe called “the fame drain.”112 One might find it only

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logical that British rock musicians would begin to look toward home more fondly now that they had been exiled from their homeland. However, the reconceptualization actually began in the late 1960s. It could perhaps be argued that the so-­called fame drain intensified positive articulations of home in general and England or Britain specifically; we have already seen how nostalgia played a powerful role in British musical articulations. But the phenomenon of Britons expressing themselves as Britons against a British backdrop preceded exile and so was not caused by it. Britons’ reconceptualization of home versus the open road was perhaps a natural outgrowth of their attempt to refiliate with their British cultural inheritance. But this does not mean that they abandoned the blues culture with which they had affiliated. Many of their expressions of British identity and culture were actually attempts to see to what extent they could apply the tropic vocabulary of African-­American blues to their own experiences. And, with the exception of their reconsideration of home in a British upper-­class rural setting—­which was a significant departure from what they perceived as blues tradition—­they found there was much that carried over. The threat of capture and enforced domesticity embodied by women applied, in the mind of Ray Davies or Mick Jagger, in the suburbs of the Home Counties just as it did in the Mississippi Delta or Chicago’s South Side. So did the possibility of escape from that domesticity. And, although there were certainly fewer wide open spaces in Britain than in the United States, the impulse and opportunity to ramble were no less developed in music set in Wales or Hertfordshire. Expressing themselves as young, white, middle-­class Britons, as opposed to as poor African Americans—­ or as white Americans for that matter—­ represented an important step in the creative maturation of the British blues-­ rock network. Augmentation: “Hard” Rock and “Supercharging” the Blues

Amid all the jazz, Celtic, Indian, and music-­hall influences at work in the British blues-­rock of the late 1960s, the casual observer might have been tempted to wonder what role, if any, remained for the blues; it was, after all, the music that had set these bands on their path. The scrupulous orthodoxy with which early British blues bands felt they had to approach the object of their reverence had largely fallen away, due partly to the perception that white American bands like Paul Butterfield’s outfit had cornered that particular market. And, as we have seen, the British were often quite adept at breaking down the blues into its component musical elements and tropes

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and integrating them with other musical styles. However, these developments did not mean an end to covering and appropriation—­far from it. British bands like the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Led Zeppelin, in addition to building on the blues to create rock, also “supercharged” the blues itself, making it sound louder, more raw, and more violent than ever and enhancing its tropic vocabulary in ways that would have been unimaginable even five years earlier. Crucial to this supercharging of the blues was a second, smaller-­scale blues renaissance that occurred in Britain beginning in mid-­to late 1967. Energized by the possibilities that the burgeoning musical dialogue between British and American groups seemed to open up for psychedelic blues, a passel of bands—­among them Led Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, the Savoy Brown Blues Band, Ten Years After, Taste, and Foghat—­emerged to seize those possibilities.113 The bands that came to prominence in the “second blues boom” confirmed for their predecessors—­if such confirmation was required—­that there was still musical hay to be made in exploring and experimenting with the “fire and dread” of Chicago blues.114 Furthermore, the dark malevolence that British enthusiasts thought they could hear in the blues from the very beginning now seemed strangely apropos in the atmosphere of tension and barely contained rage that seemed to be growing in youth culture as the 1960s drew to a close.115 Much as the likes of Jagger, Clapton, and Beck might have wished to remain outside sociopolitical activism, it was clear that, in light of what was happening in the streets and college campuses of the United States and Europe, the emotion conveyed by “heavier” psychedelic blues struck a responsive chord among young audiences.116 Fire and dread might not have erupted among Britain’s young people in the same ways as they did in Paris, Prague, or Chicago, but they were there in London if one knew where to look—­and listen. This growing sense of violence and dread in society was paralleled by a seemingly precipitous relaxation of sexual mores, emblematized by the hippies’ celebration of “free love” and the ever-­increasing availability of birth control.117 Taken together, these developments made for a much wider scope for young white male rock musicians to express themselves using two of the blues’ most predominant perceived tropes—­violence and sex. This affected Anglo-­ American rock music on two formal levels: in the cover versions of bands’ favorite blues and R&B numbers; and in original compositions that drew heavily on the blues lyrical idiom without being covers, strictly speaking. Blues covers became louder, faster, and longer, and in many cases songs that started life as rather easygoing three-­minute workouts on acoustic guitar and harmonica were transformed into ten-­minute epics, full of crunching guitar riffs

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and bombastic drumming. Eric Clapton’s version of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (renamed simply “Crossroads”), for instance, replaces Johnson’s acoustic strumming with a guitar riff that more closely resembles a crosscut saw and adds one of Clapton’s trademark blistering solos to the song’s middle eight.118 Whereas Johnson’s version is marked by a sort of otherworldly eeriness, Clapton’s is muscular, urgent, and earthbound.119 Or consider two of Led Zeppelin’s better-­known blues homages, “When the Levee Breaks” and “In My Time of Dying.”120 Both of the originals (the former by Memphis Minnie, the latter by “Blind Willie” Johnson) were relatively short in length and featured pleasant, almost jaunty vocals over an acoustic guitar with little additional accompaniment. Led Zeppelin’s versions take this comparatively light fare and turn it into monolithic slices of blues-­rock bombast that call into question the validity of the term cover version;—­“In My Time of Dying” clocks in at an astounding eleven-­plus minutes!121 As the members of the Anglo-­American rock network gained in confidence and aptitude, they began to compose their own blues, as well as rock songs that owed a great deal to the blues idiom. These songs often pushed the envelope with respect to the use of blues tropes or ran with an image or progression of images much farther than the original blues had. Nowhere is this more evident than in blues-­rock’s expressions regarding sex and sexuality. The major difference to be found in this realm is one of explicitness. British blues musicians strutted, bragged, and seduced with an aggressiveness often far removed from the style of their creative forebears, and the claims that they made regarding their exploits in the bedroom were often light-­years removed from those of a Waters or Wolf. On one level, this was a function of the license afforded to the British musician by his social situation. As a middle-­class young white male in a liberal society, operating in an era in which, among other things, birth control had been legalized and sexual mores loosened, he enjoyed an astonishingly wide capacity for sexual profligacy.122 Not most women, but any woman, any time, was considered fair game. Thus, when singing about their past and future sexual conquests, the British rock musician had tremendous leeway vis-­ à-­vis his African-­American mentors. Robert Johnson would have had to worry about censorship and the lynch mob; what was to stop Robert Plant or Mick Jagger from waxing lyrical about lemons and roosters and groupies? The hard rock musicians who accomplished these feats of increased lyrical vulgarity did so from within the blues idiom, not by inventing new metaphors to augment or supplant it. The penis was still a “kingsnake,” a wasp’s “stinger,” or a “little red rooster”; the vagina was still a “pot of honey” or a slice of “custard pie.” Rather than coming up with new nicknames for genita-

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lia, British musicians just embellished the existing ones. Thus, in “Black Dog,” Plant entreats his quarry, “when you walk that way / watch your honey drip, can’t keep away” and “when you shake that thing / gonna make you burn, gonna make you sting”—­essentially taking Waters’s metaphors and constructing longer lines of dialogue around them.123 In fact, Plant was apparently so enamored of this metaphor that he borrowed it when naming his first post-­Led Zeppelin band, The Honeydrippers.124 Vying with Led Zeppelin for the dubious honor of the most outlandish sexual boasting ever committed to vinyl was—­perhaps not surprisingly in light of its salacious offstage exploits—­the Rolling Stones. In “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Mick Jagger, momentarily borrowing the persona of the Hoochie-­Coochie Man, declares that his lust is so strong that “he can’t disguise it”—­a poorly veiled reference to a sizable erection inside his trousers—­ and asserts that he will “satisfy [his lover’s] every need.”125 Elsewhere, Jagger improves on Willie Dixon’s phallic bravado when, instead of saying that he has a “little red rooster” prowling around the barnyard, he claims to be that little red rooster.126 There is perhaps no greater way to emphasize the size of one’s endowment, and the totality of one’s lust, than to express oneself as one’s penis. Finally, in an astoundingly vulgar piece of braggadocio, “Parachute Woman” finds Jagger proclaiming, that if his lover “land[s] on me tonight . . . I’ll break big in New Orleans, and I’ll overspill in Caroline . . . make my blow in Dallas and get hot again in half the time.”127 With “Caroline” being a reference to the American states of North or South Carolina (precisely which is unclear), rather than a woman, it would seem that here Jagger actually has outdone the Hoochie-­Coochie Man, who, after all, never claimed to be able to ejaculate across the entire Deep South. The British practitioners of what was increasingly becoming known as “hard” or “heavy” rock not only embellished the Herculean sexual exploits of the bluesmen, but they also widened the scope for potential sexual partners considerably. For one thing, it was a widening with respect to age. As discussed earlier, the British took up the blues’ interest in young women and teenage girls and ran with it.128 However, even older women were portrayed as falling under the spell of the virile young rock god. Rod Stewart is visibly repulsed by the heavily made up and visibly past her prime “Jezebel” who comes onto him in the Faces’ joyously misogynistic “Stay With Me,” as is Jagger by the middle-­aged New York divorcée he meets in “Honky Tonk Women” (though both take their respective admirers home at the end of the night anyway).129 The British rock musicians’ achievement also widened the scope with respect to race, as they frequently flaunted their ability to seduce women of all

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races. These sexual encounters were sites for the demonstration of masculine knowledge, and thus power, and for the negotiation of masculine identity. Intimate sexual knowledge of many different kinds of women was, for the British rock musician, reassurance of his continued white male dominance and status as a connoisseur. Again the cultural position of the white male Briton as a “shopper” comes to the fore. Through their music—­and increasingly through their real-­life encounters with groupies and other women—­ British rock musicians sampled the sexual charms of women in the places to which they traveled with the same facility as they sampled the musical styles of foreign cultures. This led to a kind of sexual “cataloging” in which the British rock connoisseur listed, labeled, and typified his conquests on the basis of race and nationality. For instance, in “Three-­Button Hand-­Me-­Down” (a song that is actually about a secondhand dress suit), Stewart ticks his American “specimens” off his fingers: “there was a filly from Boston, a barmaid from Houston, not forgettin’ the one in Detroit.”130 Then there was the Rolling Stones’ infamous “Some Girls,” in which Jagger, sounding for all the world like a museum curator, details the various proclivities of Italian, French, English, Chinese, (presumably white) American, and black girls.131 Doing his unwitting best to reify racial and national stereotypes, Jagger announces that “English girls [are] so prissy,” “American girls want everything in the world,” and “black girls just want to get fucked all night.”132 (The latter, perhaps not surprisingly, drew the ire of African-­American political leader Jesse Jackson, among others.)133 The tendency to categorize exotic sexual exploits is also present elsewhere in British rock. With a kind of racial insensitivity that is embarrassing to read nowadays, Stewart sang (in “Every Picture Tells a Story”) the praises of “Shanghai Lil,” “the slit-­eyed lady” who ministered to his needs on a ferry sailing out of “Peking harbor.”134 Plant at once celebrated and lamented his “brown-­skinned woman” (who was only sixteen) in “Travelling Riverside Blues” and “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper.”135 Finally there is the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” which could as easily be about heroin as sex with slaves were it not for the mention of “scarred old slavers” who “whip the women just around midnight,” which Jagger noted with barely concealed glee.136 Their use of the phrase “brown sugar” points up an important aspect of British musicians’ furtherance of blues idioms; sugar was a popular blues code word for the vagina and the sexual act itself. By singing about brown sugar, the Rolling Stones were essentially underscoring their ability to have interracial sex, which was taboo for African-­American bluesmen.137 The apex of the British blues network’s creative enlargement of the blues

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was the recording by the Stones of three of the most vivid songs about sadomasochism ever to appear on vinyl (“Let It Bleed,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “Monkey Man,” all on 1969’s Let It Bleed). “Midnight Rambler” introduces the audience to the character of the same name, whom Jagger would later add to his array of bizarre and nightmarish stage personae.138 The Rambler was modeled on the African-­American bluesman persona and the real-­life “Boston Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo, who was charged with the serial murder of thirteen women in the early 1960s.139 The Midnight Rambler forces his way into a house, rapes the woman inside, and then, “in the light of the morning,” “stick[s] his knife right down your throat, baby—­and it hurts!”140 Toning down the imagery somewhat (though not much), in “Let It Bleed” and “Monkey Man” Jagger restricts himself to simply hurting (and being hurt by) his lovers. “Let It Bleed” is a “sado-­sexual nightmare” of jaded, heroin-­fueled sex, set in “dirty, filthy basement[s]” and underscored by both partners stabbing and cutting each other.141 “Monkey Man” operates in the same vein, but also describes Jagger’s being “gouged and gored” and “bitten” by his insatiable “monkey woman.”142 When performing “Midnight Rambler” live, Jagger often underscored the song’s fusion of sex, violence, and power by removing his massive, jewel-­ studded belt and whipping the stage with it—­to audible cries, on the band’s well-­documented 1972 tour, of “Hit me, Mick!” from both female and male members of the audience.143 Taken together or separately, this sadomasochistic trio of songs on the Let It Bleed album pushes this fusion to its farthest conceivable limit. According to musicologist John Hellmann Jr., it “draws the listener into a vicarious enjoyment of unrestrained mastery over his frustrations.”144 By lyrically and performatively indulging one of society’s stronger taboos (sadomasochism) the Stones describe and revel in the metaphorical exorcism of a larger, more illusive demon, the society that holds that taboo, which has repressed and emasculated Jagger and those like him.145 The resulting expansion and extension of the blues’ tropic vocabulary inspired the initially derogatory label “cock rock,” so named because of its celebration of male sexual prowess and capacity and its chauvinistic commodification of women.146 The success of cock rock and increasingly “heavy” blues in general led to a spate of followers on both sides of the Atlantic. All these bands share the crucial fact that each followed the formula laid down by members of the transatlantic blues-­rock network, thus furthering the creative objectives the latter had set for themselves and planting the seeds for the growth of heavy metal. In the words of guitarist/singer Paul Stanley, whose group KISS did much in the 1970s to build on the example set by these “heavy” bands, the

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likes of Led Zeppelin “[took] the blues and [pumped] it up on steroids.”147 In a way, this is an inapt statement, seeing as how steroids increase muscle mass but have deleterious effects on the male user’s penis size. Otherwise, however, the notion of steroids nicely captures the sense of sonic enhancement that was at the heart of the British blues network’s achievement. Perhaps it is just as fitting to say that these bands took the blues and used it as a steroid, injecting themselves with its energy to give substance to their own collective masculinity. Conclusions

By about 1972, the Anglo-­American rock network had laid the groundwork for much of what would follow. Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh could write (in 1974) of an “Anglo-­American heavy rock tradition”—­which contemporary groups like the Edgar Winter Group and Foghat were “distilling”—­without feeling the need to explain the tradition to readers. Such a tradition could largely be said to be the creation of the men under discussion in this book. The formulas these men created—­of eclectic “recombination” and bricolage; of “refiliation” with British cultural tropes, characters, and landscapes; and of “augmentation” of the blues’ tropic vocabulary—­would not only define the rest of those bands’ careers but also serve as the framework in which future bands would operate. This was true not only of not the ever-­ fragmenting musical styles of the 1970s but also of rock music over the subsequent three decades. Successful acts, whether defined and marketed as glam rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, or even punk rock, would work according to the terms set down by members of the British (and later Anglo-­American) rock network, either emulating them, tinkering with them, or downright subverting them. However, even with subversion, the Anglo-­American rock network’s example still informed the discourse. During the extraordinary period of creativity and innovation between 1966 and 1970, members of the Anglo-­American rock network internalized the lessons, themes, and sounds of their beloved blues and became creatively strong enough to make their own lasting statements. It was as a result of this combination of close study and creative confidence that these bands made their most powerful contributions to popular music in songs that were certainly not blues in the traditional twelve-­bar sense but were fueled by the blues’ despair, pain, and carnality. A case in point—­and I am not the first to make it—­is Eric Clapton’s masterpiece, “Layla,” which he recorded in 1970 with Derek and the Dominoes. Inspired by Clapton’s unrequited love for

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Pattie Boyd, it features a typical grinding electric blues riff from Clapton and a haunting contribution on slide guitar from Duane Allman (of the Allman Brothers Band and Clapton’s guest in the studio).148 However, it is Clapton’s voice, which he felt was inadequate to the task of conveying true blues emotion, that defines the song. After seven years of hearing, playing, preaching, arguing for, and sometimes even singing the blues, finally Clapton had, in “Layla,” caught up to his mentor, Robert Johnson, on “the abyss of complete psychic disintegration.”149 Critic Dave Marsh perhaps put it best when he wrote, “He had finally felt the music as deeply as anyone, matched Robert Johnson blow for blow, sorrow for sorrow, stride for stride. Having done so, he dropped from sight for three years.”150 Partly because of his unrequited love for Boyd, Clapton claims he developed an addiction to heroin, which caused him to withdraw into seclusion, not recording and only rarely performing.151 By the mid-­1970s, numerous of Clapton’s compatriots would “drop from sight” as well, their bands dissolved, their creative voices in abeyance, their personal lives blighted by fatigue, substance abuse, and other personal tragedies. Some of them—­most notably Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison—­passed from the mortal coil itself. The Beatles shocked the world with their breakup in 1970, depriving the British blues network of one of its major cultural forces and creative foils. A sense of disillusionment and hangover from the so-­called “Death of the Sixties” (whose causes have been said to range from the failure of the 1968 student-­led revolts to the 1970 campus shootings at Kent State and Jackson State universities) was mirrored by creative stagnation in the British blues network.152 Most of its members, however, did not go into seclusion for three years due to a drug addiction. They did not die, nor did their bands dissolve. And yet it is possible to look back from the remove of four decades and sense, as numerous unforgiving rock critics did at the time, that the output of transatlantic blues-­rock stars was not as creatively dynamic in the mid-­to late 1970s as it had been in the previous decade. To focus on just the Rolling Stones: Creem’s Lester Bangs attacked the band’s “lassitude and uncertainty” on the 1972 album Exile on Main St., going so far as to quote from Allen Ginsberg’s poem America, “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.”153 Exile elicited much the same combination of disdain and concern over perceived stagnation from other rock critics as well. James Lichtenberg wrote, “Jagger & co. seemed to be listening to [Canadian “sweet big-­band” orchestra leader] Guy Lombardo.”154 Lenny Kaye allowed that it was probably difficult for the Stones to constantly innovate, writing, “This continual topping of one’s self can only go on for so long, after which one must sit back and sustain what has

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already been built.”155 Such a statement could be applied to many of the Stones’ compatriots in the British blues network during the 1970s. But why? Bangs used the word tired. To fully appreciate the aptitude of that word, one must look at the simple facts of being a member of the British blues network by about 1972. The average rock star might have been playing in public for upward of ten years by then, in a variety of different bands. If he were a member of the Rolling Stones, he might have been a member of the same band, gigging and touring endlessly with the same four or five people, the entire time. Many British bands had attempted one or two tours of Britain, the United States, and possibly Europe; meanwhile, by 1975 the Rolling Stones had toured America eight times, and Led Zeppelin had done so six times in an eighteen-­month stretch from late 1968 to early 1970!156 In addition, many rock stars, whether seeking to emulate what they thought was the lifestyle of their blues idols or simply trying to meet the demands of touring, drank heavily and took drugs. Thus, the members of the Anglo-­American rock network were tired. At the very least, they were jaded. However, there may have been something else at work besides personal and creative fatigue. From the beginning, British rock musicians had always relied on the interpersonal network’s homosocial bonds and its capacity for camaraderie, competition, and collaboration. However, by the 1970s the bonds had attenuated; thus, the creativity that constant talking, drinking, cohabitating, and performing in close quarters had helped to spur, not surprisingly, attenuated as well. Long gone were the days when British bands could all be found socializing at a club like Eel Pie Island, much less living in the same flat or sharing the same van on the M1 motorway. Instead, British rock stars had scattered to the proverbial four winds—­for example, New York City, Los Angeles, the south of France—­and even members of the same band only saw each other when it was time to record a new album.157 And it was not simply geographic distance than posed a problem. When the Beatles broke up, they also severed the six-­year-­long creative bond between them and the Rolling Stones, thus removing the call (or the response, depending on your perspective) from this cultural call-­and-­response. Whether or not the Rolling Stones actually merited the self-­applied title “The World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band,” is a matter for discussion, but what cannot be denied is that existing alone at the top, as opposed to being one of two “World’s Greatest,” came at a creative cost. One can go a step further and say that, with the exception of drug addictions and periodic legal battles, there was not much personal conflict or struggle left in the lives or work of 1960s era British rock stars. There is no concrete proof that conflict and struggle are necessary for cultural creativity

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to flourish (in the blues or any branch of cultural production), but it will be remembered that the British, in consuming and interpreting the blues, had convinced themselves that these things were necessary. After all, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters had struggled (whether against poverty, discrimination, or, in Johnson’s case, the very hounds of hell), and they had produced works of incomparable genius. Consider Eric Clapton’s response to interviewer Jeffrey Peisch’s question about “the belief that you have to suffer in order to create.” I find that I live that way without actually wanting to. There’s something in my makeup that keeps upsetting the cart. . . . [T]here’s probably no doubt that my music would suffer if I became a very contented, happy person.158 That was in 1985. To this statement, one could offer as a rejoinder this assertion: when Clapton reemerged in 1974, having kicked his addiction to heroin and partnered with Boyd, there were some who opined that “much of [his] fire seems to have been dampened.” Said critic Peter Doggett, “[I]t’s unfair to judge a man’s art purely by its passion, but more had changed between . . . ‘Layla’ in 1970 and . . . [Clapton’s 1974 solo album] ‘461 Ocean Boulevard’ than Clapton’s romantic status.”159 Or consider this statement by Atlantic record producer (and friend of Clapton’s) Tom Dowd a year later. Eric has a whole new confidence now. There’s no more conflict, no more strain. . . . He’s matured. Hey . . . we’re talking about eight years ago if we’re talking about Cream. He’s gone from being  .  .  . an immature man to a young man.160 This is not to say, once again, that the struggles faced by white, middle-­class British men were really comparable to those faced by poor African-­American sharecroppers or factory workers. But whatever obstacles the British had to overcome as young blues enthusiasts spending their last shilling on brown ale or scrabbling for another paying gig, they had for the most part overcome them by the early 1970s. It would be, one imagines, hard to muster much conviction singing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” as a multimillionaire rock star with a country estate in Surrey. As Jody Breslaw put it, “[O]ne senses that the Stones’ battles have already been won: that, while still formidable presences, they”—­and here one might substitute many of the Stones’ British blues network compatriots—­“have settled ever-­so-­ slightly into domesticity.”161

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Before the members of the British blues network did so, however, their creative restlessness, their refusal to be satisfied, led them to dizzying creative heights. Clapton’s masterpiece—­and there are others dotting the oeuvre of his compatriots from this period—­proves that Anglo-­American rock musicians certainly did not abandon the blues as they developed creatively. Instead they used its themes, tropes and musical elements to redefine popular music and used its eclecticism to bring together all manner of diverse musical and lyrical elements to make a series of cultural statements that are still being emulated, and responded to, five decades later.

