Rock Music 2011932118, 9780754629566, 9781315088631

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Rock Music

The Library of Essays on Popular Music Series Editor: Allan F Moore Titles in the Series: Electronica, Dance and Club Music Mark J Butler Roots Music Mark F De Witt Pop Music and Easy Listening Stan Hawkins Non-Western Popular Music Tony Langlois Popular Music and Multimedia Julie McQuinn From Soul to Hip-Hop Richard Mook Rock Music Mark Spicer

Jazz Tony Whyton

Rock Music

Edited by

Marl< Spicer Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Mark Spicer 2011. For copyright of individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Wherever possible, these reprints are made from a copy of the original printing, but these can themselves be of very variable quality. Whilst the publisher has made every effort to ensure the quality ofthe reprint, some variability may inevitably remain.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rock music. - (The library of essays on popular music) 1. Rock music-History and criticism. I. Series 11. Spicer, Mark Stuart. 781.6'6-dc22 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932118 ISBN 9780754629566 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements Series Preface Introduction: The Rock (Academic) Circus

VII IX XI

PART I HISTORIES, AESTHETICS AND IDEOLOGIES

Bruce Baugh (1993), 'Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music', Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 51, pp. 23-29. 2 Mark Mazullo (1997), 'Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train as Rock 'n' Roll History', Musical Quarterly, 81, pp. 145-69. 3 Ian Inglis (1996), 'Synergies and Reciprocities: The Dynamics of Musical and Professional Interaction between the Beatles and Bob Dylan', Popular Music and Society, 20, pp. 53-79. 4 John Covach (2006), 'The Hippie Aesthetic: Cultural Positioning and Musical Ambition in Early Progressive Rock', Proceedings of the International Conference 'Composition and Experimentation in British Rock 1966-1976', Philomusica On-line, Special Issue, [pp. 65-75]. 5 Nadya Zimmerman (2006), 'Consuming Nature: The Grateful Dead's Performance of an Anticommercial Counterculture', American Music, 24, pp. 194-216. 6 Kevin Holm-Hudson (2001), 'The Future is Now ... and Then: Sonic Historiography in Post-1960s Rock', Genre, 34, pp. 243-64. 7 David Hesmondhalgh (1999), 'Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre', Cultural Studies, 13, pp. 34-61. 8 Mary Ann Clawson (1999), 'When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music', Gender & Society, 13, pp. 193-210. 9 Deena Weinstein (2004), 'All Singers are Dicks', Popular Music and Society, 27, pp. 323-34. 10 Fred Maus (2006), 'Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe's Queerness', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18, pp. 191-214.

3 11 37

65 77 101 123 151 169 181

PART II SOUNDS, STRUCTURES AND STYLES 11 David Temperley (2007), 'The Melodic-Harmonic "Divorce" in Rock', Popular

Music, 26, pp. 323-42. 12 Nicole Biamonte (20 10), 'Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 32, pp. 95-110.

207 227

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13 Christopher Doll (2009), 'Transformation in Rock Hannony: An Explanatory Strategy', Gamut, 2, pp. 1--44 [243-74]. 14 Allan F. Moore (2005), 'The Persona-Environment Relation in Recorded Song', Music Theory Online, 11, [pp. 275-94]. 15 Mark Spicer (2004), '(Ac )cumulative Fonn in Pop-Rock Music', twentieth-century music, 1, pp. 29-64. 16 Steve Waksman (1996), 'Every Inch of My Love: Led Zeppelin and the Problem of Cock Rock', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 8, pp. 5-25 [331--47]. 17 John Brackett (2008), 'Examining Rhythmic and Metric Practices in Led Zeppelin's Musical Style', Popular Music, 27, pp. 53-76. 18 Albin J. Zak Ill (2004), 'Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation "All Along the Watchtower"', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57, pp. 599-644. 19 Walter Everett (2000), 'The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel', Contemporary Music Review, 18, pp. 105-29. 20 Jonathan Pieslak (2008), 'Sound, Text and Identity in Korn's "Hey Daddy"', Popular Music, 27, pp. 35-52. Name Index

