On Becoming a Rock Musician 9780231544405

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On Becoming a Rock Musician

Legacy Editions

Legacy Editions Edited by Howard S. Becker and Mitchell Duneier Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs, Paul Willis, with foreword by Stanley Aronowitz The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, Herbert J. Gans, with foreword by Harvey Molotch On Becoming a Rock Musician, H. Stith Bennett, with foreword by Howard S. Becker Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, Viviana Zelizer, with foreword by Kieran Healy

On Becoming a Rock Musician H. Stith Bennett Foreword by Howard S. Becker

Columbia University Press / New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-231-18284-3 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-231-18285-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-231-54440-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956459

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Mary Ann Smith Cover image: © New York City / Alamy Stock Photo

Contents

Foreword to the Legacy Edition vii Preface xi A Guide for the Reader xix Acknowledgments xxix

Part I. Group Dynamics 1. Introduction 3 2. Group Definition and Redefinition 18

Part II. Rock Ecology 3. Instruments and “the Outside World” 4. Equipment and the Band Van 72 5. Gigs 85

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Part III. Mastering the Technological Component 6. Technology and The Music 7. The Realities of Practice

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133

Part IV. Performance:Aesthetics and the Technological Imperative 8. Playing

165

9. “Other People’s Music” 198 Afterword 229 Appendix: Loudness and Equalization 235 Notes 239 Bibliography 247 Index 265

Foreword to the Legacy Edition Howard S. Becker

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an a book published in 1980 still bring us news on the subject of contemporary pop music? Stith Bennett’s pioneering study combines the skills and knowledge of a top-notch sociologist with the comparative and technologically informed perspective of an ethnomusicologist to do just that. For the most part, studies of pop music focus on the symbolic content of the words of recorded songs, the political and social attitudes those words convey, or the business arrangements that underlie the music and make the whole thing possible—they never get around to the notes the players play, the sounds they make, and how they make them. Bennett, making just such matters central to his analysis, produces a startling, almost apocalyptic, conclusion: that the kind of pop music that began in the 1950s or 1960s, or whenever it began, inaugurated a distinctly new direction in Western music, and did so by bypassing the lengthy history of music stored, taught, and transmitted by written notation, replacing it with an aural “notation” derived from recorded studio music. This is a large claim, based surprisingly on the study of music made by a crowd of musically illiterate players. Is that how music history gets made? Based on his long and intensive observation of a small population of such players in Colorado, Bennett makes a convincing argument that new ways of “reading” and “writing” music and, consequently, new ways of becoming and being a musician, came into being in the

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