Conclusions This is an old blues number right here, we used to do it at Richmond, and all that sort of thing. We used to do it very fast. . . . Now we do it slow. —­Mick Jagger1

In the 1960s, a group of young, white, mainly middle-­class British men decided to “affiliate” themselves with African-­American blues culture—­first emulating and then innovating it. The result was a period of intense transatlantic creativity that was of great significance to modern Western intellectual and cultural history. The collective career of the British blues network is essential to our deeper understanding of salient cultural issues such as the reasons why bursts of creative output occur in distinct places at distinct times, especially when their occurrence seems superficially incongruous; the ways in which American culture influenced Western Europeans (and how some Western Europeans responded with cultural innovation of their own); the impact of interpersonal relationships and social networks on cultural production; and the negotiation of gender and sexual identities through the forms of mass popular culture. In Britain—­a small country in the process of giving up its former imperial power—­a cadre of young, white, mainly middle-­class men created a musical form that dominated not only Britain but also, when sent back across the Atlantic, the country that had invented rock ‘n’ roll in the first place. I have argued that it was Britain’s unique position of proximity to, and distance from, the United States and its culture that proved fundamentally important to explaining how Britons were able to create such an innovative, dominant cultural form. Britons shared a number of important commonalities with Americans—­not least of which were a common language and folkways dating back to the era of British colonization. But America was also “distant enough” for Britons to bring to bear the fresh perspective that, as Thorstein Veblen and Peter Gay have separately argued with respect to the Jews, only a 176

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cultural outsider can bring. Britons were free, if only in their own minds, of the ideological quicksand of “white guilt” and racism with which white Americans’ understanding of the blues was often encrusted. Britons also enjoyed a long tradition, dating back to their initial colonial adventures, of confidently borrowing from, or “shopping in,” other cultures. Latter-­day Britons could attach different cultural meanings to the blues and combine with it other musical and cultural forms seemingly at will. The result was a style of music so eclectic and dynamic that several commentators have doubted whether the blues was still a salient influence on it at all. The explosion of popular musical creativity that occurred in London and other British urban centers in the 1960s can also be explained by Britain’s situation as a relatively small and compact island archipelago in which urban cultural centers were densely located. The relative ease of travel and communication between London, the intellectual and cultural hub of Britain, and, for instance, Birmingham or Liverpool, meant that ideas and cultural forms could be disseminated more readily in Britain than in France, West Germany, or the United States. It also meant that blues enthusiasts-­cum-­performers had an easier time meeting and interacting with one another. I have argued that the interpersonal cultural network of British blues enthusiasts and performers was among the most important driving factors in explaining the extraordinary creativity of British blues-­based rock music. Cultural creativity is enhanced when cultural producers live and work in close social proximity. Through frequent social interaction, ideas are both hatched and honed. One’s social peers can provide friendly or not so friendly criticism and feedback, and the up-­close example of what one’s peers are doing can drive cultural producers to much greater achievements than if they all had been working alone. Such interpersonal networks have been the subject of much important work in European as well as American intellectual and cultural history. In the preceding chapters, I have provided an analogue to how these issues apply to the realm of popular music in Britain in the 1960s. The achievements of the British blues network still comprise a central part of our cultural heritage. The British, and later the Anglo-­American, blues-­rock network may not have survived the 1960s entirely intact. But while it was a going concern its members quite simply created many of the conventions and ground rules that blues-­based popular music would follow for the next few decades. The Anglo-­American blues-­rock network also helped to spawn—­for better or worse—­such seemingly disparate subgenres as glam rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, “Southern” rock, and alternative rock. Even punk rock, which rode to prominence in the mid-­1970s on a wave of self-­conscious iconoclasm and an avowed goal of figuratively spitting in its

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elders’ faces, cannot escape its debt to the examples set by Jagger, Clapton, Stewart, Beck, and Page. Even with subversion, the Anglo-­American rock network still informed the discourse. The greater significance of members of the British blues-­rock network lies not only in the massive formative influence they have exerted on more than fifty years’ worth of popular music but also in their role in helping to effect a major transition in Britain’s social and cultural place in the world. In 1962, speaking to an audience at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, remarked, “Great Britain has lost an Empire, but not yet found a role.”2 Within three years of this cutting yet admittedly apt remark, Britain had found a role: as the seedbed of influential blues-­based rock music; as the epicenter of a veritable revolution in first musical and then cultural taste; and as the arbiter of international cultural “cool,” the place where a gifted young African-­American guitarist like Jimi Hendrix would seemingly have to go to prove himself before being able to earn a similar reputation in his homeland. In the arena of youth culture and popular musical expression, Great Britain truly was “great” again. Of course Acheson had been speaking in terms of a global, geopolitical role vis-­à-­vis the United States and the Soviet Union. Cream’s ability to reach platinum status in album sales or to sell out the Royal Albert Hall was not going to restore Britain’s colonies, and it would be ludicrous for anyone to suggest that the financial success of Led Zeppelin caused any reconsideration of the balance of transatlantic political power. But cultural supremacy—­“soft power”—­is at once more ethereal and, in some ways, more significant to the development of the world than a traditionally defined economic or geopolitical imperium. By 1975 the Union Jack may not have flown over so many far-­flung bits of the world anymore, but, emblazoned on T-­shirts, umbrellas, and motor scooters, along with the bull’s-­eye symbol of the Royal Air Force, it represented British cultural dominance far more visibly, if far more subtly. It might not be entirely accurate to state, as David Christopher has been quoted as saying at the outset, that “all the biggest bands in the world were British.” But it is certain that whichever the biggest bands in the world were—­whether in 1975 or 2005 and whether they were British, American, Canadian, Australian, or otherwise—­they were powerfully influenced by the 1960s-­era British blues network. This network innovated the idioms of blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and then sent what they created back across the Atlantic. The musical and cultural “special relationship” between Britain and the United States helped to define discourses on race, sexuality, and power for more than a half century and will continue to do so. Generations of young men and women have engaged with these discourses by listening to Anglo-­

Conclusions  •  179

American blues-­based rock music and by taking its producers as their heroes; that, too, is the legacy of the British blues network. The members of the British blues-­rock network have repeatedly returned to the blues over the last quarter century or so, as middle-­aged men continuing to ply their trade (with varying degrees of success) in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. In the liner notes to his 2004 homage to Robert Johnson, Me and Mr. Johnson, Eric Clapton asserted that Johnson served as “the keystone of my musical foundation . . . a landmark that I navigate by, whenever I feel myself going adrift.”3 Less charitable opinions might have suggested that Clapton had certainly gone adrift a great deal in the years prior to 1994, when he returned to recording straight-­ahead blues with the cover-­laden album From the Cradle.4 Aesthetic judgments aside, what is important about Clapton’s statement is that it illustrates how formative an influence the blues remains after all these years, not only on Clapton but on many of his compatriots as well. Conventional wisdom holds that British rock musicians abandoned the blues almost as soon as they became financially viable, turning instead to rock poetry and adapting any other musical influences on offer—­everything but the evocative yet supposedly musically unsophisticated fare that had been their meat and drink in the days before they learned how properly to play their instruments. I have demonstrated throughout the preceding chapters that this is not the case. British rock musicians, and the American musicians with whom they were in increasing dialogue in the 1960s and 1970s did broaden their horizons as they matured in both age and proficiency, liberally raiding any and all cultural storehouses with which they came in contact. But they did not abandon the blues. It was their unique reception of, and education in, African-­American blues that made them even more predisposed toward eclectic musical bricolage. The blues was still at the core of the music played by the transatlantic blues network, no matter what other musical styles were also blended therein, and no matter how unbluesy the resulting rock music may have sounded. Clapton explained how he kept the blues in his music: “I used to think I could make any music, but the guitar playing would always be blues. . . . [I]f I took a solo, I would always make sure that I could find some place to put the blues in, so that I knew, even if nobody else did, that I always still had one foot on the path.”5 Men like Clapton, Jagger, Richards, Page, and Plant are still on that path more than a half century later. A crucial difference is that Britain’s blues-­rock pioneers are no longer the young enthusiasts who, uncertain of their identities as British middle-­class men, first started listening to blues and marveling at the immediacy and carnality in the grooves. They are now in their late sixties

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or early seventies. They are secure in their cultural reputations (and in many cases their fortunes) and now face a situation in which they are at the same age and level of musical experience as the men who once inspired them. In short the “sons” of the 1960s have now become the “fathers” of the 2000s. What is more, they are keenly aware of their status as godfathers and their lofty place in the long legacy of blues and rock music. When CBS’ John Blackstone referred, in a 2007 interview with Clapton, to the “great appeals” of the blues’ “long history,” Clapton implicitly acknowledged his place in that history at the age of sixty-­one: “When I was listening to music, even as a kid, all my heroes were always old guys. So, you know, I’m safe in that respect.”6 And so, in a way, is the blues itself. One of the British blues revivalists’ initial goals, starting in the early 1960s, was to spread the word about the blues in both Britain and America. By taking the blues, first emulating and then innovating it, and using the resulting musical forms to vault to international prominence, the British blues network has fulfilled this goal. After all, as Muddy Waters himself said, “It took the people from England to hip my people—­my white people—­that a black man’s music is not a crime to bring in the house.”7 Even Amiri Baraka, the black nationalist poet who famously declared that any white attempt to perform black blues was a heinous form of cultural larceny, seemed to give the efforts of the British blues enthusiasts his qualified approval. At least, Baraka said, “they have actually made a contemporary form” of the blues (unlike their American contemporaries).8 That bands like the Rolling Stones had made far more money doing this than the idiom’s originators was certainly problematic, but, Baraka said, at least the British attempted to make “reference to a deeper emotional experience” before cashing their checks.9 And as British blues-­rock godfathers have stayed in more or less the mainstream of twenty-­first-­century popular music, it seems certain that the blues will too. However, while Clapton and his compatriots will remain popular, they have most likely ceded their place at the forefront of the music scene in terms of widespread popularity, creativity, and the elusive quality of “star power.” This is no condemnation of their abilities; the recording industry operates cyclically, constantly pushing the youngest, newest, and “hottest” acts forward whilst established acts step back from the limelight. The British blues-­rock godfathers’ continuing relevance to popular music in the twenty-­ first century will be as éminences grises. They have come to play three primary roles in the music business as mentors, educators, and tributaries. All three roles demonstrate their abiding passion for the blues and their desire to continue, in whatever ways possible, the mission they set for themselves more than fifty years ago.

Conclusions  •  181

The last two decades or so have seen Britain’s blues-­rock godfathers becoming mentors, after a fashion, to a younger generation of blues-­influenced performers. Just as they once felt themselves the beneficiaries of the advice and support (or, in the case of Sonny Boy Williamson II, the “trial by ordeal”) of their African-­American blues “fathers,” now they, in turn, have sought publicly to fill that same role. So, for example, Jimmy Page joined the blues-­rock group the Black Crowes for a much-­discussed American tour in 1999 and 2000. The band’s onstage repertoire with Page combined both Led Zeppelin and Black Crowes material, with a few blues chestnuts thrown in for good measure. Brothers Chris and Rich Robinson, the Black Crowes’ lead singer and lead guitarist, respectively, told interviewers that they had been great admirers of Led Zeppelin ever since their childhood in Atlanta; the 1999 arrangement effectively allowed Chris to play the part of Robert Plant for a few months.10 Just as Page “adopted” the Robinson brothers, Eric Clapton has “adopted” alternative guitarist/singer John Mayer. On five occasions since 1999, Clapton has hosted the Crossroads Guitar Festival to raise money for his charity foundation for drug rehabilitation. Its primary purpose aside, these festivals have provided a chance for Clapton to get together with his friends (such as Steve Winwood, Jeff Beck, and Robbie Robertson) and heroes (Buddy Guy and B. B. King) for jam sessions.11 Clapton has invited Mayer to participate in the previous four festivals (2004, 2007, 2010, and 2013), thus subtly conferring his imprimatur on the younger guitarist. Their partnership deepened in 2006, when Clapton and Mayer collaborated on the latter’s album Continuum. In the liner notes, Mayer wrote, “Eric Clapton knows I steal from him and is still cool with it.”12 Finally, for their 2008 tour, which was documented for posterity’s sake by acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones invited Jack White, the guitarist/singer of the Detroit “garage rock” band the White Stripes, along for the ride. White, who at the time of writing is among the most overtly blues-­influenced performers in the modern mainstream, joined Jagger and Richards for a live version of the band’s “Loving Cup.”13 Prior to the film’s release, Richards and White spoke with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke. The resulting article was called “Blues Brothers,” but throughout the interview, both musicians (one of them sixty-­four years old, the other thirty-­two) made it clear that theirs was more of a father-­son relationship than anything else. White: When you see someone play, you know immediately if you can connect with them or not. You know you’re in the same family. And I think we are. You ask me . . . [w]as I born in the wrong

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generation because I didn’t get to play with Muddy? I play with the sons of those guys. And there will be more grandkids after that. Richards: [to White] [B]rother, you’ve made your deal now. The only thing you can do is pass it on. . . . That’s for the tombstone, baby. “He passed it on.”14 Herein lies the essence of the relationship that is at the heart of this book. First, young British devotees sought to “reverse adopt” African-­American bluesmen. Now those devotees have become old men themselves and have passed their musical legacy to a new generation of “sons.” Britain’s blues-­rock godfathers would not, one suspects, be nearly so active in playing the role of éminences grises if the influences, ideas, and metaphors of the blues were not still so personally meaningful to them and the legions of fans who regard them as heroes. African-­American blues music made its way across the Atlantic to Britain after the Second World War in an extremely haphazard and almost accidental manner. In an era in which American political and business interests were deliberately sending American culture to Western Europe literally by the boatload to fight on one front of the Cold War with Soviet Communism, the blues instead came to port cities like London and Liverpool through the back door. The two main vehicles by which the blues “invaded” Britain were record albums and radio broadcasts, and by looking at these media one can see the haphazardness of the affair. Record albums had to be bartered, borrowed, bought, or received as gifts from American GIs stationed in Britain or from friends and relations who had been to the United States. Some, like Mick Jagger, went to the extreme length of writing directly to American companies like Chess and ordering records that way. Radio broadcasts, too, point up the accidental nature of blues transmissions. Young enthusiasts tuned in to the AFN, a network meant for American GIs, in order to circumvent the BBC’s near monopoly over the airwaves. In addition to records and radio, there were rare public performances by African-­American bluesmen in Britain. These, too, were reliant on the initiative of interested individuals—­in this case, trad jazz revivalists who thought they heard in the blues the ancestor of Dixieland jazz. Through the efforts of revivalists like Chris Barber, African-­American bluesmen such as “Big Bill” Broonzy—­some of whom were not even well-­known in their own country—­ found themselves fêted by white audiences in Britain. In 1958 Muddy Waters played his first controversial club dates in Britain, sending trad jazz and folk fans running for the exits with his amplified Chicago-­style sound but electri-

Conclusions  •  183

fying a younger generation and setting the stage for two related movements—­ the first of emulation, and the second of innovation. The first movement began with the defection from trad jazz of two godfather figures, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, their formation of a Chicago-­style blues band, and subsequently the coalescence around this band of a fledgling interpersonal network out of which would emerge the first British R&B bands to achieve international acclaim. Meeting first in art school common rooms, pubs, and secondhand record shops throughout Britain, young white British blues enthusiasts gradually began to congregate in local ad hoc blues appreciation societies, trading record albums and scraps of information about the music itself, discussing the merits of this or that artist or song, and in time banging out their own earnest, if not yet technically proficient, versions of the music they had come to love. The biggest such “scene” was, obviously, in London, Britain’s social, economic, and cultural hub. By 1965 London was exerting a kind of gravitational pull on urban centers in the rest of Britain, and blues enthusiasts in Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, and Belfast began making their way south to join the fast-­growing British “blues boom.” Once installed in the capital or Home Counties, British blues enthusiasts lived, ate, drank, talked, and performed with each other, and the result was a much greater degree of creativity than would have resulted had they been socially separate, making their music without recourse to the inspiration and invidious comparison that came with being part of a social network. The fact that African-­American blues should have become so very popular with this interpersonal network of young, white, mostly middle-­class male listeners seems like it should be read as a colossal cultural anomaly—­ after all, what common ground would a relatively affluent art student from the suburban Home Counties have had with a poor, black Mississippi sharecropper? However, as I have demonstrated, it truly was not an anomaly. The blues, as interpreted by British enthusiasts, presented young white suburbanites with an alternative masculine ideal at a time when white, middle-­class British masculinity was perceived not so much as being in jeopardy as being unsatisfactory and boring. Britain had won the Second World War but appeared to be losing the peace. Its postwar inheritance included the loss of the Empire, economic and physical exhaustion, diminution on the international stage, and perceived cultural sclerosis. By contrast, the constructed persona of the “bluesman” was a sexually dynamic, knowledgeable, and virile figure who relished his freedom to wander the wide open spaces of America, carving out an existence and identity that were wholly separate from the anomie of middle-­class moder-

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nity. That the bluesman’s persona was, again, a cultural construction, and not to be construed as in any way accurately reflecting the life of itinerant African-­American musicians in the Deep South, either did not occur or did not matter to aspiring British blues enthusiasts. Preconceived notions of American culture and race relations, plus a long cultural heritage of “soldier-­heroes” that had attained this sort of masculine freedom and power in a British imperial context, made this group of young white men especially receptive to the blues. The earliest British blues enthusiasts, starting with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, listened to the blues because it spoke directly to them in ways that nothing else in the mainstream of popular culture could. They began to play the blues in public to appropriate some of its directness and masculine swagger for themselves. Thanks to their efforts, there was by 1962 a full-­ fledged blues-­and R&B-­driven scene in London, as well as similar scenes in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Belfast. Out of the Liverpool scene came the Beatles, the first British rock band to have an impact in the United States. The phenomenal success of the Beatles, dubbed “Beatlemania,” caused record executives in both countries to search frantically for more tuneful, radio-­friendly pop to throw into a “British Invasion” of America. In their decidedly broad talent search, they enlisted many of British R&B’s most prominent bands, including the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds, which soon achieved international prominence and began to have an impact on American popular music. Beginning in roughly 1965, having achieved some measure of stability in the marketplace, these British blues disciples began to feel that they had served their apprenticeships at the feet of their African-­American blues “fathers” and inaugurated a second cultural movement. This was an attempt to innovate popular musical expression within the blues tradition. British rock musicians never abandoned the blues, but they began drawing from other musical and cultural influences with which they came into contact to build on it. A robust dialogue with like-­minded performers in Britain as well as America further fueled their creativity. American musicians such as Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield, and members of the Band made music that caused their British counterparts to reconsider what they thought they knew about lyrical sophistication, blues “orthodoxy” and “authenticity,” and their ability to creatively conjure up a sense of “Americana” and American cultural tropes. In response to these reconsiderations, the British blues network began to make (or continued making) some important and interesting changes in direction, changes that allowed the British to scale even greater creative heights in the late 1960s.

Conclusions  •  185

The creative maturation of the British blues enthusiasts involved no longer trying overtly to pass themselves off as African Americans-­in-­training while not abandoning their foundation in the blues. As Cream drummer Ginger Baker put it, “You play yourself.” This meant establishing the common ground between American and British cultural modes and, in many cases, “refiliating” with their own cultural inheritance as Britons. Just as American music had conjured up for British listeners an imagined America peopled with often mythic characters, now British musicians set out to do the same with their own imagined Britain and quintessentially British characters. The next step for many British rock musicians was to branch out into any number of other outside cultural influences—­which, given Britain’s long tradition of “shopping” in the many cultures of its Empire, also meant “playing oneself,” in a way. In the late 1960s, almost every Western (and some non-­ Western) musical forms—­for instance, jazz, English folk, Indian raga, and Caribbean reggae—­became grist for the Britons’ increasingly eclectic and self-­consciously sophisticated mill. One might have been forgiven for wondering where a continued relationship with the gritty, down-­to-­earth blues tradition would fit into all this. But British rock musicians maintained their love of the blues, and in the late 1960s they “supercharged” the idiom, making it sound louder and more raw, embellishing its brash sexuality, and crafting an even more muscular and often more violent lyrical vocabulary. The all-­encompassing musical creativity of the Anglo-­American rock network can be seen largely to have fizzled out by the beginning of the 1970s. By that time, the world-­conquering optimism that had defined the wider youth culture of the 1960s had been succeeded by a prevailing mood of social and cultural fatigue. Various celebrity deaths and sociopolitical disasters contributed to what has been referred to as the “Death of the Sixties.” Besides the Anglo-­American rock stars who died, there were countless others who faded less dramatically, if just as completely, from the mainstream music scene, the victims of personal tragedy, substance abuse, or creative stagnation. The cultural fatigue was mirrored by, in many cases, actual fatigue. During its heyday in the 1960s, however, the raw, unabashed power and dynamism of British blues-­rock bands did an admirable job of restoring something of British masculinity’s faded sheen. In an era in which British men were seeking a role, a purpose, an affirmation of their virility and vitality, assistance came from a rather unlikely quarter. Drawing on, appropriating, and in many cases amplifying the blues’ vast reservoirs of sexual prowess, self-­ confidence, violence, power, and virtuosity, British bluesmen were able to reassert some sort of dominance over the world around them. The world depicted by the blues was perceived by British enthusiasts as exotic, intriguing,

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and adventuresome—­a world where the rules applied somewhat less rigidly, and where honest reality held sway over meaningless banality. African-­ American blues music enabled this generation of young, white, middle-­class Britons, anxious about their postwar sociocultural inheritance and enamored of what they perceived as the promise of the new American superpower, to stand up and declare, just as Muddy Waters had done a decade earlier, “I’m a man.” The sun may have set on the British Empire, but African American blues music proved to white, male British enthusiasts that, far from being the end of the world, “the nighttime is the right time.”15

Notes

Introduction

1. Chris Douring and Chip Stern, “Eric Clapton,” International Musician and Recording World, May 1981, 22. 2. David Christopher, British Culture: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), 272; Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 314. 3. Francis Davis, The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People, from Charley Patton to Robert Cray (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 221. 4. Michael Bane, White Boy Singin’ the Blues: The Black Roots of White Rock (New York: Da Capo, 1992), 151–­52. 5. Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2; Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin, 1981), 27, 41. 6. Christopher John Farley, “Big Bill Broonzy: Key to the Highway,” in Martin Scorsese Presents “The Blues: A Musical Journey,” ed. Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-­Warren, and Christopher John Farley et al. (New York: Amistad, 2003), 242. 7. John Milward, Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013), 40. 8. Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (New York: Anchor, 2004), 239; Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (New York: Penguin, 1999), 58–­59. 9. Ackroyd, Albion, 240. 10. Charles Dickens, quoted in Nicola Bradbury, “Dickens and the Form of the Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 155. 11. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 354. 12. For the decline of British power and the end of the empire, see Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). For an argument about how this decline affected British culture, see Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 13. Keith Richards, interview in “My Generation,” directed by Obie Benz, episode 6 187

188  •  Notes to Pages 5–12

of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 14. For a recent attempt to analyze all the various aspects of the “special relationship” from its beginnings in the colonial era, see Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2007). Christopher Hitchens has also examined the ways in which perceived shared racial heritage informed the growing special relationship in Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-­American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 2004). 15. Harold Macmillan to Richard Crossman, quoted in Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan (New York: Viking, 1989), 160. 16. Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: The History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), 212. 17. Paul Rees, Robert Plant: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 13. 18. Eric Clapton, “Eric Answers Questions about the Clapton Way of Life,” in Beat Instrumental (N.d., n.p.), Rolling Stone Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 19. Dave Thompson, Cream: The World’s First Supergroup (London: Virgin, 2005), 60. 20. Keith Richards, in The Rolling Stones, According to the Rolling Stones, ed. Dora Loewenstein and Philip Dodd (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003), 47. 21. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1969); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker, 2006); Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Matisse, and the Rise of Modern Art, trans, Cynthia Liebow (New York: Grove, 2001); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: Norton, 2007); Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005). 22. A sampling of recent entrants to a very crowded field would have to include Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Stephen Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2005); and Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Harmony, 2007). 23. John Lennon, interview in Lennon and Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1971), 67. 24. Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions,” in A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism, ed. Rick Tilman (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 12–­16. 25. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 17. 26. Chris Dreja, quoted in Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown, 2012), 54. 27. Eric Clapton, quoted in Ray Coleman, Clapton! The Authorized Biography (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1994), 28; Eric Clapton, interview in Steve Turner, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Eric Clapton,” Rolling Stone, July 18, 1974, 56. 28. Bill Wyman, with Richard Havers, Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey: A Journey to Music’s Heart and Soul (New York: Doring Kindersley, 2001), 9.