243 275 295 331 349 373 419 445 463

Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material. Cambridge University Press for the essays: David Temperley (2007), 'The Melodic-Harmonic "Divorce" in Rock', Popular Music, 26, pp. 323--42. Copyright© 2007 Cambridge University Press; Mark Spicer (2004), '(Ac )cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music', twentieth-century music, 1, pp. 29-64. Copyright© 2004 Cambridge University Press; John Brackett (2008), 'Examining Rhythmic and Metric Practices in Led Zeppelin's Musical Style', Popular Music, 27, pp. 53-76; Jonathan Pieslak (2008), 'Sound, Text and Identity in Korn's "Hey Daddy"', Popular Music, 27, pp. 35-52. Duke University Press for the essay: Kevin Holm-Hudson (2001), 'The Future is Now ... and Then: Sonic Historiography in Post-1960s Rock', Genre, 34, pp. 243-64. Copyright© 2001 by the University of Oklahoma. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Gianmario Borio and Serena Facci with Pavia University Press for the essay: John Covach (2006), 'The Hippie Aesthetic: Cultural Positioning and Musical Ambition in Early Progressive Rock', Proceedings of the International Conference 'Composition and Experimentation in British Rock 1966-1976 ', Philomusica On-line, Special Issue, 1Opp. http://riviste.paviauniversitypress.it/index.php/phi/issue/view/25. John Wiley and Sons for the essays: Bruce Baugh (1993), 'Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51, pp. 23-9. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.; Fred Maus (2006), 'Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe's Queerness', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18, pp. 191-214; Steve Waksman (1996), 'Every Inch of My Love: Led Zeppelin and the Problem of Cock Rock', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 8, pp. 5-25. Music Theory Online for the essay: Allan F. Moore (2005), 'The Persona-Environment Relation in Recorded Song', Music Theory Online, 11. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/ mto.05.11.4/mto.05.1 I .4.moore.html. Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic for the essay: Christopher Doll (2009), 'Transformation in Rock Harmony: An Explanatory Strategy', Gamut, 2, pp. 1--44. Copyright © 2009 Newfound Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from Gamut. Oxford University Press for the essay: Mark Mazullo (1997), 'Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train as Rock 'n' Roll History', Musical Quarterly, 81, pp. 145-69.

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Sage Publications for the essay: Mary Ann Clawson (1999), 'When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music', Gender & Society, 13, pp. 193-210. Copyright© 1999 Sociologists for Women in Society. Taylor & Francis for the essays: Ian Inglis ( 1996), 'Synergies and Reciprocities: The Dynamics of Musical and Professional Interaction between the Beatles and Bob Dylan', Popular Music and Society, 20, pp. 53-79; David Hesmondhalgh (1999), 'Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre', Cultural Studies, 13, pp. 34-61. Copyright© 1999 Routledge; Deena Weinstein (2004), 'All Singers are Dicks', Popular Music and Society, 27, pp. 323-34; Walter Everett (2000), 'The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs ofBilly Joel', Contemporary Music Review, 18, pp. 105-29. Copyright© 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. University of California Press for the essays: Nicole Biamonte (20 I 0), 'Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 32, pp. 95-110; Albin J. Zak Ill (2004), 'Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation "All Along the Watchtower"', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57, pp. 599-644. University of Illinois Press for the essay: Nadya Zimmerman (2006), 'Consuming Nature: The Grateful Dead's Performance of an Anticommercial Counterculture', American Music, 24, pp. 194-216. Copyright © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Series Preface From its rather modest beginnings in the 1950s, the study of popular music has now developed to such a degree that many academic institutions worldwide employ specialists in the field. Even those that do not will often still make space on crowded higher education curricula for the investigation of what has become not only one of the most lucrative spheres of human activity, but one ofthe most influential on the identities of individuals and communities. Popular music matters, and it matters to so many people, people we can only partially understand if we do not understand their music. It is for this reason that this series is timely. This is not the place to try to offer a definition of popular music; that is one of the purposes of the essays collected in the volumes in this series. Through their Popular and Folk Music series of monographs, Ashgate has gained a strong reputation as a publisher of scholarship in the field. This Library of Essays on Popular Music is partly envisioned as a complement to that series, focusing on writing of shorter length. But the series is also intended to develop the volume of Critical Essays in Popular Musicology published in 2007, in that it provides comprehensive coverage of the world's popular musics in eight volumes, each of which has a substantial introductory essay by the volume's editor. It develops the Critical Essays volume in that it makes overt recognition of the fact that the study of popular music is necessarily interdisciplinary. Thus, within the limits set by the genre coverage of each individual volume, and by the excellence of the essays available for inclusion, each editor has been asked to keep an eye on issues as diverse as: the popular music industry and its institutions; aspects of history of their respective genres; issues in the theories and methodologies of study and practice; questions of the ontologies and hermeneutics of their fields; the varying influence of different waves of technological development; the ways markets and audiences are constructed, reproduced and reached and, last but not least; aspects of the repertory without which there would be no popular music to study. As a result, no disciplinary perspective is privileged. As far as possible, no genre is privileged either. Because the study of rock largely led the growth of popular music study, the genre has produced a very large amount of material; it needs a volume to itself. Much writing on jazz tends to circumscribe the genre clearly arguing that it, too, needs a volume to itself. Other forms of music have been distributed across the remaining volumes: one on electronica; one on forms of mainstream pop (still frequently omitted from academic surveys); one on specific North American forms which lead to hiphop; one on the appearance of popular music within other (particularly visual) media; and two final volumes covering 'world' and 'roots', musics whose relationship with more obviously industrialized forms is most particularly problematic. While this categorization of the world's popular musics is not perfect (and is variously addressed in individual volumes), it is no worse than any other, and it does enable the inclusion of all those academic essays we feel are worth reproducing. The field of study has grown to such an extent that there is now a plethora of material available to read, and the growth of the internet makes it increasingly available. Why, then, produce this series of essays? The issue is principally one of evaluation. Where does one