Notes to Pages 13–24  •  189

29. Ibid., 218. 30. Alan Lomax, “Skiffle: Where Is It Going?,” Melody Maker, September 7, 1957, 5. 31. Eric Burdon, quoted in Donald E. Wilcock, “Eric Burdon and the British Invasion,” King Biscuit Time 10, no. 4 (September 2003): 16. 32. Eddie “Son” House, quoted in Martin Scorsese Presents “The Blues: A Musical Journey,” ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 8. 33. Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004), 220–­21. 34. Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 35. Wald, Escaping the Delta, xiv. 36. Ibid., 247–­48. 37. Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 241. 38. Eric Clapton, quoted, respectively, in Peter Guralnick, “Eric Clapton at the Passion Threshold,” Musician, February 1990, 46; and “Red, White and Blues,” directed by Mike Figgis, episode 6 of The Blues: A Musical Journey, produced by Martin Scorsese (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003, DVD). 39. Chrissie Shrimpton, quoted in Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 172. 40. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Ulrich Adelt, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 41. Mick Jagger, quoted in PRI, “Blues Power,” episode 8 of The Blues, Public Radio International (Boston, WGBH, September 2003). 42. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 113–­19. 43. Earl Stewart, African-­American Music: An Introduction (New York: Schirmer, 1998), 205. 44. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 2–­3. 45. John Lennon, interview in Lennon and Wenner, Lennon Remembers, 66. 46. For soul, see Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For heavy metal, see Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993). For rap, see Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 47. Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor 823277, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1970); Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin III (Atlantic 7567826782, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1970). Chapter 1

1. Mick Jagger, quoted in Kenneth Eastaugh, “Ask a Silly Question . . . You Get a Silly Answer,” The Sun (London), January 23, 1971, 6.

190  •  Notes to Pages 24–28

2. Robert Plant, quoted in Lisa Robinson, “Zapping With Zep,” Disc, June 2, 1973, 8. 3. Keith Richards, interview with Andrew Franklin, in Tony Scherman, “The Hellhound’s Trail: Following Robert Johnson,” Musician, January 1991, 37. 4. Jimmy Page, quoted in Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown, 2012), 29. 5. The term “Home Counties” refers to the counties of southeastern England, which surround but do not generally include the city of London itself. Notions of which counties are included in the term vary, and it has no official legal definition (although it was used in legislation throughout the twentieth century). 6. Tolinski, Light and Shade, 29. 7. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), 421. 8. Ibid., 432–­33. 9. A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb, eds., Twentieth Century British Social Trends (London: Macmillan, 2000), 292; Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Postwar Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 56. 10. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, xxv–­xxvii; Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society, Politics (London: Longman and Pearson, 2005), 15–­27; A. N. Wilson, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 51–­52. 11. Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 337–­38. 12. John F. Lyons, America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 8. 13. Christopher Sandford, Keith Richards: Satisfaction (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 9. 14. Stephen Davis, Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-­Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones (New York: Broadway, 2001), xxvi. The album in question was The Rolling Stones: England’s Newest Hit Makers (ABKCO Records 8822872, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1964). 15. Pete Townshend, open letter to David Lister, The Independent (London), January 6, 2007, 11. 16. Peter “Ginger” Baker, liner notes to The Ginger Baker Trio, Going Back Home (Atlantic 82652, 1994, compact disc). 17. Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), 24. 18. Robert Plant, quoted in Paul Rees, Robert Plant: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 10. 19. Ray Coleman, Clapton! The Authorized Biography (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1994), 28. 20. Rod Stewart, Rod: The Autobiography (New York: Random House, 2013), 9. 21. Ina Zweininger-­Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–­1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124. 22. Bill Wyman, with Ray Coleman, Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band (New York: Viking, 1990), 14. 23. Davis, Old Gods, xxv; Keith Richards, interview in Blue Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?, directed by Chris Rodley (London: BBC4, 2011, DVD). 24. Jack Bruce, interview in Blue Britannia. 25. For example, historian Shawn Levy’s study of “Swinging London” begins with a

Notes to Pages 28–32  •  191

single word: “Gray.” Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 3. 26. Chris Douring and Chip Stern, “Eric Clapton,” International Musician and Recording World, May 1981, 23. 27. Keith Richards, interview in Blue Britannia; Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–­2000, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), 441–­42. 28. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 354. 29. Townshend, open letter to David Lister, 11. 30. Exchange between Richard Vernon (“Man on train”) and John Lennon and Ringo Starr (themselves), in A Hard Day’s Night, directed by Richard Lester (Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment, 2002, DVD, originally released in 1964). 31. Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006), 210. 32. See David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th Century (London: Longman, 1991). 33. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 282. 34. Alan Lomax, “Skiffle: Where Is It Going?,” Melody Maker, September 7, 1957, 5. 35. Douring and Stern, “Eric Clapton,” 23. 36. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–­60 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 13; Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 3. 37. Andrew S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-­Nineteenth Century (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 18–­19. 38. Alan Clayson, The Rolling Stones: Origin of the Species (New Malden, UK: Chrome Dreams, 2007), 43–­44. The GCE is the General Certificate of Education conferred on secondary students after they take their final examinations. “O” (Ordinary) levels were conferred on students scoring in the top 25 percent; “A” (Advanced) levels were conferred on students who scored in this range after taking two additional years of schooling beyond their “O” levels. 39. Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (New York: Morrow, 1995), 47. 40. Robert Plant, interview with Tara Brown, 60 Minutes (Australian version), February 17, 2013. 41. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 295. 42. Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-­racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 51. 43. Dilwyn Porter, “‘Never-­Never Land’: Britain under the Conservatives,” in From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain since 1945, ed. Nick Tiratsoo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), 112. 44. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 313. 45. Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 71. 46. See Paul Gilroy, “Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 47. Chris Welch, Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused—­The Stories behind Every Song (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 24. 48. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3.

192  •  Notes to Pages 32–36

49. David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–­1945 (London: Phoenix, 2000), xxvi. 50. Ibid., 280–­81; David Crystal, “American English in Europe,” in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976), 57–­68. 51. George Orwell, quoted in Orwell in Tribune, ed. Paul Anderson (London: Politico’s, 2006), 57; J. B. Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes, Journey Down a Rainbow (New York: Harper and Bros., 1955), xi. 52. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 456. 53. Ibid., xxii. 54. Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–­1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 74–­76. 55. Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War Two Britain (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 199. 56. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 302–­7. 57. See Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–­1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 283. 58. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 313. 59. Pete Townshend, liner notes to The Who, Who’s Missing (MCA 25982, 1987, compact disc). 60. Davis, Old Gods, 104. 61. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); David Omissi, “Martial Races: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India, 1858–­ 1939,” War and Society 9, no. 1 (May 1991): 1–­27. 62. Tony Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 22. 63. Josephine Rickett, open letter to the Examiner (Huddersfield, UK), September 29, 1943, quoted in Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull, 201. 64. Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 255. 65. Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–­2000 (London: Macmillan, 2002), 140–­41. 66. Sandbrook, White Heat, 679–­80. 67. Ulrich Adelt, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 61. 68. See ibid., chapter 3, for a good discussion of what Adelt calls Clapton’s “racial essentialism.” 69. Judt, Postwar, 299. 70. Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 229; Christina Hardyment, Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating (London: BBC Books, 1995), 115. 71. Peter Hutchings, “Beyond the New Wave: Realism in British Cinema, 1959–­63,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 148. 72. Lyons, America in the British Imagination, 16. 73. Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 72. 74. For example, the Blum-­Byrnes Treaty of 1946 stipulated that in exchange for

Notes to Pages 36–39  •  193

American financial aid to France a quota would be established whereby, of the films to be shown to domestic audiences in France, 65 percent had to be American made. See Kuisel, Seducing the French, 18–­19. 75. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 216–­17. 76. Lyons, America in the British Imagination, 10. 77. Ibid., 11; Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 454. 78. See, for example, Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Dell, 1970); Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); and James Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–­1977 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). 79. Dick Bradley, Understanding Rock ‘n’ Roll: Popular Music in Britain, 1955–­1964 (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), 17. 80. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 94. 81. Brian Ward, “‘By Elvis and All the Saints’: Images of the American South in the World of 1950s British Popular Music,” in Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock ‘n’ Roll, ed. Franklin T. Lambert and Joseph P. Ward ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 205–­6. 82. Daily Mirror, August 16, 1956; Daily Mail, September 5, 1956; Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 96. 83. Davis, Old Gods, xxvii. 84. John Lennon, interview with Hunter Davies (1968), reprinted in Hunter Davies, The Beatles, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 19. 85. Paul McCartney, quoted in The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2000), 22. 86. John Peel and Sandra Ravenscroft, John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes (Chicago: Review History, 2007), 48. 87. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 465; Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 28. 88. Billy Hatton, quoted in Lyons, America in the British Imagination, 19. 89. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 182. 90. Bane, White Boy Singin’ the Blues, 153. 91. Ward, “‘By Elvis and All the Saints,” 193. 92. Tony Topham, interview in Eric Clapton: At the Crossroads, directed by Robin Bextor (n.p., 2002, DVD). 93. Ian Macdonald, The People’s Music (London: Pimlico, 2003), 192. 94. Patrick Humphries, The Lonnie Donegan Story, 1931–­2002: Puttin’ On the Style (London: Virgin, 2003), 78.; George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts ( London: Penguin, 1970), 26. 95. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 467. 96. Ward, “‘By Elvis and All the Saints,’” 196; Alan Clayson, Beat Merchants: The Origins, History, Impact, and Rock Legacy of the 1960s British Pop Groups (New York: Blandford, 1995), 42. 97. Mo Foster, 17 Watts? The Birth of British Rock Guitar (London: Sanctuary, 2000), 34–­36.

194  •  Notes to Pages 39–44

98. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–­1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79. 99. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 472. 100. Juliet Gardiner, From the Bomb to the Beatles: The Changing Face of Post-­war Britain (London: Collins and Brown, 1999), 11; Lyons, America in the British Imagination, 15. 101. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 179. 102. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 87. 103. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 474. 104. Steve Turner, Cliff: For the Record (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 79. 105. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 476. 106. Brian Jones, quoted in Nicholas Schaffner, The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1983), 56. 107. Bill Wyman, interview in Blue Britannia. British listeners may have been more familiar with a cover version of the song recorded by English pop singer Helen Shapiro in 1962. 108. Doris Bernays and Edward Bernays, What the British Think of Us (New York: English Speaking Union, 1957), 18. 109. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York: Dutton, 1975), 22–­23. 110. Richard L. Rapson, Britons View America: Travel Commentary, 1860–­1935 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 106–­25. 111. Eric Burdon, interview in “Red, White, and Blues,” directed by Mike Figgis, episode 6 of The Blues: A Musical Journey, produced by Martin Scorsese (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003, DVD). 112. Marcus, Mystery Train, 25. 113. Ian McLagan, All the Rage: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Odyssey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1998), 13. 114. Richard Newman, John Mayall: Blues Breaker (Chessington, UK: Castle Communications, 1995), 62. 115. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 11. 116. Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York: Broadway, 2007), 81. 117. Keith Richards, interview in “My Generation,” directed by Obie Benz, episode 6 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 118. William Chew, ed., Images of America: Through the European Looking Glass (Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel,, 1997), 43. 119. Keith Richards, interview in “Britain Invades, America Fights Back,” directed by Andrew Solt, episode 3 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 120. Noel Redding, in Tony Glover, “An Interview with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience,” Circus, March 1969, 35; Nik Cohn, “Ginger Baker, ‘Cult-­Hero,’” New York Times, May 31, 1970, 23. 121. Mick Jagger, interview in Jack Hutton, “Mick Jagger: Interview-­in-­Depth,” New Musical Express, May 28, 1966, 11. 122. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 133–­34. 123. Piri Halasz, “You Can Walk across It on the Grass,” Time, April 15, 1966. 124. Dave Thompson, Cream: The World’s First Supergroup (London: Virgin, 2005), 1.

Notes to Pages 44–51  •  195

125. Blow-­Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004, DVD, originally released in 1966). 126. Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Forty Years of Modernism (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2003), 16. 127. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 106. 128. Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 60–­63. 129. Pete Townshend, quoted in Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 114. 130. Ibid, 109. 131. Casey Harison, Feedback: The Who and Their Generation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 36; Richard Weight, Mod! A Very British Style (London: Random House, 2013), 40–­41. 132. Thompson, Cream, 11. 133. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 159, 235. 134. Alan Clayson, The Yardbirds: The Band That Launched Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2002), 41; Richard Barnes, The Who: Maximum R&B (London: Plexus, 1990), 37. 135. Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 13. 136. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 7. 137. Thompson, Cream, 44. 138. Mervyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: The Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). Chapter 2

1. Eric Burdon, interview in Dan Aykroyd and Ben Manilla, Elwood’s Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends and Stars (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2004), 133. 2. James Phelge, Nankering with the Rolling Stones: The Untold Story of the Early Days (Chicago: A Cappella, 2000), 25. 3. Alan Clayson, Mick Jagger: The Unauthorized Biography (London: Sanctuary, 2005), 32. 4. Eric Burdon, interview in “Red, White, and Blues,” directed by Mike Figgis, episode 6 of The Blues: A Musical Journey, produced by Martin Scorsese (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003, DVD). 5. Annette Carson, Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2001), 17. 6. See David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7. This is a supposition made, but not fully explored, by Charles Shaar Murray in Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 264–­65. 8. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 280–­81; Pete Townshend, liner notes to The Who, Who’s Missing (MCA 25982, 1987, compact disc). 9. Stephen Davis, Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-­Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones (New York: Broadway, 2001), xxvi. 10. Juliet Gardiner, “Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here”: The American GI in World War II Britain (New York: Canopy, 1992), 112. 11. Christopher Sandford, Mick Jagger: Primitive Cool (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 30.

196  •  Notes to Pages 51–55

12. Van Morrison, interview in Bill Flanagan, “Van Morrison Emerges from the Shadows,” Musician, January 1985, 32. 13. Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 100. 14. Alan Clayson, Beat Merchants: The Origins, History, Impact, and Rock Legacy of the 1960s British Pop Groups (New York: Blandford, 1995), 74. 15. Chris Farlowe, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 16. Eric Clapton, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 17. Georgie Fame, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 18. Georgie Fame, interview in Spencer Leigh, “Obituaries: Rik Gunnell, Club Owner and Impresario,” The Independent Online (London), March 28, 2007, accessed May 13, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/rik-gunnell-454967.html 19. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 168–­69; Patrick Morley, “This Is the American Forces Network”: The Anglo-­American Battle of the Airwaves in World War II (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 3. 20. Ibid., appendix 1, 151–­55. 21. Ibid., 127–­29. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Robert Giddings, “Radio in Peace and War,” in Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, ed. Clive Bloom and Gary Day (London: Longman, 2000), 133. 24. As a result, the BBC took on the popular nickname “Auntie.” See Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–­1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 459–­ 60. 25. Ibid., 14. 26. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), 379. 27. Eric Clapton, interview in Robert Palmer, “Eric Clapton: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, June 20, 1985, reprinted in Robert Palmer, Blues and Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, ed. Anthony DeCurtis (New York: Scribner, 2009), 222. 28. Dave Thompson, Cream: The World’s First Supergroup (London: Virgin, 2005), 28. 29. Ibid., 29. 30. Robert Santelli, “A Century of the Blues,” in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, ed.Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 43. 31. See, for example, Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 34; Davis, Old Gods, 14; and Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: A Life of Pete Townshend (New York: Cooper Square, 2002), 13. 32. Robert Plant, quoted in Paul Rees, Robert Plant: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 27. 33. Fame, interview in “Red, White and Blues.” 34. Sandford, Mick Jagger, 31; Spitz, The Beatles, 41. 35. Richard Newman, John Mayall: Blues breaker (Chessington, UK: Castle Communications, 1995), 56. 36. Thompson, Cream, 24. 37. Clapton, Fame, and Steve Winwood, interviews in “Red, White and Blues.” 38. Jimmy Page, quoted in Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown, 2012), 12.

Notes to Pages 56–61  •  197

39. Eric Clapton, interview with Andrew Franklin, in Tony Scherman, “The Hellhound’s Trail: Following Robert Johnson,” Musician, January 1991, 33. 40. Ibid. 41. Eric Clapton, interview in Peter Guralnick, “Eric Clapton at the Passion Threshold,” Musician, February 1990, 46. 42. Russell Banks, “The Devil and Robert Johnson: The Blues and the 1990s,” New Republic 204, no. 17 (1991): 26–­28. 43. Keith Richards, interview in Scherman, “Hellhound’s Trail,” 37–­38. 44. Robert Plant, interview in Scherman, “Hellhound’s Trail,” 41. 45. The Rolling Stones, Dora Loewenstein, and Philip Dodd, According to the Rolling Stones (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003), 28. 46. Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Forty Years of Modernism (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000), 23. 47. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–­1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 67–­72. 48. Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain, 1950–­70 (London: Quartet, 1989), 262. 49. Daniel Farson, Soho in the Fifties (London: Michael Joseph, 1987), 72. 50. Godbolt, History of Jazz, 263. 51. Rees, Robert Plant, 26. 52. John F. Lyons, America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73. 53. Fame, interview in “Red, White and Blues.” 54. Phelge, Nankering, 103. 55. Richard Barnes, Mods! (London: Eel Pie, 1979), 131. The story is corroborated by Ian McLagan (who gives the American flatmate’s name as Tom Wright) in his memoir All the Rage: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Odyssey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1998), 177. 56. Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 185; Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 172. 57. The Rolling Stones, According to the Rolling Stones, 14. 58. Pete Townshend, Pete Townshend—­Who He? (blog), October 3, 2006, accessed May 9, 2007, http://petetownshendwhohe.blogspot.com/ 2006_10_03_archive.html 59. Ward, “‘By Elvis and All the Saints’, 192. 60. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 508, 736. 61. Alan Clayson, Call Up the Groups! The Golden Age of British Beat, 1962–­67 (New York: Blandford, 1985), 33; Thompson, Cream, 21. 62. Peter Lewis, The Fifties (London: Heinemann, 1978), 140. 63. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 73. 64. Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 72. 65. Bob Brunning, Blues: The British Connection (New York: Blandford, 1986), 12; George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London: Penguin, 1970), 35. 66. Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues, 75. 67. Paul Jones, interview in Blue Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?, directed by Chris Rodley (London: BBC4, 2011, DVD). 68. Santelli, “Century of the Blues,” 43; Palmer, Deep Blues, 130. 69. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 468.

198  •  Notes to Pages 61–64

70. Brunning, Blues, 12. 71. Ibid. 72. Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, 159. 73. Les Fancourt, liner notes to Muddy Waters, The Complete Muddy Waters, 1947–­67 (Charly Records CD RED BOX 3, 1992, compact disc). 74. Palmer, Deep Blues, 258. 75. Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues, 82. 76. Davis, Old Gods, xxix. 77. Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, 163. 78. Willie Dixon, with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (New York: Da Capo, 1989), 198. 79. Ulrich Adelt, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 86. 80. Thompson, Cream, 33. 81. Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, 184. 82. Val Wilmer, “The First Time I Met the Blues,” in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 7. 83. Adelt, Blues Music, 93. 84. Murray, Boogie Man, 269. 85. James Segrest and Mark Hoffmann, Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 209. 86. Brunning, Blues, 166. 87. Murray, Boogie Man, 273–­275. 88. Ibid,, 269. 89. Santelli, “Century of the Blues,” 35. 90. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 16. See also William E. Donoghue, ’Fessor Mojo’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” (Seattle: Mojo Visions, 1997), 8. 91. Brunning, Blues, 175. 92. Horst Lippmann, liner notes to Various artists, American Folk Blues Festival: 1962–­1965 (Evidence 26100, 1995, compact disc). 93. Eric Burdon, interview in Donald E. Wilcock, “Eric Burdon and the British Invasion,” King Biscuit Time 10, no. 4 (September 2003): 17. 94. Brunning, Blues, 35. 95. Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “I’m Trying to Make London My Home” is included on Various artists, American Folk Blues Festival: 1962–­1965 (Evidence 26100, 1995, compact disc). 96. Adelt, Blues Music, 78; Jim O’Neal, preface to interview with Eddie Boyd, in The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine, edited by Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel (New York: Routledge, 2002), 227. 97. Donoghue, ’Fessor Mojo’s “Don’t Start Me To Talkin’,” 103. 98. Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York: Broadway, 2007), 42. 99. Simon Napier and Sonny Boy Williamson II [Aleck or Rice Miller], “I Knew Robert Johnson,” in Nothing but the Blues, edited by Mike Leadbitter (London: Hanover, 1971), 96. 100. Sean Egan, Animal Tracks: The Story of the Animals, Newcastle’s Rising Sons (Lon-

Notes to Pages 64–69  •  199

don: Helter Skelter, 2001), 37; Eric Burdon, interview in Wilcock, “Eric Burdon,” 17; Clapton, Clapton, 48. 101. Robert Plant, interview in Aykroyd and Manilla, Elwood’s Blues, 139. 102. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 48. 103. Robbie Robertson, quoted in Palmer, Deep Blues, 263. Fellow Hawk Levon Helm remembers things a little differently, claiming that Williamson II harbored a guarded respect for the British bands. Levon Helm, with Stephen Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, 2nd ed. (Chicago: A Cappella, 2000), 63. 104. Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of Blues Music (New York: Amistad, 2004), xvi. 105. Murray, Boogie Man, 269. 106. Eric Clapton, interview in Guralnick, “Eric Clapton,” 48. 107. Dixon, I Am the Blues, 131. 108. Giorgio Gomelsky, quoted in Dixon, I Am the Blues, 135. 109. The Rolling Stones, Loewenstein, and Dodd, According to the Rolling Stones, 16. 110. Segrest and Hoffmann, Moanin’ at Midnight, 218. 111. Steve Winwood, interview in Chris Welch, “Last of the R&B Groups?,” Melody Maker, June 12, 1965, 8; David Simonelli, Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s (Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2013), 43. 112. Jim Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–­1977 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 8. 113. This is not to suggest that these differences were not previously present, simply that the music industry was far less aware of them. See Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37. 114. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Dream of Southern Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 28. 115. Davis, History of the Blues, 226. 116. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 5, 7. 117. John Mayall, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 118. Fame, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 119. Rod Stewart, interview with John Morthland in Rolling Stone, April 1970, reprinted in The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking with the Legends of Rock, 1967–­1980, ed. Peter Herbst (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 125. 120. Davis, Old Gods, 104. 121. Clapton, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 122. Ibid. 123. Murray, Boogie Man, 271. 124. Clayson, Beat Merchants, 159. 125. Roger Daltrey, interview in Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 28. 126. Eric Clapton, interview in Steve Turner, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Eric Clapton,” Rolling Stone, July 18, 1974, 12. 127. George Case, Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Hal Leonard, 2007), 67 (my emphasis). 128. Jimmy Page, quoted in Tolinski, Light and Shade, 90.