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start? It is no longer possible to suggest to new entrants in the field that they should read everything, for there is much which is of lesser value. So, what you will find collected in these volumes is a selection of the most important and influential journal articles, essays and previously-published shorter material on the genre area concerned. Editors were given the brief of choosing not only those essays which have already garnered a great degree of influence, but essays which have also, for whatever reason, been overlooked, and which offer perspectives worthy of greater account. The volumes' editors are all experts in their own fields, with strong views about the ways those fields have developed, and might develop in the future. Thus, while the series is necessarily retrospective in its viewpoint, it nonetheless aims to help lay a platform for the broad future study of popular music. ALLAN F. MOORE

Series Editor University of Surrey, UK

Introduction: The Rock (Academic) Circus More academic writing has been devoted to rock than to any other genre of popular music, so I knew going into this project that selecting the essays for inclusion in this volume would be no easy task. I see my role here more as ringmaster than editor, much like Mick Jagger in the 1968 film The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, emceeing a diverse line-up of actsfrom musicologists and music theorists to sociologists, cultural historians and philosophersthat provide a representative sampling of the wide range of approaches taken by scholars who write about rock music. The field of rock scholarship is impossibly broad and ever growing, and yet, with hundreds of excellent essays to choose from, Ashgate imposed some limits that made my selection process a little easier. First and foremost, I was asked to look for essays written in English and published in academic journals, which ruled out book chapters and essays that had originally appeared in other edited collections, as well any pieces from mainstream rock magazines such as Rolling Stone or Mojo. 1 I was also to avoid essays that had been previously anthologized in other key collections, ruling out, to name just two examples, Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie's seminal 1978 essay 'Rock and Sexuality' (which was reprinted in Frith and Andrew Goodwin's 1990 collection, On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word) and Walter Everett's comprehensive 2004 essay on rock harmony, 'Making Sense of Rock's Tonal Systems' (reprinted in Allan Moore's 2007 Ashgate collection, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology). What we have here then are twenty essays selected from among the best scholarly writing on rock music published in academic journals over the last two decades. I have tried to strike a balance between essays by seasoned scholars already influential in the field and what I consider important newer essays by younger scholars who are beginning to make their mark. While some of these essays originally appeared in academic journals devoted specifically to the study of popular music, such as Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music Among the several edited collections of scholarly essays on rock music published in the past two decades, most noteworthy are Covach and Boone ( 1997); Dettmar and Richey ( 1999); Everett ([2000] 2008); and Spicer and Covach (2010). Interestingly, only the first two of these four collections (Covach and Boone's Understanding Rock and Dettmar and Richey's Reading Rock and Roll) specifically refer to 'rock' or 'rock and roll' in their titles. The titles of the latter two collections (Everett's Expression in Pop-Rock Music and Spicer and Covach's Sounding Out Pop) refer to 'pop-rock' and 'pop' respectively, even though the majority of the music under scrutiny in these books falls pretty squarely within the 'rock' camp. I will address further the distinction (or lack thereof) between 'rock' and 'pop' below. For two recent collections that gather some of the best and most important short pieces of critical writing on rock published in the mainstream press since the 1950s, see Brackett (2008) and Cateforis (2007). For a representative collection of essays on rock that deliberately includes examples of writing by both academics and independent music critics, see DeCurtis ( 1992).