200  •  Notes to Pages 70–77

129. Murray, Boogie Man, 271. 130. Thompson, Cream, 2–­3; Ken Emerson, “Britain: The Second Wave,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992), 419–­27; Chris Welch, Led Zeppelin, Dazed and Confused: The Stories behind Every Song (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998), 8. 131. Emerson, “Britain,” 424–­25. 132. Winwood, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 133. Keith Richards, interview in Jas Obrecht, “Keith Richards: On Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson,” Guitar Player 27, no. 9 (September 1993): 90. 134. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 294. 135. Paul Jones, interview in Blue Britannia (emphasis in original). 136. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 95; Davis, Old Gods, 46. Artist and repertory executives were essentially talent scouts. 137. Lester Bangs, “The British Invasion,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992); Clayson, Beat Merchants, 113–­15. 138. Ibid., 162. 139. Jim Dickinson, quoted in Robert Gordon, It Came from Memphis (New York: Pocket, 2001), 6. 140. Paul Jones, interview in Blue Britannia. Chapter 3

1. Led Zeppelin, “Good Times, Bad Times,” Led Zeppelin (Atlantic 7567826322, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 2. Ian McLagan, quoted in Segrest and Hoffmann, Moanin’ at Midnight, 219. 3. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 17. 4. Jimmy Page, quoted in Paul Trynka, “Call of the Wild: Howlin’ Wolf,” in Mojo Classics: Blues Heroes Starring Eric Clapton, June 2005, 15. 5. “Eric Clapton Chronology,” Rolling Stone, June 20, 1985, Rolling Stone Magazine Records, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, accessed June 17, 2015. 6. Muddy Waters, unpublished transcript of a Rolling Stone interview with Don DeMicheal, April 23, 1969, Rolling Stone Magazine Records, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, accessed June 17, 2015. 7. Bill Wyman, interview in Dan Aykroyd and Ben Manilla, Elwood’s Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends and Stars (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2004), 158–­59. 8. Dennis Jarrett, “The Singer and the Bluesman: Formulations of Personality in the Lyrics of the Blues,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1978): 31. 9. See, for example, Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993); and Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-­war Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). 10. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–­60 (New York:

Notes to Pages 77–81  •  201

Oxford University Press, 1981), 7; Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 58–­62. 11. Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), 64–­65; Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York: Broadway, 2007), 4–­7, 36–­37; Rod Stewart, Rod: The Autobiography (New York: Random House, 2013), chaps. 1 and 2. 12. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6–­10, 77–­81. 13. The literature on this subject is especially rich (perhaps understandably) for West Germany. See, for example, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). For France, see Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 14. Pete Townshend, open letter to David Lister, The Independent (London), January 6, 2007; Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 100. 15. Mosse, Image of Man, 181. 16. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 253–­68. 17. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 32; Mosse, Image of Man, 15. 18. Martin Green, The Adventurous Male: Chapters in the History of the White Male Mind (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 181. 19. Ibid., 182. 20. Daniel Snowman, Britain and America: An Interpretation of Their Culture, 1945–­ 1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 56–­57. 21. Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 51. 22. Robert Christgau, “The Rolling Stones,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992), 240. 23. Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counter-­Culture (London: Pimlico, 1999), 56. 24. Roper, Masculinity, 12. 25. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), 125. 26. The Kinks, “Well-­Respected Man,” Kinks-­Size/Kinkdom (Rhino R21S-­75769, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 27. Ibid. 28. The Rolling Stones, “Memo from Turner,” Metamorphosis (ABKCO Records 719006, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1975). 29. Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 170. 30. The Rolling Stones, “Get Off My Cloud,” December’s Children (and Everybody’s) (ABKCO Records 7451–­2, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 31. The Rolling Stones, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Out of Our Heads (ABKCO Records 719429, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1965).

202  •  Notes to Pages 81–86

32. The Who, “A Legal Matter,” The Who Sings My Generation (MCA MCAD-­31330, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 33. Robert Plant, interview in Cameron Crowe, “Jimmy Page and Robert Plant: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, March 13, 1975, 8. 34. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 177. 35. John Osborne, Look Back In Anger (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 89. 36. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, 212. 37. Cover art by Burt Goldblatt, Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia/Legacy 52944, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1961). 38. Frank Driggs, liner notes to ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 36; James Marshall, “Let’s Get Drunk and Truck: A Guide to the Party Blues,” in Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 119. 41. Pearson and McCulloch, Robert Johnson, chaps. 3–­6; Wald, Escaping the Delta, chaps. 6, 11, 13. 42. Chris Dreja, interview in Blue Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?, directed by Chris Rodley (London: BBC4, 2011, DVD). Surbiton is the West London suburb from which Dreja hailed. 43. Mike Vernon, interview in ibid. 44. William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 327. 45. Roberta Freund Schwartz, “Preaching the Gospel of the Blues: Blues Evangelists in Britain,” in Cross the Water Blues: African-­American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 159. 46. Bob Groom, The Blues Revival (London: Studio Vista, 1972), 29–­30; Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 34–­35. 47. Segrest and Hoffmann, Moanin’ at Midnight, 218. 48. Muddy Waters, “Young-­Fashioned Ways,” London Sessions (Chess CHD-­9298, 1989, compact disc, originally released in 1972). 49. Palmer, Deep Blues, 113. 50. “Blues Language,” Harry’s Blues Lyrics Online, accessed November 13, 2007, http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/blueslanguage.htm#top 51. Debra DeSalvo, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (New York: Billboard, 2006), 13; Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (New York: Horizon, 1960), 36. 52. Tommy Johnson, quoted in Palmer, Deep Blues, 59–­60. 53. Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 100. 54. Eric Clapton, interview with Andrew Franklin in Tony Scherman, “Hellhound on My Trail: Following Robert Johnson,” Musician, January 1991, 50–­51. 55. Keith Richards, in ibid., 37; Keith Richards, interview in Jas Obrecht, Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1993), 8. 56. Eric Burdon, with J. Marshall Craig, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2001), 80.

Notes to Pages 86–90  •  203

57. Marshall, “Let’s Get Drunk,” 119; Robert Johnson, “Traveling Riverside Blues” and “Come On in My Kitchen,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers. 58. Muddy Waters, “Hoochie-­ Coochie Man,” The Chess Box (Chess/MCA AACHD380002, 1989, compact disc). 59. Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy,” on ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Muddy Waters, “Got My Mojo Workin’,” on ibid. 62. Versions of “Got My Mojo Workin’” were recorded or performed by, among many others, the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Them, and the Zombies. Alan Clayson, Beat Merchants: The Origins, History, Impact, and Rock Legacy of the 1960s British Pop Groups (London: Blandford, 1995), 78. 63. Muddy Waters, “You Need Love,” on Waters, The Chess Box. 64. Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 61. 65. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 136. 66. Robert Plant, interview in Aykroyd and Manilla, Elwood’s Blues, 139. 67. Keith Richards, interview in Blue Britannia (my emphasis). 68. Eddie “Son” House, quoted in Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 8. 69. Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 10. See also Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 63. 70. Marshall, “Let’s Get Drunk,” 121; “Blind Lemon” Jefferson, “That Black Snake Moan,” Complete Recorded Works, Volume 2 (1927) (Document DOCD 5018, 1994, compact disc); Robert Johnson, “Traveling Riverside Blues,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers; Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster,” Howlin’ Wolf (The Rockin’ Chair Album) (Vogue 600111, 1986, compact disc, originally released in 1962). 71. Slim Harpo, “I’m a King Bee,” The Best of Slim Harpo (Rhino 70169, 1989, compact disc). 72. “Mississippi Fred” McDowell, “Shake ‘Em on Down,” Mississippi Blues (Black Lion 760179, 1992, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 73. John Lee Hooker, “Crawlin’ King Snake,” I’m John Lee Hooker (Collectables COLCD 71002, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1960). 74. See, for example, Muddy Waters, “Long Distance Call,” on Waters, The Chess Box. 75. Willie Dixon, “29 Ways,” I Am the Blues (Columbia/Legacy 53627, 1993, compact disc, originally released in 1970); Sonny Boy Williamson II, “One Way Out,” One Way Out (Universal 93315, 2007, compact disc, originally released in 1968). 76. Michael Coyne, Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 19. 77. Elmore James, “Dust My Broom,” Blues Masters: The Very Best of Elmore James (Rhino 79803, 2000, compact disc); “Big Bill” Broonzy, “Key to the Highway,” Complete Recorded Works, Volume 11 (1940–­42) (Document 5133, 1993, compact disc). 78. Johnny Shines, quoted in Palmer, Deep Blues, 118. 79. Pearson and McCulloch, Lost and Found, 7. 80. Robert Johnson, “Traveling Riverside Blues” and “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers.

204  •  Notes to Pages 90–93

81. Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” on ibid. 82. McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 60. 83. Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Bernhard Klein, “Introduction: Britain and the Sea,” in Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspective on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, ed. Bernhard Klein (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 7. 84. Clapton, Clapton, 121. Ripley was Clapton’s hometown; Hurtwood Edge was the country villa in which he began living in 1968. 85. Michael Schumacher, Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 92. 86. Jonathan Gregg, “On Stage: E. C. Returns to Form,” Record, July 1985, 35. 87. Clapton, Clapton, 134 (my emphasis). 88. Robert Greenfield, Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (New York: Da Capo, 2006), 99. 89. Harry Shapiro, Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music (New York: Morrow, 1988), 43. 90. Fergus Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the Battle for the Soul of America (New York: Amistad, 2005), 121. 91. Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 32. 92. Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: The City and the Music (New York: Da Capo, 1975), 34. 93. James A. McPherson, Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture (New York: Random House, 1976), 6. 94. Houston A. Baker, “Introduction to Blues, Ideology, and African-­American Literature,” reprinted in Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, edited by Stephen C. Tracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 465. 95. Lead Belly, “Leavin’ Blues,” Complete Recorded Works, Volume 1 (1939–­1940) (Document DOCD 5226, 1995, compact disc). 96. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 30; George Douglas, All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 235–­36. 97. Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightning,” Moanin’ in the Moonlight (Universal/ MCA 3206, 2001, compact disc, originally released in 1962). In fact, early publicity for the Who attempted to distinguish the band by announcing that it did not cover the song! John Atkins, The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–­1998 ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 47. 98. Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 13. 99. Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 78. 100. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 42. 101. Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 558–­ 622.

Notes to Pages 93–97  •  205

102. Christopher Finch, Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 174–­76. 103. Muddy Waters, “Tiger in Your Tank,” The Complete Muddy Waters, 1947–­1967 (Charly Records CD RED BOX 3, 1992, compact disc); Walter Winnick, “Muddy Waters: A Living Legend in the Blues,” The Hatchet, February 2, 1976, 5. 104. “Terraplane” refers to the Hudson Terraplane, a car that was popular in the late 1930s. See “Robert Johnson—­Terraplane Blues,” Harry’s Blues Lyrics Online, accessed December 8, 2007, http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/lyrics/robert_johnson/terraplane_ blues.htm#top 105. Robert Johnson, “Terraplane Blues,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers. 106. Ibid. 107. Led Zeppelin, “Trampled Underfoot,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song/Atlantic 7567924422, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1974). 108. Finch, Highways to Heaven, 178. 109. Doris Bernays and Edward Bernays , What the British Think of Us, 12. 110. Eric Clapton, quoted in Dan Forte, “The Eric Clapton Story,” Guitar Player, July 1985, 57. 111. Ulrich Adelt, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 62. 112. George “Buddy” Guy and Donald E. Wilcock, Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues: Buddy Guy and the Blues Roots of Rock and Roll (San Francisco: Woodford, 1993), 99. 113. Segrest and Hoffmann, Moanin’ at Midnight, 98, 183. 114. Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 94. 115. For her part, Nadine Cohodas writes, “But Chicago was not the plantation, and musicians were not held hostage to the company. They were paid for making records, and they didn’t have to give that money back even if the record flopped.” In Cohodas, Spinning Blues Into Gold, 94. 116. Stewart, Rod, 112. 117. Pete Townshend, interview with Pete Frame, in “Chatting with Pete Townshend,” reprinted in The Road to Rock: A Zigzag Book of Interviews, ed. Pete Frame (New York: Charisma, 1974), 25. 118. Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes: A Life of Pete Townshend (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1996), 63. 119. Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-­British Modernity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 85. 120. Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes, 64 121. Blind Joe Reynolds, “Outside Woman Blues,” Various Artists, Roots of Classic Rock: The Blues That Inspired Rock ‘n’ Roll (Grammercy Records 301, 2009, compact disc). 122. Howlin’ Wolf, “Sitting on Top of the World,” The Real Folk Blues (MCA/Chess 9273, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1966). 123. Muddy Waters, “Long Distance Call,” on Waters, The Chess Box. 124. “Little Johnny” Jones, “Big Town Playboy,” on Various Artists, Chess Blues Classics, Vol. I: 1947–­1956 (Chess 9369, 1997, compact disc). 125. Examples include Howlin’ Wolf, “Killing Floor,” on Wolf, The Real Folk Blues;

206  •  Notes to Pages 97–101

Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Fattenin’ Frogs for Snakes,” Sonny Boy Williamson II, The Real Folk Blues (Universal 93207, 2007, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 126. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958). 127. Waters, “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” on Waters, The Chess Box. 128. Sonny Boy Williamson I, “Good Morning, School Girl,” When the Sun Goes Down, Volume 8: Bluebird Blues (BMG/Bluebird/RCA 82876551562, 2003, compact disc); Waters, “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” on Waters, The Chess Box; Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” One Dozen Berrys (Hallmark 709792, 2010, compact disc, originally released in 1958). 129. Greg Shaw, “The Teen Idols,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992), 107. 130. Sheila Whiteley, Too Much, Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 2005), 12. 131. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 167. 132. Ibid., 171. 133. Steve Appleford, The Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll: Song-­by-­Song (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 37–­39; The Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl,” Aftermath (ABKCO Records 7476–­2, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1966). 134. The Rolling Stones, “Stray Cat Blues,” Beggars Banquet (ABKCO Records 7539–­ 2, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1968). 135. Clapton, Clapton, 85. 136. Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Bring It On Home,” Led Zeppelin II (Atlantic 7567826332, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 137. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 92, 169; Pamela des Barres, “Every Inch of My Love,” in Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: An Anthology, ed. William McKeen (New York: Morrow, 2000), 299–­305. 138. Led Zeppelin, “Sick Again,” on Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti. 139. Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Too Young to Die,” on Williamson II, The Real Folk Blues. 140. Howlin’ Wolf, “I Asked for Water (and She Gave Me Gasoline),” on Wolf, Moanin’ in the Moonlight; Muddy Waters, “Iodine in My Coffee,” on Waters, The Complete Muddy Waters. 141. Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 195. 142. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Penguin, 2004), 197. 143. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 217. 144. Ibid., 196. 145. Patricia Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 46. 146. David Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–­4. 147. Michael Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Knopf, 2000), 308. 148. Ibid., 9. 149. Roger Lewis, “Captain America Meets the Bash Street Kids: The Comic Form in

Notes to Pages 101–4  •  207

Britain and the United States,” in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975), 179. 150. Robert Johnson, “.32-­20 Blues,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers. The .32-­20 in the song title refers to a handgun caliber. “Robert Johnson—­.32-­.20 Blues,” Harry’s Blues Lyrics Online, accessed December 8, 2007, http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/ lyrics/robert_johnson/32–20_blues.htm#top 151. Muddy Waters, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” on Waters, The Chess Box. 152. Muddy Waters, “Oh Yeah!,” on Waters, The Complete Muddy Waters. 153. Robert Johnson, “.32-­20 Blues,” on Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers. 154. John Lee Hooker, “I’m Mad Again,” The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker (Collectables COLCD 71292, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1961). 155. Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man,” on Wolf, Howlin’ Wolf (The Rockin’ Chair Album). 156. John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 171–­73. 157. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of American in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York: Dutton, 1975), 66–­67. 158. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 203–­9, citing Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 44; and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: Making and Unmaking the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174–­75. 159. Mimi Clar Melnick, “‘I Can Peep through Muddy Water and Spy Dry Land’: Boasts in the Blues,” in Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-­American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1973), 276. 160. Marcus, Mystery Train, 67. 161. Willie Dixon, with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (New York: Da Capo, 1989), 20; Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 3. 162. The Leaves, “Hey Joe,” Various artists, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–­1968 (Rhino 5101124192, 2006, compact disc, originally released in 1972). 163. Lead Belly, “Gallis Pole,” on Lead Belly, Complete Recorded Works, Volume 1. 164. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Drinking Man Blues,” cited in Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 191–­92. 165. Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man,” on Wolf, Howlin’ Wolf (“The Rockin’ Chair Album”). 166. The 1955 lynching of fourteen-­year-­old Emmett Till, who had supposedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi, serves to underscore this point. Touré, “And It’s Deep, Too,” in Martin Scorsese Presents “The Blues: A Musical Journey,” ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 211. 167. John Lee Hooker, “Boom Boom,” Burnin’ (Collectables 7106, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1962). 168. “Little Walter” Jacobs, “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights!,” Complete Chess Masters (Hip-­O/Polydor 001263602, 2009, compact disc). 169. Robert Johnson, “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2 (Sony Music Distribution, 5174572, 2004, compact disc, originally released in 1970).

208  •  Notes to Pages 104–12

170. The Rolling Stones, “Stop Breaking Down,” Exile on Main St. (Virgin CDV 2731, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1972). Chapter 4

1. John Lennon, interview in Lennon and Wenner, Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews, 65–­66. 2. Eric Burdon, interview in “Britain Invades, America Fights Back,” directed by Andrew Solt, episode 3 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 3. Paul Myers, It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues (Vancouver: Greystone, 2007), 56–­68. 4. Rod Stewart, Rod: The Autobiography (New York: Random House, 2013), 52. 5. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1969); Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). 6. Gay, Enlightenment, 1:3–­4. 7. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 8. Noel Annan, Our Age: English Intellectuals between the Wars, a Group Portrait (New York: Random House, 1990). 9. John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, 2004), 63. 10. Ibid. See also Stefan Krätke, The Creative Capital of Cities (Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2011). 11. Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Matisse, and the Rise of Modern Art, translated by Cynthia Liebow (New York: Grove, 2001), 95–­97. 12. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 117. 13. Ibid., 123–­24. 14. Jonathan Jones, The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 2012), 6. 15. Ibid., 270. 16. Eric Clapton, interview in Eric Clapton: Nothing But the Blues, produced by Martin Scorsese (New York: Warner/Reprise, 1995, DVD) (my emphasis). 17. Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 169–­71. 18. Paul Trynka, “Between Muddy and the Wolf: Guitarist Hubert Sumlin,” in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Peter Guralnick et al. (New York: Amistad, 2003), 214. 19. Ibid., 214–­15. 20. Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (New York: Da Capo, 1989), 149. 21. Peter Wolf, “Me, Muddy, and the Wolf: Adventures in the Blues Trade,” in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Guralnick, Santelli, George-­Warren, and Farley, 192. 22. “Long John” Baldry, interview with Holger Petersen, quoted in Myers, It Ain’t Easy, 41–­42.

Notes to Pages 113–17  •  209

23. Keith Altham, “Steve Winwood: Modest Wonder Boy,” New Musical Express, February 11, 1966. 24. The Rolling Stones, Dora Loewenstein, and Philip Dodd, According to the Rolling Stones (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003), 28. 25. Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 163. 26. Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 95. 27. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–­1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19. 28. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 101. 29. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–­60 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 190–­91. 30. Stephen Davis, Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-­Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones (New York: Broadway, 2001), 37; Barry Miles, quoted in Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 101. 31. Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 24. 32. Ibid., 28; Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York: Broadway, 2007), 36. 33. Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), 68; Chris Dreja, quoted in Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown, 2012), 54. 34. Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Dream of Southern Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 28. 35. Keith Richards, quoted in Christopher Sandford, Keith Richards: Satisfaction (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 14. 36. Eric Clapton, quoted in Steve Turner, Conversations with Eric Clapton (London: Abacus, 1976), 32; Clapton, Clapton, 19. 37. Eric Clapton, interview in “Crossroads: A Rock and Roll History,” directed by Karen Walsh and Alan Lewens, episode 2 of Dancin’ in the Street: A Rock and Roll History, produced by Sean Barrett (London: BBC Video, 1996, Videocassette (VHS)). 38. Clapton, interview in Eric Clapton: At the Crossroads, directed by Robin Bextor (N.p., 2002, DVD). 39. James Phelge, Nankering with the Stones: The Untold Story of the Early Days (Chicago: A Cappella, 2000), 54. 40. Andrew Loog Oldham, quoted in Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 92. 41. Richards, Life, 106. 42. Eric Clapton, interview in Sessions for Robert J, produced by Eric Clapton and Doyle Bramhall II (Burbank, CA: Reprise Records, 2004, DVD). 43. Ibid.; George Melly, interview in “Red, White, and Blues,” directed by Mike Figgis, episode 6 of The Blues: A Musical Journey, produced by Martin Scorsese (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003, DVD). Woodshedding, a term lifted from jazz, means “sequestering oneself away for the purpose of mastering a musical instrument.” 44. John Mayall, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 45. Mick Fleetwood, interview in Blue Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?, directed by Chris Rodley (BBC4, 2011, DVD). 46. John Porter, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 47. Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 22.

210  •  Notes to Pages 118–22

48. Newman, John Mayall: Blues breaker, 102–­3. 49. Roger Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe,” translated by Carol Mossman, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 104. 50. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 51. 51. Ibid. 52. Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability,” 107. 53. George Pearson, Sex, Brown Ale, and Rhythm-­and-­Blues: The Life That Gave Birth to the Animals (N.p.: SnagaP Publishers, 1998), 18. 54. Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York: Walker, 2005), 56–­59. 55. Ibid., 166. 56. Eric Burdon, with J. Marshall Craig, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2001), 48. 57. Clapton, Clapton, 36. 58. Phil May, unpublished interview with John Platt, John Platt Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 59. David Grazian, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 21. 60. John Lee Hooker, “Boogie Chillen,” Burning Hell (Universal Records 112303, 1992, compact disc, originally released in 1959). 61. Them, “The Story of Them,” Them Featuring Van Morrison (London 8101652, 1987, compact disc); The Animals, “Club A Go-­Go,” Animal Tracks (EMI Music Distribution 7546, 1999, compact disc, originally released in 1965). 62. In English slang, a loon (short for lunatic) is an insane person. Slag is a derogatory English slang term for a prostitute or promiscuous woman. 63. Christopher Hjort, Strange Brew: Eric Clapton and the British Blues Boom, 1965–­ 70 (London: Jawbone, 2007), 42. 64. Eric Clapton, interview in Turner, Conversations, 53. On the other hand, Steve Winwood claims to have no recollection of such an organization, or his membership therein, at all—­perhaps a legacy of the club’s busy agenda. 65. John Lee Hooker, “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” The Real Folk Blues/ More Real Folk Blues (MCA/Chess 112821, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1966); Tommy Johnson, “Canned Heat Blues,” Complete Recorded Works, (1928–­1929) (Document DOCD 5001, 1994, compact disc). Canned heat refers to Sterno brand lighter fluid. 66. Davis, Old Gods, 24. 67. Rod Stewart, interview in Pete Frame, “Face to Face With a Face,” Zigzag, May 1971, 5. 68. “Rod Stewart/Faces American Tour, August-­October 1975,” promotional biography by Gaff Music, Inc., Rolling Stone Records, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 69. Tony Bacon, London Live: From the Yardbirds to Pink Floyd to the Sex Pistols (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1999), 51. 70. Jonathon Green, The Sixties and the Counter-­Culture (London: Pimlico, 1999), 42; John Mayall, unpublished interview with John Platt, John Platt Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 71. Bob Brunning, Blues: The British Connection (New York: Blandford, 1986), 13.

Notes to Pages 122–29  •  211

72. Graeme Pattingale, “Renovating the Blues: The Early Bootlegs,” accessed December 18, 2006, http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/cream/renovating.htm 73. Bacon, London Live, 52–­54. 74. Chris Barber, interview in Blue Britannia. 75. Keith Richards, interview in ibid. (emphasis in original). 76. Chris Dreja, interview in ibid. 77. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 139–­140. 78. Leighton Grist, “‘The Blues Is the Truth’: The Blues, Modernity, and the British Blues Boom,” in Cross the Water Blues: African-­American Music in Europe, ed. Neil A. Wynn ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 203. 79. Jeff Cloves, “Ramblin’ Jack at the Roundhouse,” Zigzag, December–­January 1971, 11. Panel beater is a term commonly used in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to refer to an automotive repair technician. 80. Brunning, Blues, 12. 81. Ibid., 13. 82. Eric Clapton, interview in “Red, White, and Blues.” 83. Blues Incorporated, R&B from the Marquee (Deram 820986–­2, 1991, compact disc, originally released in 1962). 84. Brunning, Blues, 17. 85. Ibid., 20, 41. 86. Ibid., 17–­18. 87. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 20–­21. 88. Mick Jagger, quoted in Ronnie Finkelstein, “A Farewell to Brian Jones (1943–­ 1969),” Circus, September 1969, 23–­24. 89. Davis, Old Gods, 393–­94; Jim Kunstler, “Random Notes,” Rolling Stone, March 13, 1975, Rolling Stone Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 90. Tom McGuinness and Chris Dreja, interviews in Blue Britannia. 91. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 124. 92. Mick Fleetwood, interview in “Britain Invades, America Fights Back.” 93. Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions” (1899), reprinted in A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism, edited by Rick Tilman (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 12–­16. 94. Clapton, Clapton, 126. 95. Ibid., 107, 127. 96. Keith Shadwick, Led Zeppelin: The Story of a Band and Their Music, 1968–­1980 (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2005), 36. 97. Dave Thompson, Cream: The World’s First Supergroup (London: Virgin, 2005), 77–­78. 98. Hjort, Strange Brew, 130. 99. Eric Clapton, interview in Jeffrey Peisch, “The Slowhand of God: Sittin’ in with Eric Clapton,” Record, July 1985, 34. 100. Jim Delahant, “Jack & Ginger Make the Cream Work,” Hit Parader, October 1968, 16. Interestingly, this interview was published some months after Cream had already announced its breakup!

212  •  Notes to Pages 130–33

101. Pete Townshend, interview in “Guitar Heroes,” directed by Marc J. Sachnoff, episode 7 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­ Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 102. Paolo Hewitt and John Heller, Steve Marriott: All Too Beautiful (London: Helter Skelter, 2004), 78. 103. David Williams, The First Time We Met the Blues (York, UK: Music Mentor, 2009), 70. 104. Christopher Knowles, The Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Mysterious Roots of Modern Music (Berkeley, CA: Viva Editions, 2010), 101–­4, 122–­23; Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Harmony, 2007), 331. 105. Tom Wolfe, quoted in Philip Norman, Shout! The True Story of the Beatles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 277. 106. Robert Christgau, “The Rolling Stones,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992), 239. 107. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 123. 108. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 75; Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 217. 109. George Martin, interview in “Britain Invades, America Fights Back.” See also Norman, Shout!, 279. 110. Sean O’Mahony, quoted in Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 256. 111. Ibid, 345. 112. Norman, Shout!, 278–­79. 113. It did appear on the Beatles’ second British album, With the Beatles, which was released three weeks after the Stones’ single version. 114. Oldham, Stoned, 234–­35. 115. On the comments by both Richards and McCartney, see Pete Fornatale, , 50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 69. 116. Davis, Old Gods, 46. 117. John Lennon, interview in Lennon and Wenner, Lennon Remembers, 67. 118. The Beatles, Rubber Soul (Capitol B 1970702, 2014, compact disc, originally released in 1965) and Revolver (Capitol B 1970902, 2014, compact disc, originally released in 1966). 119. Richie Unterberger, review of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, in The All Music Guide to Rock: The Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul, ed. Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2002), 78. 120. Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love, 332; The Rolling Stones, Aftermath (ABKCO Records 7476–­2, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1966); The Rolling Stones, Between the Buttons (ABKCO Records 7499–­2, 1986, compact disc, originally released in 1967). Aftermath was released four months after Rubber Soul, and Between the Buttons was released five months after Revolver. 121. Billy Altman, quoted in Fornatale, 50 Licks, 72. 122. Langdon Winner, quoted in Spitz, The Beatles, 654–­63.

Notes to Pages 133–38  •  213

123. Michael Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 58–­59. 124. Davis, Old Gods, 221. 125. Ibid., 224. 126. Ian Inglis, “Cover Story: Magic, Myth, and Music,” in Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, ed. Oliver Julien (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 96. 127. Paul Nelson, “Records,” Hullabaloo, March 1968, 36–­37. 128. John McMillian, Beatles vs. Stones (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 175. 129. Davis, Old Gods, 212, 227. 130. Ibid., 228. 131. Philip Norman, quoted in Oldham, Stoned, 345. 132. Ian McLagan, quoted in Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 82. 133. Eddie Kramer, quoted in Fornatale, 50 Licks, 78. 134. The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet (ABKCO Records 7539–­2, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1968); Let It Bleed (ABKCO Records 8004–­1, 1986, compact disc, originally released in 1969); Sticky Fingers (Virgin 39504, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1971). 135. Fornatale, 50 Licks, 73. See also Nik Cohn, “A Briton Blasts the Beatles,” New York Times, December 15, 1968, H1; and Eric van Lustbader, “Insight & Sound,” Cash Box, May 8, 1971, 22. 136. Bill Wyman, quoted in Fornatale, 50 Licks, 81. 137. Steve Appleford, The Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll: Song-­by-­Song (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 18; James Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1947–­1977 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 270. 138. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 271. 139. The Beatles, “Yer Blues,” The Beatles (commonly titled “The White Album”) (Capitol 100022, 2011, compact disc, originally released in 1968); “Oh! Darling,” Abbey Road (Capitol 100032, 2011, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 140. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 276–­77. 141. Blue Britannia. 142. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North (London: Ebury, 2008), xi–­xiv. 143. I use the unsatisfactory term North American to describe these three acts because four of the Band’s five members were Canadian, although they creatively matured while touring and performing in the United States. (The fifth, drummer Levon Helm, was born and raised in Arkansas.) 144. Mike Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 140. 145. Davis, Old Gods, 165–­66. 146. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 5–­6. 147. Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom, Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000), 12; Ed Ward, Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero (New York: Cherry Lane, 1983), 23. 148. Hjort, Strange Brew, 41; Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006), 112. 149. Helm, with Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, 140; Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (London: Picador, 1997), 42–­44.

214  •  Notes to Pages 139–47

150. Boyd, White Bicycles, 226. 151. Eric Clapton, interview in Steve Turner, in “The Rolling Stone Interview: Eric Clapton,” Rolling Stone, July 18, 1974, 13. 152. William Bender, “Down to Old Dixie and Back,” Time, January 12, 1970, 42–­46. Chapter 5

1. Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959), 49. 2. Jody Breslaw, “Record Reviews,” Variety, May 31, 1972, 26. 3. The Hellenistic period is traditionally dated from the reign of Alexander “the Great” (336–­323 BCE) through to the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in 31 BCE. 4. Eric Burdon, interview in Paul Williams, “Blues ’66, Part One,” Crawdaddy!, September 1966, 8. 5. Mick Jagger, quoted in Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-­War Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 137. 6. Alan Clayson, Mick Jagger: The Unauthorized Biography (London: Sanctuary, 2005), 18. 7. John Mayall, quoted in Appleford, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, 35. 8. Cream, Fresh Cream (Polydor 5318102, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1966); Ahmet Ertegün, quoted in Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie, Music Man: Ahmet Ertegün, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Norton, 1990), 137. 9. Joe Boyd, quoted in Jonathan Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–­71 (London: Pimlico, 1998), 234. 10. Jim DeRogatis, Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the ’60s to the ’90s (Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1996), 37. 11. Chris Welch, Led Zeppelin, Dazed and Confused: The Stories Behind Every Song (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998), 24. 12. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 127–­28. 13. Sandy Pearlman, “Patterns and Sounds: The Uses of Raga in Rock,” Crawdaddy, January 1967, 5. 14. Jonathan Bellman, “Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965–­1968,” Journal of Musicology 15, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 121. 15. Jimmy Page, interview in Pete Frame, ed., The Road to Rock: A Zigzag Book of Interviews (New York: Charisma, 1974), 103. Raga is a term used to describe melodic practices in Indian (or Carnatic) classical music. 16. Ibid. 17. The Kinks, “See My Friends,” Kinks-­Size/Kinkdom (Rhino R21S-­75769, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1965); Bellman, “Indian Resonances,” 122. 18. Connor McKnight, “Kinks—­Grist, Cuttings, Records, Memorabilia, Pix, Fax, Information, & Useless Trivia,” Zigzag, December 1972, 12. 19. The Beatles, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” Rubber Soul (Capitol B 1970702, 2014, compact disc, originally released in 1965); The Beatles, “Love You To,” Revolver (Capitol B 1970902, 2014, compact disc, originally released in 1966); The Roll-

Notes to Pages 147–50  •  215

ing Stones, “Paint It, Black” and “Mother’s Little Helper,” Aftermath (ABKCO Records 7476–­2, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1966). 20. Alan Clayson, The Yardbirds: The Band That Launched Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2002), 97; The Yardbirds, “Heart Full of Soul,” Having a Rave-­Up! (Victor Records 61099, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1965); The Yardbirds, “White Summer,” Little Games (Capitol/EMI 54102, 1996, compact disc, originally released in 1967). 21. Traffic, Mr. Fantasy (Island IMCD 264, 1999, compact disc, originally released in 1967); Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “East-­West,” East-­West (Elektra 7559607512, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1966); Frederick W. Harrison, “West Meets East,” Soundscapes.info, accessed December 23, 2007, http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/ VOLUME04/ West_meets_east.shtml 22. Jimmy Page, quoted in Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown, 2012), 123–­24; Sidharth Bhatia, “When Led Zeppelin Visited India,” BBCNews.com, June 5, 2015, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-india-33017725 23. Derek Hopwood, Tales of Empire: The British in the Middle East, 1880–­1952 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 36; Stephen Davis, Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-­Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones (New York: Broadway, 2001), 170. The phrase “desert-­loving Englishmen” is taken from Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean (Burbank, CA: Columbia Tristar Home Video, 2002, DVD, originally released in 1962). 24. The Yardbirds, “Over Under Sideways Down,” The Yardbirds (commonly titled “Roger the Engineer”) (Victor Records 62293, 2003, compact disc, originally released in 1966); Annette Carson, Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2001), 50. 25. Davis, Old Gods, 248–­53. Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at JouJouka (Rolling Stones COC 49100, 1971, vinyl LP) was released after the guitarist’s death. 26. Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song/Atlantic 7567924422, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1974); Robert Plant, quoted in Welch, Led Zeppelin, 90. 27. Paul Oliver, Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-­Asian Contribution to Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), 78. 28. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 49. 29. Michael Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 54–­55. 30. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of “Cool”: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 31. William Weber, Music and the Middle Class (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 41–­54. 32. Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 46. 33. Ibid., 53. 34. Welch, Led Zeppelin, 23. 35. Led Zeppelin, “Dazed and Confused,” Led Zeppelin (Atlantic 7567826322, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1969); “In the Evening,” In Through the Out Door (Swan Song/Atlantic 7567924432, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1979). 36. The Jeff Beck Group, “Beck’s Bolero,” Truth (Epic 66085, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1968).

216  •  Notes to Pages 150–54

37. Pete Townshend, interview in Jann Wenner, “Pete Townshend: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, September 28, 1968, 27. 38. Neville Marten and Jeffrey Hudson, The Kinks: A Very English Band (London: Sanctuary, 2002), 147; The Kinks, Preservation, Act 1 (Konk/Velvel 63467–­79721–­2, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1973). 39. Steve Knopper, “The Who: Tommy,” in Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, ed. Jim DeRogatis and Carmél Carrillo (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade, 2004), 36–­37. 40. The Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol/EMI 6994261, 2012, compact disc, originally released in 1967); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: Norton, 2007), 150. 41. Cream, “She Walks Like a Bearded Rainbow (SWLABR),” Disraeli Gears (Polydor 5318112, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1967); Gay, Modernism, 164. 42. Eric Clapton, quoted in Dave Thompson, Cream: The World’s First Supergroup (London: Virgin, 2005), 80. 43. Welch, Led Zeppelin, 56–­57. 44. Steve Winwood, interview in Thompson, Cream, 95. 45. DeRogatis, Kaleidoscope Eyes, 131. 46. Ginger Baker, interview in Thompson, Cream, 92. 47. See, for example, Greil Marcus’s essential works, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York: Dutton, 1975); and Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (London: Picador, 1997). 48. The Who, The Who Sing My Generation (MCA MCAD-­31330, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1965); Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-­ British Modernity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 85. 49. Philip Norman, “Led Zeppelin: Earls Court,” Times (London), May 26, 1975, 5; Barbara Charone, “Please Take This ‘Badge’ Off of Me,” Crawdaddy, November 1975, 42. 50. “Ten Years After,” publicity biography (undated) from CPR/Contemporary Public Relations, Rolling Stone Magazine Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 51. Pete Townshend, interview in The Kids Are Alright, directed by Jeff Stein (N.p.: Pioneer Entertainment, 2003, DVD, originally released in 1979). 52. James Baldwin, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1963), 18–­21. 53. Examples include Traffic’s self-­titled second album (Island IMCD 45, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1968); the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society (Reprise 2–­6327, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1968); and the Faces’ Long Player (Warner Brothers 7599261912, 1993, compact disc, originally released in 1972). See Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006), 227; and Tony Glover, “Traffic and the Karma Wheel,” Circus, January 1972, 19. 54. Eric Clapton, quoted in John Pidgeon, Eric Clapton: A Biography (London: Vermilion, 1985), 43. 55. Thompson, Cream, 44. 56. Joe Boyd, quoted in Green, Days in the Life, 234 (my emphasis). 57. Phil Ardery and Mary Duffy, “Rod Stewart: Heliotrope Englishman,” Circus, July 1970, 34.

Notes to Pages 154–59  •  217

58. Patricia O’Haire, “Rolling Stones Start Gathering Moola Moss,” New York Daily News, June 23, 1975, 5. 59. Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival, 1944–­2002 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 44. 60. Ibid., 23. 61. James Day, Englishness in Music: From Elizabethan Times to Elgar, Tippett, and Britten (London: Thames, 1999), 7. 62. Bert Jansch, interview in Colin Harper, Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 340n21. 63. Jimmy Page, interview in Frame, ed., The Road to Rock, 103. 64. Harper, Dazzling Stranger, 4. 65. Welch, Led Zeppelin, 24. 66. Ibid., 38. The “standard” guitar tuning is known as EADGBE (for the chords involved), while DADGAD involves tuning the first, second, and sixth strings of a six-­ string guitar down a whole step. Before the folk revival, DADGAD was most closely associated with Celtic music. 67. Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25. Plant’s side, interestingly, has also been taken up by blues chronicler Robert Palmer in “Led Zeppelin: The Music,” liner notes to Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin, Volume 2 (N.p.: Warner Chappell Music, 1991). 68. Robert Plant, interview with Philip Schofield, “This Morning,” ITV, January 11, 2008. 69. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 281–­82; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213. 70. Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (London: Michael Joseph, 1998), 74–­75; Kumar, Making of English Identity, 230. 71. Stanley Baldwin, “On England” and Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan, 1926), 6–­7. 72. Philip Gibbs, England Speaks (London: Heinemann, 1935), 3–­4. 73. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, quoted in Kumar, Making of English National Identity, 228. 74. The Kinks, “Village Green,” on The Village Green Preservation Society. 75. The Kinks, “Drivin’,” Arthur (or the Rise and Fall of the British Empire) (Castle/ Reprise 6366, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 76. Traffic, “Berkshire Poppies,” on Mr. Fantasy. 77. Traffic, “Giving to You,” on Mr. Fantasy. 78. Chris Welch, Steve Winwood: Roll with It (New York: Perigee, 1990), 105. 79. Ibid., 62. 80. Ibid., 106. 81. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 119. 82. Welch, Led Zeppelin, 43. 83. Ibid. 84. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 119. 85. Macan, Rocking the Classics, 80; Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin III (Atlantic 7567826782, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1970); Elton John,

218  •  Notes to Pages 159–64

“Country Comfort,” Tumbleweed Connection (Polygram 829248, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1970); Cream, “Politician,” Goodbye (Polydor 5318152, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1969); The Who, “A Quick One While He’s Away,” A Quick One (MCA MCAD31331, 1988, compact disc, originally released in 1966); The Beatles, “Penny Lane,” 1967–­1970 (Capitol CDPCSP 718, 1993, compact disc, originally released in 1973). 86. Traffic, “John Barleycorn Must Die,” John Barleycorn Must Die (Island IMCD 40, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1970). 87. The Kinks, “Mr. Churchill Says” and “Victoria,” Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). 88. J. S. Bratton, “Of England, Home and Duty: the Image of England in Victorian and Edwardian Juvenile Fiction,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 73–­93. 89. Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions,” in A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism, ed. Rick Tilman (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 40–­56. 90. Tony Fletcher, Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2000), 439–­40. 91. Howard Kaylan, quoted in ibid., 440. 92. Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Broadway, 2002), 83. 93. Steven Gaines, “Eric Clapton: The Inside Story of His Comeback With ‘461 Ocean Boulevard,’” Circus: Raves, October 1974, 9. 94. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 228. 95. Alan Clayson, Brian Jones (London: Sanctuary, 2002), 159–­60. 96. Jonathan Cott, “A Talk with Pete Townshend,” Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970, 32. 97. Penny Valentine, “Daltrey’s Utopia in the Wilds of Sussex,” Sounds, November 20, 1971, 10. 98. Timothy White, “Steve Winwood: Rock’s Gentle Aristocrat,” Musician, October 1982, 56. 99. J. B. Priestley, English Journey, quoted in Paxman, The English, 148. 100. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 149. 101. Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!, 192; Michael Schumacher, Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 288. 102. “Blind Willie” Johnson, “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed,” Various artists, The Early Blues Roots of Led Zeppelin (Complete Blues SBLUECD036, 2007, compact disc, originally released in 2000); The Band, “Rocking Chair,” The Band (Capitol 5253892, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 103. Rod Stewart, “Gasoline Alley,” Gasoline Alley (Mercury 5580592, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1970). 104. The Faces, “Bad ‘n’ Ruin,” on Long Player. 105. Traffic, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Stew,” The Low Spark of High-­Heeled Boys (Island IMCD 42, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1971). 106. Valentine, “Daltrey’s Utopia,” 10. 107. The Song Remains the Same, directed by Peter Clifton and Joe Massot (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007, DVD, originally released in 1976).

Notes to Pages 164–69  •  219

108. An interesting, slightly different analysis of these dream sequences can be found in John Scanlan, Easy Riders, Rolling Stones: On the Road in America, from Delta Blues to ’70s Rock (London: Reaktion, 2015), 191–­94. 109. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 226. 110. Robert Greenfield, Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (New York: Da Capo, 2006), 13. 111. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 296. 112. The Who, “Going Mobile,” Who’s Next (Polydor 5277602, 2000, compact disc, originally released in 1971); Sir Geoffrey Howe, MP, quoted in George Clark, “Howe appeals to Labour Party moderates to part company with Mr. ‘Robespierre’ Benn,” Times (London), September 15, 1975. 113. Bob Brunning, Blues: The British Connection (New York: Blandford, 1986), 116. 114. Appleford, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, 18. 115. Ibid., 19. 116. Ibid., 72. 117. Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain, World War I to the Present (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 201. 118. Cream, “Crossroads,” Wheels of Fire (Polydor UICY9152/3, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1968). The middle eight is the section, usually lasting eight bars, in which the verse-­chorus-­verse structure pauses to feature instrumental solos. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 57. 119. McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 58. 120. Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks,” Untitled (commonly titled “ZOSO” or “IV”) (hereafter referred to as ZOSO) (Atlantic 7567826382, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1971); “In My Time of Dying,” on Physical Graffiti. Johnson’s version, referenced earlier, was called “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed.” 121. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 242. 122. Haste, Rules of Desire, 171. 123. Led Zeppelin, “Black Dog,” on ZOSO. 124. Davis, Hammer of the Gods, 307. 125. The Rolling Stones, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Between the Buttons (ABKCO Records 7499–­2, 1986, compact disc, originally released in 1967). 126. The Rolling Stones, “Little Red Rooster,” The Rolling Stones: England’s Newest Hit Makers (ABKCO Records 8822872, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1964). 127. The Rolling Stones, “Parachute Woman,” Beggars Banquet (ABKCO Records 7539–­2, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1968). 128. The Rolling Stones, “Stray Cat Blues,” on Beggars Banquet; Led Zeppelin, “Sick Again,” on Physical Graffiti. 129. The Faces, “Stay With Me,” A Nod Is as Good as a Wink . . . to a Blind Horse (Warner Brothers 7599259292, 1993, compact disc, originally released in 1971); The Rolling Stones, “Honky Tonk Women,” Hot Rocks: 1964–­1971 (ABKCO Records 96672, 2002, compact disc, originally released in 1972). 130. The Faces, “Three-­Button Hand-­Me-­Down,” First Step (Warner Brothers 7599263762, 1993, compact disc, originally released in 1970).

220  •  Notes to Pages 169–72

131. The Rolling Stones, “Some Girls,” Some Girls (Virgin CDV 2734, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1978). 132. Ibid. 133. James Maycock, “White Men Sing the Blues,” The Independent (London), June 4, 1999. 134. Rod Stewart, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” Every Picture Tells a Story (Mercury 5580602, 1998, compact disc, originally released in 1971). 135. Led Zeppelin, “Travelling Riverside Blues,” BBC Sessions (Atlantic 7567830612, 1997, compact disc); “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” on Led Zeppelin III. 136. The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar,” Sticky Fingers (Virgin 39504, 1994, compact disc, originally released in 1971). 137. For example, John Lee Hooker, “Sugar Mama,” Various artists, Chess Blues Classics, Volume 1: 1947–­1956 (Chess 9369, 1997, compact disc). 138. Sheila Whiteley, “Little Red Rooster v. The Honky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger, Sexuality, Style, and Image,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 68. 139. Appleford, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, 93. 140. Rolling Stones, “Midnight Rambler,” Let It Bleed (ABKCO Records 8004–­1, 1986, compact disc, originally released in 1969). 141. Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed,” on Let It Bleed. 142. Rolling Stones, “Monkey Man,” on Let It Bleed. 143. Don Heckman, “As Cynthia Sagittarius says, ‘Feeling . . . I Mean, Isn’t That What The Rolling Stones Are All About?’,” New York Times, July 16, 1972. 144. John W. Hellmann Jr., “‘I’m a Monkey’: The Influence of the Black American Blues Argot on the Rolling Stones,” Journal of American Folklore 86, no. 342 (October–­ December 1973): 372. 145. Ibid. 146. Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 272–­92. 147. Paul Stanley, interview in “The ’70s: Have a Nice Decade,” directed by Bill Richmond, episode 8 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 148. Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla,” Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor 823277, 1990, compact disc, originally released in 1970). Dave Marsh, “Eric Clapton,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren (New York: Straight Arrow, 1992), 409. 149. Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (London: BBC, 1976), 199. 150. Marsh, “Eric Clapton,”, 410. 151. Gaines, “Eric Clapton,” 9. 152. A. E. Hotchner, Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 87 153. Lester Bangs, “Review: Exile on Main St.,” Creem, August 1972, 58. 154. James Lichtenberg, “Record Reviews: Exile on Main St.,” Changes, July 1972, Atlantic Recording Corporation Records, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Notes to Pages 173–81  •  221

155. Lenny Kaye, “Records: ‘Tumbling Dice’ Puts the Cherry on the First Side of ‘Main Street,’” Rolling Stone, July 6, 1972, 54. 156. O’Haire, “Rolling Stones Start Gathering Moola Moss,” 5; Keith Shadwick, Led Zeppelin: The Story of a Band and Their Music, 1968–­1980 (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2005), 126. 157. Greenfield, Exile on Main St., 13; Tolinski, Light and Shade, 97. 158. Eric Clapton, interview in Jeffrey Peisch, “The Slowhand of God: Sittin’ in with Eric Clapton,” Record, July 1985, 36. 159. Peter Doggett, “Short Takes: Crossroads 2,” Herb Staehr Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. 160. Tom Dowd, quoted in Barbara Charone, “Please Take This Badge Off of Me,” Crawdaddy, November 1975, 36 (my emphasis). 161. Breslaw, “Record Reviews,” 26. Conclusion

1. The Rolling Stones, “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Rarities, 1971–­2003 (Virgin 45401, 2004, compact disc). 2. Dean Acheson, quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), 218. 3. Eric Clapton, liner notes to Eric Clapton, Me and Mr. Johnson (Reprise 4870, 2004, compact disc). 4. Dave Thompson, I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto (New York: Backbeat, 2008), 91–­92; Eric Clapton, From the Cradle (Reprise 9362457352, 1994, compact disc). 5. Eric Clapton, interview in “Guitar Heroes,” directed by Marc J. Sachnoff, episode 7 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. (Chicago Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995, DVD). 6. Eric Clapton, interview with John Blackstone on “Eye to Eye with Katie Couric,” CBS, January 5, 2007. 7. Muddy Waters, quoted in Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 153. 8. Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963), 27; Black Music (New York: Morrow, 1968), 143. 9. Baraka, Black Music, 124. 10. Chris Robinson, quoted in Bill Crandall, “Chris Robinson Has a Whole Lotta Love for Zeppelin,” Rolling Stone, October 14, 1999, RollingStone.com, accessed September 24, 2008, http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/jimmypage/articles/story/5925254/ chris_robinson_has_a_whole_lotta_love_for_zeppelin 11. See, for example, Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival, 2007, directed by Martyn Atkins (Burbank, CA: Rhino, 2007, DVD). 12. John Mayer, liner notes to John Mayer, Continuum (Columbia 88697011522, 2006, compact disc). 13. The Rolling Stones: Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008, DVD).