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and Popular Music and Society, others appeared in journals that treat both 'art' and popular music (with a typical emphasis on the former), such as American Music, Contemporary Music Review, Gamut, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, Musical Quarterly and twentieth-century music, and the remainder were culled from an eclectic mix of journals across a range of disciplines outside of music, such as Cultural Studies, Gender & Society, Genre and Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism - a testament to the broadly interdisciplinary nature of popular music studies in general. The twenty essays are organized into two groups often (not be construed as 'top ten' lists, although the analogy is tempting given the subject matter at hand) under the headings 'Histories, Aesthetics and Ideologies' and 'Sounds, Structures and Styles'. The essays in the first group tend to focus more on the historical, sociological, cultural and technological factors that gave rise to this music, while those in the second group tend to focus more on analysis of the music itself. In certain cases- the essays by Holm-Hudson (Chapter 6) and Waksman (Chapter 16), for example- this distinction is not exactly clear-cut. Before discussing the significance of each of the twenty essays in the context of the larger issues they raise with respect to the study of rock music, making reference along the way to other important scholarly books and essays within the field, I wish to weigh in briefly on the thorny and ongoing debate over just what is it that distinguishes 'rock' from 'pop', a topic that seems necessary to consider especially given the fact that another volume in this series is devoted to 'Pop Music and Easy Listening'. As Peter Gammond has explained in his Oxford Companion to Popular Music, the very notion of 'popular' music reaches back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century, yet the shortened term 'pop' first entered mainstream discourse in the 1950s - the same decade that gave us Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and the supposed 'birth' of rock and roll in the US 2 - when it was used 'as an umbrella name for a special kind of musical product aimed at a teenage market' (1991, p. 457). Thus, even in rock's first decade, the terms 'pop' and 'rock and roll' (or 'rock 'n' roll') were often used interchangeably. In turn, the term 'rock' as a generic shorthand for rock and roll first went into general usage in the mid-to-late 1960s, a period of extraordinary development and sea change in the history of Anglophone popular music. This period witnessed the rise of the album over the single as the dominant product (think Sgt. Pepper) and the emergence of rock as nothing less than the voice of the counterculture, all of which worked in tandem with the rise of rock criticism and the launching of influential US rock-countercultural magazines such as Creem and Rolling Stone, along with the retooling of established UK trade publications such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express. Ever since that crucial formative period in rock criticism, the distinction between 'pop' and 'rock' has been blurry at best, yet has hinged on To suggest that rock and roll was 'born' sometime around the release of, say, Bill Haley and the Comets' 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' in 1954- in other words, when white artists began recording their own versions of songs originally recorded by black R&B artists (Big Joe Turner, in the case of 'Shake, Rattle and Roll') in order to market them to a mainstream white audience during a time when racial segregation in the US was rampant- is an example of the kind of dangerously sweeping generalization one often finds in published accounts of rock's history. Conversely, accounts decrying the 'death' of rock have been an ongoing part of the journalistic discourse almost since the moment of its 'birth' in the early to mid-1950s (whenever exactly that might be); for an entertaining and illuminating book-length study on this very topic, see Dettmar (2006).

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the idealistic notion that pop music is wilfully derivative and carefully calculated to have mass commercial appeal, while rock music is grounded in 'authenticity' and therefore carries with it a seriousness of artistic intent that pop somehow does not. That dreaded 'a' word, authenticity, is an ideal that has loomed so large both in academic popular music studies and in mainstream rock criticism as to become more than a mere cliche. 3 As the story usually goes, unlike 'pop' musicians, rock musicians are 'authentic' in that they write and perform their own songs, songs that represent genuine and original statements of unbridled emotion or thought without necessarily any concern for whether or not the record sells or gets played on the radio. So what do we say when a consummate 'authentic' rock band like U2 releases in 1997 an album called Pop that reaches # l on the charts in thirtyfive countries? Or when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that hallowed institution, which since its founding in 1983 has celebrated rock's greatest performers and practitioners, inducts Madonna (2008), Run-DMC (2009), Abba (2010) and Neil Diamond (2011), not to mention the late, great King of Pop himself Michael Jackson (200 1)? While some popular music scholars might have a hard time calling these performers 'rock' artists, the Rock Hall obviously thinks otherwise. 4 In his well-reasoned essay on what he calls 'The "Pop-Rockization" of Popular Music', Motti Regev asserts that 'to clarify the exact relationship between "pop" and "rock" ... is not really possible' (2002, p. 252), and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Instead, Regev prefers the catchall term 'pop/rock' (as opposed to the hyphenated expression 'pop-rock' used by some scholars, myself included) to embrace the myriad styles and genres of popular music produced in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. For Regev, the unifying principle behind this overwhelming profusion of styles 5 - from R&B to soul, funk, progressive rock, It seems almost as if embracing authenticity as a measure of artistic value is necessary in order to be an 'authentic' popular music scholar, yet, if it were up to me, we would jettison the myth of authenticity altogether, admit that most rock is pop music and get down to the business of analysing songs. With respect to those who still find the concept useful, however, I refer the reader to Allan Moore's excellent essay 'Authenticity as Authentication' (2002), which, to use Moore's words, 'reconfigures [authenticity] as a property attached to individuals rather than to music' (Moore, 2007, p. xv ). Also, judging by his title for one of the volume's parts ('Aesthetics and Authenticity'), no doubt Stan Hawkins will have more to say on the subject of authenticity in the introduction to his volume on 'Pop Music and Easy Listening' in this series. According to the description of the induction process as outlined on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's website (rockhall.com), 'Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. Criteria include the influence and significance of the artists' contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll.' Accordingly, the inaugural class of 1986 included several obvious candidates from rock's first decade, such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, alongside perhaps less obvious candidates such as 'The Godfather of Soul' James Brown and 'The Father of Country Music' Jimmie Rodgers (in defence of Rodgers, the Rock Hall's website notes that 'his combination of blues and hillbilly styles made him a true forebear of rock and roll'). Quite a stir was created in 2007 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first rap or hip-hop artist to be inducted into the Rock Hall, but this all goes to show just how broadly the ethos of 'rock and roll' is interpreted, at least in the US. 'A profusion of styles' is how Allan Moore puts it in the title to Chapter 4 of his groundbreaking book Rock: The Primary Text, which on its initial publication in 1993 became the first book-length

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heavy metal, punk, reggae, disco, synthpop, grunge, rap and so on- is what he calls the rock aesthetic, 'a set of constantly changing practices and stylistic imperatives for making popular music based on the use of electric and electronic sound textures, amplification, sophisticated studio craftsmanship, and "untrained" and spontaneous techniques of vocal delivery' (2002, p. 253). 6 While I like this definition very much, we must for the sake of clarity separate Regev's notion of a unifying 'rock aesthetic' from 'rock' as a genre unto itself, or else resign ourselves to the fact that all popular music since the 1950s is somehow rock - which I am sure most popular music scholars would not be content to do, no matter how tricky it may be to define precisely those style characteristics that allow us to distinguish between the various subgenres of rock and other post-l950s genres of popular music. 7 Such is the task of rock scholarship, and, taken together, the essays in this volume go a long way towards achieving that goal. Part I of the collection opens with Bruce Baugh's little essay, 'Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music' (Chapter 1), since it articulates nicely many of the quandaries scholars of rock face in ascribing value to the music we study. In contrast to Regev's more pragmatic approach, Baugh grounds his take on rock aesthetics within the discipline of philosophy, suggesting that the 'basic principles of an aesthetics of rock can be derived from turning Kantian or formalist aesthetics on its head' (p. 6). 8 While many working within the field of popular music studies, particularly those who are not musicians themselves, would likely agree with Baugh that what we value most in rock music are its immediate effects on the body rather than the beauty of its form, 9 there are also many of us within the field who musicological study of rock. I noted above that the terms 'pop' and 'rock' are often used seemingly interchangeably to describe the same music, especially by US academics and critics. yet UK popular musicologists such as Moore apparently see a real stylistic difference between what constitutes 'pop' and what constitutes 'rock' (although I have never seen this articulated clearly in print). At the risk of belabouring this issue, I should point out that sometimes the distinction remains blurry even for Moore -for example, perhaps out of respect to his book's title, he prefers the odd descriptor 'synthesizer rock' (Moore, 2001, pp. 151-54) rather than the more commonly accepted 'synthpop' when referring to the music of late 1970s and early 1980s artists such as Gary Numan and the Human League. Broadening his definition even further, Regev goes on to say that 'It should be stressed that these practices include sampling and turntabling' (2002, p. 253). For an excellent scholarly introduction to the most important genres of post-1950s popular music, see Borthwick and Moy (2004). Their book includes individual chapters on soul, funk, reggae, synthpop, rap and jungle, along with various sub genres of rock, such as psychedelia, progressive rock, punk rock, heavy metal and indie. To Borthwick and Moy, 'rock' is obviously too broad a genre to treat manageably in a single chapter. On the prickly issue of what defines a genre in popular music, see Franco Fabbri's important early essay 'A Theory of Musical Genre' ( 1982); see also Toynbee (2000, pp. I 02-29). Baugh's essay appeared about three years before the publication of Theodore Gracyk's Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock ( 1996), which remains the most comprehensive study to date of rock aesthetics from the standpoint of a trained philosopher (see also Gracyk, 2007). For another useful essay that addresses notions of musical value in rock, specifically in the service of analysing the 1972 song 'Roundabout' by the progressive rock band Yes. see Sheinbaum (2002). This was the essential position advocated by Susan McClary and Robert Walser over twenty years ago in their oft-cited polemical essay 'Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles With Rock'.