222  •  Notes to Pages 182–86

14. Keith Richards and Jack White, quoted in David Fricke, “Blues Brothers: The Rolling Stones and Jack White shine a light on the roots of their music,” Rolling Stone, April 17, 2008, RollingStone.com, accessed September 24, 2008, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/19969845/blues_brothers 15. Ray Charles, “The Nighttime Is The Right Time,” The Very Best of Ray Charles (Rhino Records 8122798222, 2000, compact disc).

Selected Bibliography

Archived Collections

Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland, Ohio Atlantic Recording Corporation Records (ARC-­0031) Herb Staehr Collection (ARC-­0029) John Platt Collection (ARC-­0051) Rolling Stone Magazine Records (ARC-­0119) Primary Sources (Print)

Altham, Keith. “Steve Winwood: Modest Wonder Boy.” New Musical Express, February 11, 1966. Ardery, Phil, and Mary Duffy. “Rod Stewart: Heliotrope Englishman.” Circus, July 1970, 34–­35. Aykroyd, Dan, and Ben Manilla. Elwood’s Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends and Stars. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2004. The Beatles. The Beatles Anthology. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2000. Boyd, Joe. White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006. Brunning, Bob. Blues: The British Connection. New York: Blandford, 1986. Burdon, Eric, with J. Marshall Craig. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2001. Charone, Barbara. “Please Take This ‘Badge’ Off of Me.” Crawdaddy, November 1975, 35–­42. Clapton, Eric. Clapton: The Autobiography. New York: Broadway, 2007. Clapton, Eric. “Eric Answers Questions About the Clapton Way of Life.” Beat Instrumental. N.p., n.d. Rolling Stone Magazine Collection, Library and Archives, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Clapton, Eric. Liner notes to Eric Clapton, Me and Mr. Johnson. Reprise 4870, 2004, compact disc. Clapton, Eric, with Marc Roberty. Eric Clapton in His Own Words. London: Omnibus, 1993. 223

224  •  Selected Bibliography

Cohn, Nik. “A Briton Blasts the Beatles. New York Times, December 15, 1968,. Cohn, Nik. “Ginger Baker, ‘Cult-­Hero.’” New York Times, May 31, 1970. Cott, Jonathan. “A Talk With Pete Townshend.” Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970, 32–­35. Crowe, Cameron. “Jimmy Page and Robert Plant: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, March 13, 1975, 8. Delahant, Jim. “Jack & Ginger Make the Cream Work.” Hit Parader, October 1968, 14–­ 16, 53. Des Barres, Pamela. “Every Inch of My Love.” In Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: An Anthology, edited by William McKeen. New York: Norton, 2000. Dixon, Willie, with Don Snowden. I Am The Blues: The Willie Dixon Story. New York: Da Capo, 1989. Doggett, Peter. “Short Takes: Crossroads 2.” N.p., n.d. Herb Staehr Collection, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Douring, Chris, and Chip Stern. “Eric Clapton.” International Musician and Recording World, May 1981, 22–­24, 36. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. Vol. 1. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Eastaugh, Kenneth. “Ask a Silly Question . . . You Get a Silly Answer.” The Sun (London). January 23, 1971. Finkelstein, Ronnie. “A Farewell to Brian Jones (1943–­1969).” Circus, September 1969, 23–­24. Flanagan, Bill. “Van Morrison Emerges from the Shadows.” Musician, January 1985, 30–­ 36. Frame, Pete. “Face to Face with a Face.” Zigzag, May 1971, 4–­7. Frame, Pete, ed. The Road to Rock: A Zigzag Book of Interviews. London: Charisma, 1974. Gaines, Steven. “Eric Clapton: The Inside Story of His Comeback With ‘461 Ocean Boulevard.’” Circus: Raves, October 1974, 4–­10. Glover, Tony. “An Interview with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.” Circus, March 1969, 34–­35. Glover, Tony. “Traffic and the Karma Wheel.” Circus, January 1972, 19. Gregg, Jonathan. “On Stage: E.C. Returns to Form.” Record, July 1985, 35. Guralnick, Peter. “Eric Clapton at the Passion Threshold.” Musician, February 1990, 45–­ 55. Guy, George “Buddy,” and Donald E. Wilcock. Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues: Buddy Guy and the Blues Roots of Rock and Roll. San Francisco: Woodford, 1993. Heckman, Don. “As Cynthia Sagittarius says, ‘Feeling . . . I Mean, Isn’t That What the Rolling Stones Are All About’?’” New York Times, July 16, 1972. Helm, Levon, with Stephen Davis. This Wheel’s on Fire: The Story of Levon Helm and the Band. 2nd ed. Chicago: A Cappella, 2000. Herbst, Peter, ed. The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking With the Legends of Rock, 1967–­ 1980. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Hutton, Jack. “Mick Jagger: Interview-­in-­Depth.” New Musical Express, May 28, 1966. Kaye, Lenny. “Records: ‘Tumbling Dice’ Puts the Cherry on the First Side of ‘Main Street,’” Rolling Stone, July 6, 1972, 54. Led Zeppelin, with Paul Kendall and Dave Lewis. Led Zeppelin in Their Own Words. London: Omnibus, 1995. Leigh, Spencer. “Obituaries: Rik Gunnell, Club Owner and Impresario.” The Indepen-

Selected Bibliography  •  225

dent Online (London), March 28, 2007. Accessed May 13, 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/rik-gunnell-454967.html Lennon, John, and Jann Wenner. Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1971. Lichtenberg, James. “Record Reviews: Exile on Main St.” Changes, July 1972, n.p. Atlantic Recording Corporation Records, Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum and Archives. Lomax, Alan. “Skiffle: Where Is It Going?” Melody Maker, September 7, 1957,, 5. Mayer, John. Liner notes to John Mayer, Continuum. Columbia 88697011522, 2006, compact disc. McKnight, Connor. “Kinks: Grist, Cuttings, Records, Memorabilia, Pix, Fax, Information & Useless Trivia.” Zigzag, December 1972, 12. McLagan, Ian. All the Rage: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Odyssey. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1998. Napier, Simon, and Sonny Boy Williamson II [Aleck or Rice Miller]. “I Knew Robert Johnson.” In Nothing But the Blues, edited by Mike Leadbitter. London: Hanover, 1971. Nelson, Paul. “Peter Townshend of the Who Talks About Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones!” Hullabaloo 3, no. 5 ( July 1968): 5–­6. Obrecht, Jas. “Keith Richards: On Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson.” Guitar Player 27, no. 9 (September 1993): 86–­97. Oldham, Andrew Loog. Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Oliver, Paul. Conversation With the Blues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. O’Haire, Patricia. “Rolling Stones Start Gathering Moola Moss.” New York Daily News, June 23, 1975, 5. O’Neal, Jim. Preface to interview with Eddie Boyd, in The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine, edited by Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel. New York: Routledge, 2002. O’Neal, Jim, and Amy van Singel, eds. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pearlman, Sandy. “Patterns and Sounds: The Uses of Raga in Rock.” Crawdaddy, January 1967, 5–­7. Peel, John, and Sandra Ravenscroft. John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes. Chicago: Review History, 2007. Peisch, Jeffrey. “The Slowhand of God: Sittin’ in with Eric Clapton.” Record, July 1985, 31–­36. Phelge, James. Nankering with the Rolling Stones: The Untold Story of the Early Days. Chicago: A Cappella, 2000. Richards, Keith, with James Fox. Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. Robinson, Lisa. “Zapping With Zep,” Disc, June 2, 1973, 8. The Rolling Stones, Dora Loewenstein, and Philip Dodd. According to the Rolling Stones. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003. Stewart, Rod. Rod: The Autobiography. New York: Random House, 2013. Tolinski, Brad. Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. New York: Crown, 2012.

226  •  Selected Bibliography

Townshend, Pete. Open letter to David Lister. The Independent (London), January 6, 2007. Townshend, Pete. Who I Am: A Memoir. New York: HarperPerennial, 2013. Turner, Steve. Cliff: For the Record. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Turner, Steve. Conversations with Eric Clapton. London: Abacus, 1976. Turner, Steve. “The Rolling Stone Interview: Eric Clapton.” Rolling Stone, July 18, 1974. Reprinted in The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking with the Legends of Rock, 1967–­ 1980, edited by Peter Herbst. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Valentine, Penny. “Daltrey’s Utopia in the Wilds of Sussex.” Sounds, November 20, 1971, 10. Ward, Ed. Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero. New York: Cherry Lane, 1983. Welch, Chris. “Last of the R&B Groups?” Melody Maker, June 12, 1965, 8. Wenner, Jann. “Pete Townshend: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, September 28, 1968. Reprinted in The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking with the Legends of Rock, 1967–­1980, edited by Peter Herbst. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Wenner, Jann, ed. The Rolling Stone Interviews. New York: Back Bay, 2007. White, Timothy. “Steve Winwood: Rock’s Gentle Aristocrat.” Musician, October 1982, 54–­63. Wilcock, Donald E. “Eric Burdon and the British Invasion.” King Biscuit Time 10, no. 4 (September 2003): 16–­17. Williams, David. The First Time We Met the Blues: A Journey of Discovery wjth Jimmy Page, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. York, UK: Music Mentor, 2009. Williams, Paul. “Blues ’66, Part One.” Crawdaddy, September 1966, 8. Willis, Ellen. “Records: Rock, Etc.—­The Big Ones.” New York Times, February 1, 1969. Wolkin, Jan Mark, and Bill Keenom. Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000. Wood, Ron. Ronnie: The Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007. Wyman, Bill, with Ray Coleman. Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. New York: Viking, 1990. Wyman, Bill, with Richard Havers. Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey: A Journey to Music’s Heart and Soul. London: Doring Kindersley, 2001. Discography

The Animals. Animal Tracks. EMI Music Distribution 7546, 1999, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Band. The Band. Capitol 5253892, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Band. Music from Big Pink. Capitol/EMI 460692A, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. The Beatles. Abbey Road. Capitol 100032, 2011, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Beatles. The Beatles (commonly titled “The White Album”). Capitol 100022, 2011, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. The Beatles. A Hard Day’s Night. Capitol CDP 7464372, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1964.

Selected Bibliography  •  227

The Beatles. 1962–­1966. Capitol CDPCSP 717, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1973. The Beatles. 1967–­1970. Capitol CDPCSP 718, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1973. The Beatles. Revolver. Capitol B 1970902, 2014, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. The Beatles. Rubber Soul. Capitol B 1970702, 2014, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Beatles. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Capitol/EMI 6994261, 2012, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. Berry, Chuck. One Dozen Berrys. Hallmark 709792, 2010, compact disc. Originally released in 1958. Blues Incorporated. R&B from the Marquee. Deram 820986–­2, 1991, compact disc. Originally released in 1962. Broonzy, “Big Bill.” Complete Recorded Works, Volume 11 (1940–­42). Document 5133, 1993, compact disc. Charles, Ray. The Very Best of Ray Charles. Rhino 8122798222, 2000, compact disc. Clapton, Eric. From the Cradle. Reprise 9362457352, 1994, compact disc. Clapton, Eric. Me and Mr. Johnson. Reprise 4870, 2004, compact disc. Clapton, Eric. Sessions for Robert J. Reprise/Warner Brothers 48926, 2004, compact disc. Cream. Disraeli Gears. Polydor 5318112, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. Cream. Fresh Cream. Polydor 5318102, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. Cream. Wheels of Fire. Polydor UICY9152/3, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. Cream. Goodbye. Polydor 5318152, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. Derek and the Dominos. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Polydor 823277, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Dixon, Willie. I Am The Blues. Columbia/Legacy 53627, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Dylan, Bob/The Band. The Basement Tapes. Columbia/Legacy 88697082292, 2009, compact disc. Originally released in 1975. Dylan, Bob. Blonde on Blonde. CBS Records CD 22130, 1989, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. Dylan, Bob. Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia CK-­9128, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Faces. First Step. Warner Brothers 7599263762, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. The Faces. Long Player. Warner Brothers 7599261912, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1972. The Faces. A Nod Is as Good as a Wink . . . to a Blind Horse. Warner Brothers 7599259292, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. The Ginger Baker Trio. Going Back Home. Atlantic 82652, 1994, compact disc. Harpo, Slim. The Best of Slim Harpo. Rhino 70169, 1989, compact disc. Hooker, John Lee. Burnin’. Collectables 7106, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1962. Hooker, John Lee. Burning Hell. Universal Records 112303, 1992, compact disc. Originally released in 1959.

228  •  Selected Bibliography

Hooker, John Lee. The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker. Collectables COLCD 71292, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1961. Hooker, John Lee. I’m John Lee Hooker. Collectables COLCD 71002, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1960. Hooker, John Lee. The Real Folk Blues/More Real Folk Blues. MCA/Chess 112821, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. House, Eddie “Son.” Son House and the Great Delta Blues Singers, 1928–­30. Document DOCD 5002, compact disc. Originally released in 1990. Jacobs, “Little Walter.” Complete Chess Masters. Hip-­O/Polydor 001263602, 2009, compact disc. James, Elmore. Blues Masters: The Very Best of Elmore James. Rhino 79803, 2000, compact disc. The Jeff Beck Group. Beck-­Ola (Cosa Nostra). Epic 66084, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Jeff Beck Group. Truth. Epic 66085, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. Jefferson, “Blind Lemon.” Complete Recorded Works, Volume 2 (1927). Document DOCD 5018, 1994, compact disc. John, Elton. Tumbleweed Connection. Polygram 829248, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Johnson, Robert. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia/Legacy 52944, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1961. Johnson, Robert. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2. Sony Music Distribution 5174572, 2004, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Johnson, Tommy. Complete Recorded Works (1928–­1929). Document DOCD 5001, 1994, compact disc. The Kinks. Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). Castle/Reprise 6366, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Kinks. Kinks-­Size/Kinkdom. Rhino R21S-­75769, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Kinks. Preservation, Act 1. Konk/Velvel 63467–­79721–­2, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1973. The Kinks. The Village Green Preservation Society. Reprise 2–­6327, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. Lead Belly. Complete Recorded Works, Volume 1 (1939–­1940). Document DOCD 5226, 1995, compact disc. Led Zeppelin. BBC Sessions. Atlantic 7567830612, 1997, compact disc. Led Zeppelin. Houses of the Holy. Atlantic 7567826392, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1973. Led Zeppelin. In Through the Out Door. Swan Song/Atlantic 7567924432, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1979. Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin. Atlantic 7567826322, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin II. Atlantic 7567826332, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin III. Atlantic 7567826782, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1970.

Selected Bibliography  •  229

Led Zeppelin. Physical Graffiti. Swan Song/Atlantic 7567924422, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1974. Led Zeppelin. Untitled (commonly titled “ZOSO” or “IV”). Atlantic 7567826382, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. Mayall, John. Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. Polygram 9169, 2001, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. McDowell, “Mississippi Fred.” Mississippi Blues. Black Lion 760179, 1992, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. Morrison, Van. Blowin’ Your Mind! Epic/Legacy 65751, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. East-­West. Elektra 7559607512, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Elektra 7559606472, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Rolling Stones. Aftermath. ABKCO Records 7476–­2, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. The Rolling Stones. Beggars Banquet. ABCKO Records 7539–­2, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. The Rolling Stones. Between the Buttons. ABKCO Records 7499–­2, 1986, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. The Rolling Stones. December’s Children (and Everybody’s). ABKCO Records 7451–­2, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Rolling Stones. Exile on Main St. Virgin CDV 2731, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1972. The Rolling Stones. Hot Rocks: 1964–­1971. ABKCO Records 96672, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1972. The Rolling Stones. Let It Bleed. ABKCO Records 8004–­1, 1986, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Rolling Stones. Metamorphosis. ABKCO Records 719006, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1975. The Rolling Stones. Out of Our Heads. ABKCO Records 719429, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Rolling Stones. Rarities, 1971–­2003. Virgin 45401, 2005, compact disc. The Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones: England’s Newest Hit Makers. ABKCO Records 8822872, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1964. The Rolling Stones. Some Girls. Virgin CDV 2734, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1978. The Rolling Stones. Sticky Fingers. Virgin 39504, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. The Rolling Stones. Their Satanic Majesties Request. ABKCO Records 719002, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. Stewart, Rod. Every Picture Tells a Story. Mercury 5580602, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. Stewart, Rod. Gasoline Alley. Mercury 5580592, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Them. Them, Featuring Van Morrison. London 8101652, 1987, compact disc.

230  •  Selected Bibliography

Traffic. John Barleycorn Must Die. Island IMCD 40, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1970. Traffic. Last Exit. Island 548540, 2001, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. Traffic. The Low Spark of High-­Heeled Boys. Island IMCD 42, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. Traffic. Mr. Fantasy. Island IMCD 264, 1999, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. Traffic. Traffic. Island IMCD 45, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. Various artists. American Folk Blues Festival: 1962–­1965. Evidence 26100, 1995, compact disc. Various artists. Chess Blues Classics, Vol. I: 1947–­1956. Chess 9369, 1997, compact disc. Various artists. Chess Blues Classics, Vol. II: 1957–­1967. Chess 9368, 1997, compact disc. Various artists. The Early Blues Roots of Led Zeppelin. Snapper 036, 2007, compact disc. Various artists. Folk Festival of the Blues. Argo/Chess P-­4031, 1964, vinyl LP. Various artists. Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–­1968. Rhino 5101124192, 2006, compact disc. Originally released in 1972. Various artists. Roots of Classic Rock: The Blues That Inspired Rock ‘n’ Roll. Grammercy Records 301, 2009, compact disc. Various artists. What’s Shakin’. Elektra 61343, 1993, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. Waters, Muddy. The Chess Box. MCA/Chess AACHD380002, 1989, compact disc. Waters, Muddy. The Complete Muddy Waters, 1947–­1967. Charly Records CD RED BOX 3, 1992, compact disc. Waters, Muddy. London Sessions. Chess CHD-­9298, 1989, compact disc. Originally released in 1972. Waters, Muddy. Rare and Unissued. MCA/Chess CHD 9180, 1984, compact disc. Waters, Muddy, featuring Michael Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield. Fathers and Sons. Chess/MCA AA881126482, 2001, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. Wheatstraw, Peetie. Complete Works, Volume 4. Document 5244, 1994, compact disc. The Who. A Quick One. MCA MCAD31331, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. The Who. The Who Sell Out. MCA MCAD31332, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. The Who. The Who Sings My Generation. MCA MCAD-­31330, 1988, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Who. Tommy. Polydor 5310432, 1998, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Who. Who’s Missing. MCA 25982, 1987, compact disc. The Who. Who’s Next. Polydor 5277602, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. Williamson I, Sonny Boy [ John Lee Williamson]. When the Sun Goes Down, Volume 8: Bluebird Blues. BMG/Bluebird/RCA 82876551562, 2003, compact disc. Williamson II, Sonny Boy (Aleck “Rice” Miller). His Best. MCA/Chess MCD 09375, 1997, compact disc. Williamson II, Sonny Boy (Aleck “Rice” Miller). One Way Out. Universal 93315, 2007, compact disc. Originally released in 1968. Williamson II, Sonny Boy (Aleck “Rice” Miller). The Real Folk Blues. Universal 93207, 2007, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. Williamson II, Sonny Boy, and the Yardbirds. Sonny Boy Williamson & The Yardbirds. Victor Records 61793, 2002, compact disc. Originally released in 1966.

Selected Bibliography  •  231

Wolf, Howlin. Howlin’ Wolf (The Rockin’ Chair Album). Vogue 600111, 1986, compact disc. Originally released in 1962. Wolf, Howlin’. London Sessions. MCA/Chess 9351, 1994, compact disc. Originally released in 1971. Wolf, Howlin’. Moanin’ in the Moonlight. Universal/MCA 3206, 2001, compact disc. Originally released in 1962. Wolf, Howlin’. The Real Folk Blues. MCA/Chess 9273, 1990, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. Wolf, Howlin’. This Is Howlin’ Wolf ’s New Album . . . Universal 93213, 2007, compact disc. Originally released in 1969. The Yardbirds. Having A Rave-­Up! Victor Records 61099, 2000, compact disc. Originally released in 1965. The Yardbirds. Little Games. Capitol/EMI 54102, 1996, compact disc. Originally released in 1967. The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds (commonly titled “Roger the Engineer”). Victor Records 62293, 2003, compact disc. Originally released in 1966. Secondary Sources (Print)

Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. New York: Anchor, 2004. Addison, Paul. No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Postwar Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Adelt, Ulrich. Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Anderson, Paul, ed. Orwell in Tribune. London: Politico’s, 2006. Annan, Noel. Our Age: English Intellectuals between the Wars, a Group Portrait. New York: Random House, 1990. Appleford, Steve. The Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll: Song-­by-­Song. New York: Schirmer, 1997. Atkins, John. The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–­1998. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Bacon, Tony. London Live: From the Yardbirds to Pink Floyd to the Sex Pistols. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1999. Baker, Houston A. “Introduction to Blues, Ideology, and African-­American Literature.” Reprinted in Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, edited by Stephen C. Tracy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.. Baldwin, Davarian. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Baldwin, James. “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.” In Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1963. Baldwin, Stanley. “On England” and Other Addresses. London: Philip Allan, 1926. Bane, Michael. White Boy Singin’ the Blues: The Black Roots of White Rock. New York: Penguin, 1992. Bangs, Lester. “The British Invasion.” In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-­Warren. New York: Straight Arrow, 1992.

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244  •  Selected Bibliography

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Simonelli, David. Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s. Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2013. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Skelton, Tracey, and Gill Valentine, eds. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge, 1998. Smith, Graham. When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War Two Britain. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Smith, Julie Edith. “From American Invasion to British Innovation: The Evolution of Rock Music in Great Britain, 1954–­1967.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 1999. Snowman, Daniel. Britain and America: An Interpretation of Their Culture, 1945–­1975. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Spencer, Jon Michael. Blues and Evil. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Spitz, Bob. The Beatles: The Biography. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker, 2005. Stark, Stephen. Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2005. Stewart, Earl. African-­American Music: An Introduction. New York: Schirmer, 1998. Storry, Mike, and Peter Childs, eds. British Cultural Identities. London: Routledge, 1997. Sweers, Britta. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Thompson, Andrew S. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-­Nineteenth Century. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. Thompson, Dave. Cream: The World’s First Supergroup. London: Virgin, 2005. Thompson, Dave. I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto. New York: Backbeat, 2008. Tiratsoo, Nick, ed. From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain since 1945. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Touré. “And It’s Deep, Too.” In Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-­Warren, and Christopher John Farley. New York: Amistad, 2003. Tracy, Stephen C. Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Trynka, Paul. “Between Muddy and the Wolf: Guitarist Hubert Sumlin.” In Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-­Warren, and Christopher John Farley. New York: Amistad, 2003. Trynka, Paul. “Call of the Wild: Howlin’ Wolf.” In Mojo Classics: Blues Heroes Starring Eric Clapton. Mojo Magazine Publishers, 2005. Twelker, Uli. The Small Faces, the Faces, Peter Frampton, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Lane, Steve Marriott, Humble Pie, and Other Stories. London: Sanctuary, 2002. Unterberger, Richie. Review of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, in The All Music Guide to Rock: The Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul, edited by Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2002. Veblen, Thorstein. “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.” In A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism, edited by Rick Tilman. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.

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Wade, Dorothy, and Justine Picardie. Music Man: Ahmet Ertegün, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock ‘n’ Roll. New York: Norton, 1990. Wagnleitner, Reinhold, and Elaine Tyler May, eds. Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Policy of American Popular Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. Waksman, Steve. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Wald, Elijah. The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: Amistad, 2004. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993. Ward, Brian. “‘By Elvis and All the Saints’: Images of the American South in the World of 1950s British Popular Music.” In Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock ‘n’ Roll, edited by Franklin T. Lambert and Joseph P. Ward. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Ward, James A. Railroads and the Character of America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Ward, Stuart, ed. British Culture and the End of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975. Webster, Wendy. Englishness and Empire, 1939–­1965. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman, 1981. Weight, Richard. Mod! A Very British Style. London: Random House, 2013. Weight, Richard. Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–­2000. London: Macmillan, 2002. Welch, Chris. Led Zeppelin, Dazed and Confused: The Stories behind Every Song. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998. Welch, Chris. Steve Winwood: Roll with It. New York: Perigee, 1990. Whiteley, Sheila. “Little Red Rooster v. The Honky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger, Sexuality, Style, and Image.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley. London: Routledge, 1997. Whiteley, Sheila. Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender. New York: Routledge, 2005. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. Williamson, Nigel. The Rough Guide to the Blues. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 2007. Wilmer, Val. “The First Time I Met the Blues.” In Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-­Warren, and Christopher John Farley. New York: Amistad, 2003. Wilson, A. N. Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010. Winnick, Walter. “Muddy Waters: A Living Legend in the Blues.” The Hatchet, February 2, 1976, 5.

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Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Wolf, Peter. “Me, Muddy, and the Wolf: Adventures in the Blues Trade.” In Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-­Warren, and Christopher John Farley. New York: Amistad, 2003. Wynn, Neil A., ed. Cross the Water Blues: African-­American Music in Europe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Wynn, Neil A., and Jill Terry, eds. Transatlantic Roots Music: Folk, Blues, and National Identities. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Zweiniger-­Bargielowska, Ina. Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–­1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Filmography

Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who. Directed by Murray Lerner. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2007. DVD. The American Folk Blues Festival, 1962–­1966. 3 vols. Produced by David Peck, John Kanis, Janie Hendrix, and John McDermott. Santa Monica, CA: Hip-­O Records, 2003–­4. DVD. Blow-­Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD. Originally released in 1966. Blue Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites? Directed by Chris Rodley. London: BBC4, 2011. DVD. “Britain Invades, America Fights Back.” Directed by Andrew Solt. Episode 3 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995. DVD. “Crossroads: A Rock and Roll History.” Directed by Karen Walsh and Alan Lewens. Episode 2 of Dancin’ in the Street: A Rock and Roll History. Produced by Sean Barrett. London: BBC Video, 1996. Videocassette (VHS). Eric Clapton: At the Crossroads. Directed by Robin Bextor. N.p., 2002. DVD. Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival, 2007. Directed by Martyn Atkins. Burbank, CA: Rhino, 2007. DVD. Eric Clapton: Nothing but the Blues. Produced by Martin Scorsese. New York: Warner/ Reprise, 1995. DVD. “Godfathers and Sons.” Directed by Marc Levin. Episode 5 of The Blues: A Musical Journey. Produced by Martin Scorsese. New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003. DVD. “Guitar Heroes.” Directed by Marc J. Sachnoff. Episode 7 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995. DVD. A Hard Day’s Night,. Directed by Richard Lester. Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Originally released in 1964. The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995. DVD. The Kids Are Alright. Directed by Jeff Stein. 1979. N.p.: Pioneer Entertainment, 2003. Lawrence of Arabia. Directed by David Lean. Burbank, CA: Columbia Tristar Home Video, 2002. Originally released in 1962. Led Zeppelin: The Origin of the Species. Produced by Thomas Walker. New Malden, UK: Sexy Intellectual, 2006. DVD.

248  •  Selected Bibliography

“My Generation.” Directed by Obie Benz. Episode 6 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995. DVD. “Red, White and Blues.” Directed by Mike Figgis. Episode 6 of The Blues: A Musical Journey. Produced by Martin Scorsese. New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003. DVD. The Rolling Stones: Shine a Light. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD. Sessions for Robert J. Produced by Eric Clapton and Doyle Bramhall II. Burbank, CA: Reprise Records, 2004. DVD. The Seven Ages of Rock. Directed by Andrew Graham-­Brown. London: BBC Two, 2007. “The ’70s: Have a Nice Decade.” Directed by Bill Richmond. Episode 8 of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Produced by Jeffrey Peisch et al. Chicago: Time-­Life Video and Television, 1995. DVD. The Song Remains the Same. Directed by Peter Clifton and Joe Massot. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007. DVD. Originally released in 1976. Websites

Bhatia, Sidharth. “When Led Zeppelin Visited India.” BBCNews.com. Accessed May 4, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33017725 Crandall, Bill. “Chris Robinson Has a Whole Lotta Love for Zeppelin.” Rolling Stone, October 14, 1999. Rolling Stone.com. Accessed September 24, 2008. http://www. rollingstone.com/artists/jimmypage/articles/story/5925254/chris robinson_ has_a_whole_lotta_love_for_zeppelin Fricke, David. “Blues Brothers: The Rolling Stones and Jack White Shine a Light on the Roots of Their Music.” Rolling Stone, April 17, 2008. Rolling Stone.com. Accessed September 24, 2008. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/19969845/blues_ brothers Fridhammar, Christer. “Knights in Blue Denim: The British Blues Scene From the 1960s Onward.” Accessed May 21, 2008. http://www.fridhammar.com/london.html Harrison, Frederick. “West Meets East.” Soundscapes.info. Accessed December 23, 2007. http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME04/ West_meets_east.shtml Harry’s Blues Lyrics Online. Accessed October 16, 2008, November 12, 2007, and December 8, 2007. http://blueslyrics.tripod.com Pattingale, Graeme. “Renovating the Blues: The Early Bootlegs.” Accessed December 18, 2006. http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/cream/ renovating.htm Townshend, Pete. Pete Townshend—­Who He? (blog). Accessed September 3, 2006; October 3, 2006; January 6, 2007; and May 9, 2007. http://petetownshendwhohe. blogspot.com

Index

“affiliation” and “filiation,” 10–­11, 75, 76, 139, 176 African-­American men in the British imagination, 33, 34, 35, 76, 86, 102, 103–­4 alcohol and drinking, 22, 63, 116, 119, 120, 121, 140, 159, 160, 183 and impact on creativity, 121 and intellectual networks in history, 119 and stage fright, 121 See also homosocial bonding; Society of Looning Alcoholic Guitarists (SLAGs) America in the British imagination, 4–­5, 31–­ 32, 41–­43, 82, 90, 139, 152 American Folk and Blues Festival (AFBF), 62, 63, 130 American Forces Network (AFN), 50, 52–­ 53, 54–­55, 67, 182 See also radio American popular culture, 4, 47, 51, 76, 78, 93, 137, 176, 178, 184 Britons’ fascination with, 41–­43 ideas of America spread via, 41, 42 postwar spread to Britain and Europe, 32, 36–­37, 41 relationship to realities of American life, 80–­81 violence in, 100–­01 androgyny in British rock music, 154 “Angry Young Men,” 82 Animals, The, 62, 74, 115, 137, 184 and the “British Invasion,” 71, 137

and drinking, 120 influence of white American blues enthusiasts on, 15 influence on Bob Dylan, 10 and “Mod,” 45 and Sonny Boy Williamson II, 63–­65 anti-­industrial sentiment in British rock music, 156–­158 apprenticeships, blues, 63, 64, 65, 66, 124, 125, 143, 184 aristocracy, British, 5, 42, 98 attempted emulation of by British rock stars, 114, 159–­62 See also class, socioeconomic, in Britain art colleges, British, 13, 24, 25, 70, 107, 122, 124 and drinking, 119–­20 as educational alternative, 114 locale for homosocial bonding, 22, 57, 113, 183 reasons for cultural fertility of, 115–­16 Atlantic Records, 68, 145–­46 “augmentation” of the blues, 142, 165–­66, 171 “authenticity,” debates regarding, 14–­16, 39, 40, 60, 76, 110, 138, 150, 153, 184 automobiles, 11, 16, 92, 93–­95, 148, 157–­158, 160, 162 See also blues tropes: automobiles Baker, Peter “Ginger,” 27, 43, 128–­29, 151, 158, 185 See also Cream 249

250  •  Index

Baldry, “Long John,” 63, 106, 112 Baldwin, James, and identity, 153 Band, The, 65, 153, 213n143 and “imagined America,” 138–­39, 152, 159, 184 influences on the British blues network, 22, 108, 137, 138–­39 Baraka, Amiri, 180 Barber, Chris, 39, 60, 61–­2, 122, 123, 182 Beatles, The, 44, 111, 151, 184 and “Beatlemania,” 66, 71, 126, 137, 184 break-­up, 172, 173 competition with the Rolling Stones, 10, 22, 108, 131–­34, 136, 141, 173 emulation of British aristocracy by members, 162 Indian influences on, 147 investiture as MBEs, 29 music as “Apollonian,” 131 origin of band name, 38 outsold in 1960s by Cliff Richard, 40 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), 10, 133, 134, 144 as tangentially related to British blues network, 9 Beck, Jeff, 9, 115, 120, 178 “Beck’s Bolero,” 128, 150 considered by Rolling Stones as replacement guitarist, 125 exposure to blues and rock ‘n’ roll, 50 friends with Eric Clapton, 94, 181 friends with Jimmy Page, 125 Indian influences on, 147 lack of interest in sociopolitical activism, 166 Middle Eastern influences on, 147–­48 Berry, Chuck, 18, 25, 38, 49, 54, 57, 59, 75, 97, 113 black Britons, 33–­36 See also immigration Black Crowes, 181 Blind Faith, 129 Bloomfield, Michael, 75, 138 Blues Incorporated, 55, 62, 121, 122, 124–­25, 126, 128 “blues nymphets,” 97–­99 See also women

blues tropes, 2, 20, 22, 76, 104, 171, 175, 178 specific tropes automobiles, 11, 92, 93–­95 “badman,” 102 adultery, 88–­89, 102 the Devil, 85–­86 freedom, 76 guns, 100–­101, 104 intimate violence, 101, 102 knowledge, 84–­85 language, 88–­89, 166–­70 mobility, 89, 91–­95 power, 76 run-­ins with the law, 102–­3 sex and sexual prowess, 11, 76, 86–­87, 88, 166–­70, 185 the supernatural, 85–­86 trains, 11, 90, 92–­93 violence, 11, 76, 100–­04, 166–­70, 185 voodoo, 85, 86, 87 women, 96–­100 blues, “invention” of by white scholars, 14–­ 15, 16 blues, perceived gender bias in, 16–­18 “bluesman” persona, 11, 76, 82–­85, 183–­84 and autobiographical fallacy, 75, 76, 85, 91, 100, 103–­4, 112, 121 characteristics of, 88 Boyd, Joe, 139, 146, 154 Boyd, Pattie, 10, 127, 140–­41, 172, 174 Britain in the British imagination, 42, 47, 90, 142, 159, 185 landscapes, 152, 156, 159 postwar perceptions of as “gray,” “tired,” and/or “uncool,” 5, 28, 42, 47 tropes and characters, 22, 139, 151–­52, 157, 159, 171, 185 unfavorable comparisons with America, 28, 42, 44, 90 “British blues network,” 8, 17, 50, 77, 131, 144, 155, 159, 184 animosity among members, 128 attenuation of bonds in the early 1970s, 173 comparison with other cultural networks in history, 108, 111, 112, 113 and competition, 126–­27

Index  •  251

creative maturation of, 142–­43, 165, 185 cultural significance of, 23, 176–­79 existence and composition, 8–­10 as “medieval guild,” 125 as “temp agency,” 125, 137 definition of, 107 formation of, 113 goals of, 70 internal transmission of knowledge throughout, 129–­30, 140 overlap with “Swinging London,” 45, 46 shared circumstances, of members, 21, 140 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 52–­54, 55, 79, 124, 182, 196n24 See also radio “British Invasion,” 22, 66, 71, 80, 108, 123, 144, 184 competition amongst members, 127 influence on Bob Dylan, 138 and notions of “Britishness,” 152–­53 and “Swinging London,” 44 British literature, 4, 86, 146, 155, 156, 157 “Britishness” and “Englishness” in British rock music, 22, 142, 151–­53 Broonzy, “Big Bill,” 49, 61, 89, 182 Brown, James, 33 Bruce, Jack, 28, 128 See also Cream Burdon, Eric, 9, 115, 119, 129 acquiring first records, 50 and “Big Bill” Broonzy, 49 at 1958 Muddy Waters concert, 62, 113 childhood, 13, 41 on moving beyond the blues, 143–­44 on Robert Johnson and the Devil, 86 socializing, 106 See also Animals, The Butterfield, Paul, 75, 137–­38, 153, 184 See also Paul Butterfield Blues Band Chess Records, 16, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 95, 112, 135, 182, 205n114 “Chicago blues,” 16, 38, 61–­62, 63, 68, 111, 112, 138, 166, 182, 183 “C-­I-­A Influence” (on music), 146

cities, cultural impact of, 7, 10, 11, 16, 24, 109–­10, 126, 140, 177 Clapton, Eric, 1, 9, 18, 23, 178 “adoption” of John Mayer, 181 on America and pop culture, 42 and art school, 114, 116, 120 and automobiles, 94 on blues fathers and sons, 66, 75 on Chicago blues network, 111 on Children’s Hour radio program, 53–­54 childhood, 12, 14, 27 on commonalities with bluesmen, 116 composition and recording of “Layla,” 171–­72, 175 cover version of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” 167 and Cream, 128, 151 on drinking, 120–­121 on eclecticism, 68, 69 “emotional poverty” of, 12, 14 emulation of African-­American bluesmen by, 33 and English cuisine, 152 and Ahmet Ertegün, 145 and father, 27, 77 friends with members of Traffic, 158 and heroin, 91, 127, 160, 172, 174 influence of white American blues enthusiasts on, 15 and Robert Johnson, 55–­56, 83, 86, 91, 179 and Alexis Korner, 124 lack of interest in sociopolitical activism, 166 living with John Mayall, 117 and John Mayall’s record collection, 55 on mobility and restlessness, 90–­91 and old age, 180 on “playing like a white man,” 153 possible impact of decolonization on, 5 quits the Yardbirds, 125, 153 on racism, 35 reaction to The Band, 139 relationship with Pattie Boyd, 10, 127, 140, 171–­72 on suffering and creativity, 174 as twenty-­first-­century blues mentor, 180 and virtuosity, 149

252  •  Index

Clapton, Eric (continued) visiting the Flamingo Club, 52 and Muddy Waters, 16, 35 with Sonny Boy Williamson II, 64 and young women, 99 See also Cream; Derek and the Dominoes; Yardbirds, The class, socioeconomic, in Britain, 11–­13, 25, 30, 41, 44, 77, 79, 114, 131, 162 See also aristocracy, British classical music, 4, 22, 149–­51, 161 “cock rock,” 170 coffeehouses and “milk bars,” 22, 39, 61, 107, 114 Cold War, 36, 50, 52, 71, 79, 157, 182 commonalities between African-­American bluesmen and British blues network, 11–­14, 88, 92, 105, 115–­16, 120, 183 between America and Britain, 3, 47, 176 Conover, Willis, 54–­55 consumer culture as “feminine,” 80, 96 Count Suckle (Wilbert Augustus Campbell), 58 country-­and-­western music, 9 broadcast on American Forces Network,55 and eclecticism, 4, 70 as ingredient in rock ‘n’ roll, 37 in music of Led Zeppelin, 158 as musical “source” to be revisited, 139 popularity in Liverpool, 38 and reconsideration of “home” in British rock music, 163 young Britons’ interest in American records, 41, 51 cowboys, 14, 41, 42–­43, 78, 82, 102, 105, 159 See also “Wild West” Crawdaddy (British nightclub), 122 Cream (band), 2, 106, 145, 153, 166, 178 as “Dada group,” 151 Baker-­Bruce feud, 128–­29 and eclecticism, 69, 70 influence of The Band on, 139 and role in “supergroup” phenomenon, 44, 149 creativity, 2, 23, 113, 140, 176, 177, 183, 184

and alcohol, 119, 120, 121 and animosity, 128–­29 and competition, 9, 10, 22, 110–­12, 126–­ 27, 131–­36, 177 and eclecticism, 22 and financial stability, 145 and freedom, 114–­15 and interpersonal networks in history, 108–­9 impact of technology on, 144 occurrences of in certain times and places, 7–­8, 176 and struggle, 173–­74 cultural borrowing and “shopping,” 2, 3, 4, 22, 67, 146–­47, 156, 169, 177, 179, 185 Dada (European artistic movement), 8, 20, 146, 151 DADGAD guitar tuning, 155, 217n66 Daltrey, Roger, 69, 128, 161, 164 See also Who, The Davies, Cyril, 61, 62, 106, 112, 118, 122–­25, 126, 183, 184 See also Blues Incorporated Davies, Dave, 113, 128 Davies, Ray, 9, 39, 79, 113, 115, 128, 147, 165 See also The Kinks decolonization See Empire, British “Delta” blues, 13, 14, 16, 18, 38, 67, 68 Derek and the Dominoes, 23, 127, 171 Devil, The See blues tropes: The Devil Diddley, Bo (Ellas McDaniel), 38, 49–­50, 59 Dixon, Willie, 59, 62, 66, 89, 102, 103–­4, 112, 168 domesticity, 79, 80–­81, 96, 163, 165 Donegan, Tony (“Lonnie”), 39, 61 Dowd, Tom, 146, 174 Dreja, Chris, 84, 123, 126 See also Yardbirds, The drugs, 44, 91, 133, 142, 148, 149, 160, 172, 173 Dylan, Bob, 20, 22, 108, 133, 152, 184 “going electric,” 60, 138 and “imagined America,” 153, 159 influence on the British blues network, 79–­80, 137–­38

Index  •  253

influenced by the British blues network, 10, 138 eclecticism, 22, 140, 171, 175, 185 in British cultural history, 3–­4, 146 in Britons’ understanding of the blues, 19, 67–­69, 179 in British rock music, 69–­70, 144, 146, 179 education system, British, 13, 25, 114 See also art schools, British; “Eleven-­Plus” examination Eel Pie Island (British nightclub), 46, 106–­ 7, 122, 173 “Eleven-­Plus” examination, 13, 25, 114, 115 electric guitars, 15, 60, 61, 62, 138, 150 Elizabeth II, Queen, 25, 29, 96 Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, 95–­96 Empire, British, 13, 21, 26, 104, 156, 176 and categorization of racial “Others,” 34 “comes home” in postwar period, 31, 34 and “cultural borrowing,” 142, 146–­48 decolonization of, 5, 13, 30, 47, 77, 79, 178, 186 “imperial heroes” from, 159, 184 and the “man of adventure” trope, 78–­79, 184 emulation of the blues, by British blues network, 1–­2, 23, 175, 176, 180, 183 of drinking specifically, 121 as opposed to passive reception, 47 role of interpersonal connectivity in, 107 shift from admirers to emulators, 122, 123 shift from emulators to innovators, 21, 22 Enlightenment (European intellectual movement), 8, 108–­9 Epstein, Brian, 132 Ertegün, Ahmet, 145 See also Atlantic Records ethnicities, British, 3–­4, 9, 31, 155 experimentation, musical, 142–­43, 146 Faces, The, 121, 154, 163 Fame, Georgie, 40, 52, 55, 58, 68 fashion models, 44, 98, 99, 127 See also women

fathers and sons, blues, 5, 23, 72, 123, 140, 184 and alternative masculine ideal, 5, 10–­11, 18, 75, 139 British “sons” becoming the “fathers,” 180–­82 filial reverence of British blues network, 66, 75 lack of socioeconomic commonalities between, 12 and marginalization of women in blues, 17 and musical lessons learned, 66, 139 premised on bluesmen’s old age, 16, 84, 138 relationship between idealization and reality, 74, 138 and “sibling rivalry” with Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 138 fathers, British blues network’s actual, 27, 77 Flamingo (British nightclub), 52, 69, 122 Fleetwood, Mick, 117, 127 folk music, 9, 10, 13, 39, 57, 70, 114, 147, 185 American, 15, 60 as element in “skiffle,” 38 English and Celtic, 4, 154 enthusiasts as “moldy figs,” 61, 110, 182 influence on British blues network, 154–­ 56 recording and re-­discovery in the 1940s, 18–­19 roots of blues in, 3 “folkways,” Anglo-­American, 3, 176 freedoml. See blues tropes: freedom gender roles, 2, 13, 176 and the “bluesman” persona, 11 and “intimate violence,” 101 in mainstream pop culture, 17 performing the blues, 16–­18 “public and private spheres,” 163, 165 and record “listening parties,” 117 and suburbia, 81 “generation gap,” 29, 78 GIs, American, 21, 32, 41, 46, 51, 52, 53, 55, 69, 153, 182

254  •  Index

GIs (continued) African-­American, 33–­34, 46, 51–­52, 72, 122 See also Second World War “glam rock,” 70, 171, 177 Gomelsky, Giorgio, 66, 122 Graham, Davy, 147, 155 Grant, Peter, 145 Green, Peter, 149 groupies, 98 See also women guns. See blues tropes: guns Guy, George “Buddy,” 95, 181 “hands-­on preservation,” 2, 110, 137, 138, 141 Harrison, George, 10, 127, 133, 140, 147 See also Beatles, The heavy metal, 20, 86, 170, 171, 177 Hendrix, Jimi, 23, 103, 149, 172, 178 heteronormativity, 13, 17 Holiday, Billie, 18 Holly, Buddy, 38, 54 “Home Counties,” 24, 54, 165, 183, 190n5 homosocial bonding, 22, 107, 108, 113, 118, 121–­22, 140, 173 around activities, 116 at art college, 113 at music shops, 113 at pubs, 113 role of alcohol in, 119, 120 See also alcohol and drinking; masculinity Hooker, John Lee, 45, 50, 68, 89 and the American Folk Blues Festival (AFBF), 62, 63 backed by British blues bands, 63, 123 and drinking, 120, 121 as father figure to British blues network, 66 influence on British blues network, 66 and sex in lyrics, 89, 104 and violence in lyrics, 101–­02, 04 House, Eddie “Son,” 13, 14, 18, 84, 88, 100, 102 Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), 45, 55, 59, 167 and automobiles, 92, 95

extends tour in Britain, 63 as father figure to British blues network, 33, 66, 75, 139 meets the Muleskinners, 74–­75 and money made, as compared to British blues network, 162, 180 as preferable to mainstream pop music, 72 pseudonym of, 84 relationship with Paul Butterfield and Michael Bloomfield, 138 rivalry with Muddy Waters, 112 on “Shindig!” TV program, 66 and women as nemesis, 97, 100, 101 immigration, 31, 34, 46, 51, 69 See also black Britons Impressionism (European artistic movement), 2, 8 Indian “raga” music, 4, 22, 70, 146–­47, 185 innovation, musical, 2, 176, 180, 183 and eclecticism, 22 in late 1960s British blues-­rock, 23, 142, 171 as opposed to passive reception, 47 role of distance and proximity in, 3 role of interpersonal connectivity in, 10, 107, 140 without abandoning the blues tradition, 184 interpersonal cultural networks, 7, 9, 24, 48, 70, 119, 140, 177 Jacobs, “Little Walter,” 72, 104, 112 Jagger, Mick, 9, 18, 23, 178, 179 and 1962 American Folk Blues Festival, 62, 130 acquaintances in high society of, 45 on America and pop culture, 43 and American GIs, 51 and androgyny, 154 anti-­suburban sentiment, 80, 81 asks John Mayall for guitarist recommendation, 125 and blues fathers and sons, 139 and British-­composed R&B music, 143 career options open to, 30

Index  •  255

and cataloging of sexual conquests, 169 and Chrissie Shrimpton, 17, 98 consumption of alcohol for stage fright, 121 dismissive of Their Satanic Majesties Request, 134 on domestic life, 80–­81, 165 drug charges, 133 friends with members of Traffic, 135 hangs out at Scene nightclub, 59 influence of James Brown on, 33 influence of white American blues enthusiasts on, 15 lack of interest in sociopolitical activism, 166 mail-­orders blues records from America, 182 meets Keith Richards, 57, 113 onstage with Jack White, 181 and “organization man” archetype, 80 possible impact of decolonization on, 5 record collection of, 59 and sadomasochism, 104, 170 on scholarly ethos of blues network, 18 and sex in lyrics, 167, 168 shares flat with Brian Jones and Keith Richards, 116–­17 songwriting partnership with Keith Richards, 49, 138 and women, 17, 165, 169 See also Rolling Stones, The jazz, 4, 9, 10, 22, 55, 122, 185 broadcast on the BBC, 53, 54 and British eclecticism, 68, 69, 70, 146 as element in “skiffle,” 38 and musical virtuosity, 149 as precursor to British blues scene, 21, 58, 61 See also traditional (“trad”) jazz revival Jeff Beck Group, The, 70, 166 John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, 7, 63, 117, 118, 124 See also Mayall, John Johnson, Robert, 2, 18, 45, 135, 146, 174 and automobiles, 93–­94 and blues “authenticity,” 14, 15 death, 64, 65

and the Devil, 64, 85, 86, 149 discovery by British blues network, 35 elevation to top of blues pantheon, 14, 65 as “empty screen” for British blues network, 35, 65 and guns, 104 King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961 compilation), 15, 56–­57, 83–­84 lack of photographs of, 65, 83–­84 as “mentor” to Eric Clapton, 172 mobility and restlessness, 90 music covered by Eric Clapton, 167, 179 re-­discovery and re-­release of recordings, 15, 19 romantic views of, 83–­84 and sex in lyrics, 86, 167 and violence, 100, 101 youth and virtuosity of, 85, 149 Johnson, Tommy, 85–­86, 121 Jones, Brian, 49, 134, 136 and 1962 American Folk Blues Festival, 130 death, 172 friendship with Eric Burdon and John Lennon, 119 goals in forming the Rolling Stones, 70–­ 71 and Paul Jones, 70 and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, 148 moves in with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 116–­17 parts ways with Rolling Stones, 125, 136 and rock music as “watered down,” 40 and Robert Johnson, 56 use of sitar, 147 See also Rolling Stones, The Jones, John Paul, 128, 150, 164 See also Led Zeppelin Jones, “Little Johnny,” 97 Jones, Paul, 60, 62, 70–­71, 72, 114, 130 See also Manfred Mann King, Riley “B.B.,” 181 Kinks, The, 39, 113 animosity among members, 128 anti-­suburban sentiment of, 80 and the “British Invasion,” 71

256  •  Index

Kinks, The (continued) and “Britishness,” 155, 157, 159, 216n53 and children’s literature, 155 Indian influences on, 10, 147 and “Mod,” 45 and pastoralism, 157 and “rock opera,” 150 knowledge. See blues tropes: knowledge Korner, Alexis, 55, 61–­62, 118, 122–­25, 126, 183, 184 See also Blues Incorporated Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), 39, 51, 84, 92, 100, 102, 103, 156 Led Zeppelin, 1, 56, 74, 106 augmentation of the blues by, 166, 171 and blues fathers and sons, 75 and charges of lyrical theft, 130 “C-­I-­A Influence” on music of, 146 classical musical influences on, 150 cover versions of “Blind Willie” Johnson’s “In My Time of Dying,” 167 of Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks,” 167 of Muddy Waters’ “You Need Love,” 87 and creativity, 145 differences between blues covers and originals, 87 and eclecticism, 70 emergence from the Yardbirds, 118 English folk influences on, 155 and financial stability, 145 and groupies, 99 Middle Eastern influences on, 148 music covered by Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes (1999), 181 and pastoralism, 157, 158 and quasi-­mysticism of “Stairway to Heaven,” 20 role of the Who in formation of, 128 and sex in lyrics, 168 signed to Atlantic Records, 145 The Song Remains the Same concert film (1976), 164 as “sons” of Howlin’ Wolf, 75

untitled fourth album, 151 US tours from 1968 to 1970, 178 Lennon, John, 10 on alcohol and social network tradition, 119 at art college, 115 on “blues as a chair,” 20 on Elvis Presley, 38 emulation of British aristocracy by, 162 friends with Eric Burdon and Brian Jones, 129 hostility toward Mick Jagger, 138 listens to American Forces Network, 55 on the Rolling Stones imitating the Beatles, 133, 136 and skiffle, 39 on socializing, 106 songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney, 132, 138 See also Beatles, The Lomax, Alan, 13, 18, 30, 54 London as cultural center and hub, 7, 122, 126, 140, 177, 183 McCartney, Paul, 38, 39, 132, 133, 138, 162 See also Beatles, The McGhee, Brownie, and Sonny Terry, 54, 61, 62 McGuinness, Tom, 45, 114, 126 See also Yardbirds, The McLagan, Ian, 42, 74, 115, 135, 197n55 “man of adventure” trope, 78, 82, 105 managers, talent, 39–­40, 71, 144–­45, 152–­53 Manfred Mann, 28, 45, 70, 71, 114, 126, 130 Marriott, Steve, 120, 130 Martin, George, 132, 133 masculinity, 18 acceptable standards of, 77, 82 and androgyny, 154 and blues “authenticity,” 15 the blues as an alternative ideal of, 10, 76, 104, 105, 183 the blues as “steroids,” 171 and the “bluesman” persona, 11, 13, 41, 76, 105, 183, 184 as “boring,” 82 and the British Empire, 30, 186

Index  •  257

and consumer culture, 81 and heteronormativity, 17 modern tensions regarding, 15–­16 perceived as “in crisis,” 77–­78, 82 and urban and rural landscapes, 81 and violence, 104, 170, 185 and virtuosity, 185 See also gender roles; homosocial bonding May, Phil, 115, 120 Mayall, John, 19, 55, 63, 65, 66, 68, 117–­118, 125, 129, 143 See also John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers Mayer, John, 181 Mellotron, 144 Melody Maker (British pop music magazine), 61, 62, 67, 98, 120, 125 Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas), 17, 167 Middle Eastern influences on British rock music, 147 Miller, Jimmy (British record producer), 135–­36 misogyny, 17, 98 mobility. See blues tropes: mobility “Mod” (British masculine subculture), 44–­ 46, 69, 80, 146 Modernism (European artistic movement), 2, 8, 110, 119 Modular synthesizer, 144 Moon, Keith, 128, 150, 160 See also Who, The Morrison, Van, 51, 68, 164 multi-­tracking, 144 Murray, Charles Shaar (British journalist and author), 65, 69, 87, 195n7 networks, interpersonal cultural, 70, 140, 177, 183 of Chicago blues performers in the 1940s and 1950s, 111 creativity resulting from British blues network, 10, 144, 176, 177 definition and description of British blues network, 7–­8, 107 examples of in modern history, 108–­11, 119 formation of British blues network in 1950s and ‘60s, 22, 24, 48

impact of alcohol on, 119 influence of British blues network on rock music, 9 significance to wider cultural history, 176, 177 use of to fill vacancies in British bands, 125 of young British blues consumers, 1, 2 See also “British blues network” New Musical Express (NME) (British pop music magazine), 43, 125 nightclubs in Britain, 46, 51, 52, 58, 70, 106–­7, 120, 122, 127, 130, 132, 173 in cities of northern USA, 111, 120 “jook joints” in southern USA, 16, 100, 120 See also Crawdaddy; Eel Pie Island; Flamingo; Roaring Twenties; Scene, The; Scotch of St. James Oldham, Andrew, 98, 116, 132, 134–­35 Oliver, Paul, 19, 74, 88 “organization man” archetype, 11, 77, 79, 80, 105 outsiders, sociocultural, 89, 102, 115–­116, 145 Page, Jimmy, 9, 23, 178, 179 and 1962 American Folk Blues Festival, 62, 130 “adopting” the Black Crowes, 181 and art school, 115 attempts to record in Egypt and India, 147 and “Beck’s Bolero,” 128, 150 on blues enthusiasts, 24 and blues fathers and sons, 66, 75 and “C-­I-­A Influence” on music, 146 and English folk, 155 forms Led Zeppelin, 128 friends with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, 125 and groupies, 99 imagination in Led Zeppelin, 145 in The Song Remains the Same concert film (1976), 164

258  •  Index

Page, Jimmy (continued) insists on no title for Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, 151 on John Mayall’s record collection, 55 meets Robert Plant, 118–­19 plays guitar with violin bow, 150 and record listening parties, 118, 119–­20 and rural retreat at Bron-­Yr-­Aur, 158 and sitar, 147 and skiffle, 39 and virtuosity, 149 See also Led Zeppelin pastoralism in British rock music, 157–­58 Patton, Charley, 14, 18, 100 Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 22, 108, 137–­39, 147, 165 Plant, Robert, 9, 18, 179 and Anglo-­Indian wife, 148 and Birmingham “Black Country,” 153 and “blues nymphets,” 99 on blues and sexual prowess, 88, 167 career options open to, 30 childhood and radio, 54 Chris Robinson sings like, on tour with Jimmy Page, 181 on consumer culture and women, 81–­82 drinks tea onstage, 152 duet with Sandy Denny on “Battle of Evermore,” 155 on eclecticism, 69 and father, 27 friends with members of The Small Faces, 130 and The Honeydrippers, 168 in The Song Remains the Same concert film (1976), 164 meets Jimmy Page, 118–­19 on Robert Johnson, 57, 83 and rural retreat at Bron-­Yr-­Aur, 158 with Sonny Boy Williamson II, 64–­65 and young women, 169 See also Led Zeppelin polyrhythms, 31 power See blues tropes: power Presley, Elvis, 18, 25, 37–­38, 40, 47, 54 progressive (“prog”) rock, 70, 139, 144, 150,

171, 177 proximity and distance as influence, 2–­3, 141, 148, 176–­77 psychedelic rock, 133, 135, 139, 143, 148–­49, 150, 151 pubs. See alcohol and drinking punk, 171 queerness, 154 R&B All-­Stars, The, 106, 112, 124 racism, 3, 115, 143, 156 in America in the 1960s, 43 and the American legal system, 102, 103, 167 debates about “Britishness,” 35 perceived lack in Britain, 12–­13, 177 and remarks by Eric Clapton in 1976, 35–­ 36 and the Second World War, 33 and sexual cataloging, 169 radio, 3, 18, 19, 21, 50, 52–­55, 66, 72, 124, 182 See also American Forces Network (AFN); British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) “railroad culture,” 11, 90, 92–­93 See also blues tropes: trains Rainey, Gertrude “Ma,” 17, 18 rap music, 20, 100 rationing, economic, 12, 25, 28, 29, 46 Rau, Fritz, and Horst Lippmann, 62, 63 See also American Folk Blues Festival (AFBF) reception of blues and rock ‘n’ roll, by Britons, 20, 21, 25, 30, 47, 48, 50, 53, 57, 72, 179 record albums, 3, 8, 66, 183 and American GIs, 51, 52, 72 comparison with Greco-­Roman objets d’art for collectors, 110 cult of acquiring, 57–­58, 59 early examples by Beatles, 44 excitement provoked by, 49 haphazard distribution of, 72 listening parties, 59, 117–­20 mail-­order by young British enthusiasts, 19, 59

Index  •  259

John Mayall’s collection of, 55, 117 as method of transmitting blues to Britain, 3, 21, 41, 50, 182 youth market for in late 1950s, 39, 47 record executives, 15, 39–­40, 71, 144–­45, 152–­53, 184 record shops, 8, 19, 22, 24, 58, 70, 113, 126, 183 Redding, Noel, 43 “refiliation,” 22, 142, 151, 155, 165, 171, 185 Renaissance (European artistic movement), 110–­11, 136 “reverse adoption,” 11, 33, 72, 74, 80, 123, 139–­40, 182 rhythm-­and-­blues (R&B), 49, 70, 124, 139 Atlantic and Motown’s dominance of, 145 Beatles’ reliance on, 20 British bands, 65, 66, 143, 183 broadcast on American Forces Network, 55 cover versions of, 166 definition, 19 eclectic understandings of in Britain, 67, 68 GIs’ role in exposing to Britain, 51, 52 as ingredient in rock ‘n’ roll, 37 “Mods’” interest in, 45 musical conventions of, 139 as phase in creative development, 143 popularity in Britain by 1963, 62 reasons for appeal in Britain, 88 records played in British nightclubs, 58 “reverse adoption” of by Britons, 80 “scene” in London and other British cities, 184 transmission of to Britain, 21, 72 See also soul music Richard, Cliff, 40, 143 Richards, Keith, 9, 179 and 1962 American Folk Blues Festival, 62, 130 on America and pop culture, 43 on American women, 5 and androgyny, 154 at art college, 115, 120 on blues and sexual prowess, 88 on blues enthusiasts, 24, 48

on blues fathers and sons, 181 brings a Bo Diddley record home, 49–­ 50 drug charges, 133 on economic rationing, 28 on Elvis Presley, 38 on emulating the blues, 122 emulation of British aristocracy by, 161 and father, 27, 77 friends with members of Traffic, 135 friends with Ron Wood, 125 on goals of British blues network, 70 hangs out at Scene nightclub, 59 on heroin, 91 inspiration for Pete Townshend’s “windmill” arm movement, 130 on Robert Johnson, 56–­57, 86 listens to American Forces Network, 55 meets Mick Jagger, 57, 113 riled up by Bob Dylan, 138 shares flat with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, 116–­17 songwriting partnership with Mick Jagger, 138 and virtuosity, 149 war damage on family home, 26 on Jack White, 181 See also Rolling Stones, The riots “Bank Holiday” riots (1964–­65), 45 “Blackboard Jungle” riots (1956), 37 Notting Hill race riots (1958), 31 Roaring Twenties (London nightclub), 58 rock ‘n’ roll music, 1, 107, 113, 178 antipathy of American folk enthusiasts for, 60 as American invention, 1, 176 broadcast on American Forces Network, 55 comes to Britain in the 1950s, 25, 37–­38 early British versions of, 40 expression of American masculinity through, 159 learned about at British art colleges, 114 as musical “source” to be revisited, 139 shared love of Beatles and Rolling Stones for, 131

260  •  Index

rock ‘n’ roll music (continued) as a shared text for British blues network, 117 as starting-­point for British blues enthusiasts, 18 stereotypical “lifestyle,” 16 as transmitter of ideas about America, 4 used by British consumers to fill cultural needs, 5 in Western Europe, 47 “rock opera,” 20, 150–­51 “Rockers” (British masculine subculture), 45 Rolling Stones, The, 1, 2, 51, 56, 106, 122, 123, 130 “adopting” Jack White, 181 alarm parents, 98 Amiri Baraka on, 180 anti-­suburban sentiment, 80–­81 augmentation of the blues by, 166, 168, 169 and the “British Invasion,” 71, 137, 184 and children’s literature, 155 competition with the Beatles, 10, 108, 111, 141, 173 and eclecticism, 70, 146, 168 emulation of British aristocracy by members, 162 and exorcism of taboos, 170 “Hellenistic” period of, 142 Indian influences on, 147 influence of white American blues enthusiasts on, 15 and misogyny in lyrics, 98 music as “Dionysian,” 131 and musical “shopping,” 146 outsold in 1960s by Cliff Richard, 40 parting ways with Brian Jones, 125 and pastoralism, 155 and Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 153 perceived lack of dynamism in early 1970s, 172–­73, 174 and “pilgrimage” to Chess Studios, 16 playing “like white men,” 154 and police harassment in America, 43 relationship with the Beatles, 10, 22, 131–­ 34, 136, 173 and sex in lyrics, 168, 169

signed to Atlantic Records, 145 as “sons” of Chuck Berry, 75 as “spin-­off ” from Blues Incorporated, 124 in “tax exile” in the south of France, 164 touring in the USA, 173 urge amongst members to buy country estates, 160 with Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig! TV program, 66 Romanticism (European artistic movement), 115, 149 rural motifs in British rock music. See pastoralism sadomasochism, 170 See also violence Said, Edward (Palestinian-­American theorist), 10–­11, 75, 139 Scene, The (British nightclub), 58–­59 Scotch of St. James (British nightclub), 46 Second World War, 5, 21, 71, 93, 107, 114, 154, 162, 182 and the American Forces Network, 52 bomb damage in Britain from, 25, 26, 46 economic impact on Britain, 28, 29, 183 impact on British blues network’s fathers, 25, 27 mood of “post-­war denial” resulting from, 29, 78 George Orwell and sense of “Britishness” during, 157 role in diminution of Britain as a world power, 5, 25, 29–­30, 183 and the United States, 31–­32 “separate spheres” for men and women, 163, 165 sex and sexuality in the blues. See blues tropes: adultery; blues tropes: sex and sexual prowess Shrimpton, Chrissie, 17, 98 sitar, 10, 31, 146, 147 skiffle, 25, 38–­39, 40, 61, 123 Small Faces, The, 45 Smith, Bessie, 17, 18, 57 Smith, Mamie, 15

Index  •  261

Society of Looning Alcoholic Guitarists (SLAGs), 120–­21 See also Alcohol and drinking “soft power,” 20, 36–­37, 50, 71, 178, 182 soul music, 4, 19, 20, 45, 67, 68, 122, 145 See also rhythm-­and-­blues (R&B) “special relationship,” Anglo-­American, 5–­6, 23, 26, 36, 178 Spencer Davis Group, The, 67, 69, 70, 71, 113 Stanley, Paul, 170–­71 Stewart, Rod, 9, 46, 178 and androgyny, 154 and automobiles, 95 and cataloging of sexual conquests, 169 and drinking, 121 and eclecticism, 68 and father, 77 and misogyny, 168 and “tax exile” in America, 164 on tightness of social network, 106–­07 war damage on family home, 27 and yearning for “home,” 163 suburbs and suburban life, 10, 79–­80, 81, 82, 122, 157, 183 supernatural, the. See blues tropes: the supernatural “Surrey Delta,” 12, 105 “Swinging London” (British cultural movement), 21, 43–­46, 127, 158, 190n25 “tax exiles,” 43, 164–­65 Taylor, Dick, 115, 120 Taylor, Mick, 125 See also The Rolling Stones technology, music-­related, 144 teenage girls, 97–­99 See also women teenagers, 3, 21, 38, 39, 46, 47 Ten Years After, 152, 166 “Thames Valley cotton fields,” 105 See also “Surrey Delta” Townshend, Pete, 9, 164 animosity toward Roger Daltrey, 128 at art college, 114 and automobiles, 95–­96 and “Britishness,” 152 considered by the Rolling Stones as re-

placement guitarist, 125 and drinking, 120 and eclecticism, 68 effect of Second World War on, 26–­27 emulation of British aristocracy by, 161 friends with members of Traffic, 158 on learning to be English in America, 153 on “Mod,” 45 “mood of postwar denial,” 29, 78 and record collection, 59 and virtuosity, 149 and “windmill” arm movement, 130 See also Who, The traditional (“trad”) jazz revival, 39, 58, 60, 62, 123, 182, 183 See also jazz Traffic (band), 10, 70, 135, 147, 151, 155, 157, 158, 163 transmission of the blues to Britain via live performances by African-­ American bluesmen, 3, 8, 21, 50, 60–­ 62, 72, 123, 182 via radio broadcasts, 3, 18, 19, 21, 50, 52, 54, 66, 72, 74, 182 via record albums, 3, 19, 21, 22, 24, 41, 49–­ 50, 51, 52, 55–­59, 68, 72, 135, 182 Veblen, Thorstein (Norwegian-­American theorist), 10, 127, 145, 176–­77 Victoria, Queen, 159 Victorian era, 4, 12, 14, 156 vinyl. See record albums violence. See blues tropes: violence; sadomasochism virtuosity, musical, 117–­18, 149 Waters, Muddy (McKinley Morganfield), 2, 50, 59, 70, 72, 123, 130, 167, 186 and age and knowledge in lyrics, 85 and automobiles, 95 and band, 16 on blues fathers and sons, 75 broadcast on American Forces Network, 55 and Paul Butterfield and Michael Bloomfield, 138 electrified music of, 123

262  •  Index

Waters, Muddy (continued) exposure of Mick Jagger to music of, 51 as father figure to British blues network, 15, 33, 66, 139 first concert in Britain (1958), 61–­63, 113, 123, 182 and “Hoochie-­Coochie Man” persona, 87, 168 influence on Rolling Stones, 134 and money made, compared to British blues network, 162, 180 music covered by Rolling Stones, 49 and “paternal-­professional” sexual persona, 99 pseudonym of, 84 Keith Richards’ desire to spread word about, 70 rivalry with Howlin’ Wolf, 112 role of albums in Mick Jagger-­Keith Richards friendship, 57 and sex in lyrics, 85 and significance of British blues network, 180 struggles of, 174 and violence in lyrics, 101 visual impact of band on Eric Clapton, 16 and young women, 97 Wheatstraw, Peetie (William Bunch), 103 White, Jack, 181–­82 Who, The, 59, 81, 95, 96, 106, 122, 137, 152 anti-­suburban sentiment, 81 animosity among members, 128 and the “British Invasion,” 71 and “Britishness,” 152, 164 eclecticism, 59, 69 and emulation of British aristocracy, 160–­61, 164 and “Mod,” 45 and “power chords,” 130 rock opera “Tommy,” 20, 150 “Wild West,” 14, 78, 100 Williamson I, Sonny Boy ( John Lee Williamson), 63, 97 Williamson II, Sonny Boy (Aleck “Rice” Miller), 35, 160, 181 and the American Folk Blues Festival (AFBF), 63

backed by the Animals and Yardbirds, 63, 64–­65, 74, 123 and escape in lyrics, 89, 102 feelings about backing bands, 64, 199n103 feelings about Britain, 64 and feud with “Little Walter” Jacobs, 112 and sex in lyrics, 88, 99 and young women, 99 Wilson, Harold, 26, 162 Windrush, 31 Winwood, Steve, 9 attempts to name British rock style, 67, 151 and drinking, 120 and eclecticism, 70 emulation of British aristocracy by, 160, 161 friends with Eric Clapton, 181 goals of British blues network, 70 and John Mayall’s record collection, 55 and musical training, 149 and pastoralism, 158, 161 and the Spencer Davis Group, 70, 113 and Traffic, 10, 70 and yearning for “home,” 163 See also Spencer Davis Group, The; Traffic women, 17, 18, 96–­100 American, imagined by Britons, 41 as adulterers, 96 as blues nemeses, 96 cataloged by British rock stars, 168–­69 as constraining men’s freedom, 13, 17, 18, 76, 81–­82, 96, 165, 174 as demanding, 96–­97, 98 as “fair game” to British rock stars, 167–­ 169, 170 and intimate violence, 101–­2 as metaphorical automobiles, 93–­94 perceived as “inauthentic” bluesmen, 15, 17 as sex objects, 17, 18 as violent, 98, 99–­100, 101 See also “blues nymphets;” blues tropes: sex and sexual prowess; blues tropes: women; fashion models; groupies; teenage girls

Index  •  263

Wood, Ron, 114–­15, 125, 154 See also Rolling Stones, The World War Two. See Second World War Wyman, Bill, 12–­13, 28, 40, 160 See also Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The, 2, 10, 17, 40, 84, 122, 123, 126 and Jeff Beck, 125 and the “British Invasion,” 71, 184 and Eric Clapton, 99, 116, 117, 153 emulation of British aristocracy by members, 162

formation at art college, 114 going to America, 137 Indian influences on, 147 Middle Eastern influences on, 147 and Jimmy Page, 125 as precursor to Led Zeppelin, 118 and Sonny Boy Williamson II, 63, 64, 65, 74 and soundtrack to Blow-­Up, 45 youth culture, 2, 3, 6, 21, 23, 44, 46 See also teenagers