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are also practising musicians and whose formative years were shaped by both a classical and a rock aesthetic, playing in as many classical ensembles as we did pop and rock bands. When I listen to (or perform) a rock song, I can be turned on equally by the sheer power of a screaming guitar solo or infectious beat as I can by an eclectic harmonic progression or unusual phrase design. Thankfully, the field of popular music studies has matured enough to accept the fact that rock can be just as pleasurable to think about as music as it can be to dance or headbang to. The next two essays in Part I are concerned with aspects of rock's history, but approach their topics from different angles. Chapter 2, by Mark Mazullo, is actually a history of a history - specifically, a detailed study of the reception and influence of Greil Marcus's watershed 1975 book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n 'Roll Music, which Rolling Stone hailed at the time of its first publication as 'probably the best book ever written about rock' (Flippo, 1975, p. 80). Mazullo demonstrates just how influential Mystery Train was in the 1970s in helping to construct a peculiarly American view of rock's early history. As Keith Negus (1996, pp. 136-63) has rightly pointed out, however, there is no single history of rock, and opinions as to what have been its most significant moments or who are the most important artists in rock sometimes differ greatly on each side of the Atlantic. 10 Nevertheless, we cannot deny that, since the 1970s, a certain corpus of key artists, songs and albums -the so-called 'classic rock' canon- has crystallized, with classic albums by classic artists whom rock aficionados and scholars alike have universally recognized as great. 11 In his 'Synergies and Reciprocities: The Dynamics of Musical and Professional Interaction between the Beatles and Bob Dylan' (Chapter 3), Ian Inglis focuses on two of classic rock's most iconic figures, evoking concepts from business studies ('synergy') and anthropology ('reciprocity') to show how the mutual respect and admiration the Beatles and Bob Dylan had for each other and each other's music would profoundly shape some of the most significant moments across three decades of rock's history. where they argue against traditional formalist analysis of rock music and 'its chronic failure to address what is really at stake in the tunes' ( 1988, p. 277). John Covach offers a convincing counterargument in defence of formalist analysis of rock in his two essays 'We Won't Get Fooled Again: Rock Music and Musical Analysis' ( 1997b) and 'Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology' ( 1999). 1° For example, Greil Marcus's more recent book Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005) celebrates Dylan's epic 1965 single as the greatest and most influential rock song ever written or recorded, thus agreeing with Rolling Stone magazine, whose critics ranked 'Like a Rolling Stone' as #I on their 2004list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time'. By contrast, Queen's equally epic 1975 single 'Bohemian Rhapsody', which clocked in only at # 163 on Rolling Stone's list, was ranked #6 on the UK magazine Q's 2006 list of 'The 100 Greatest Songs Ever' (Oasis's Britpop anthem 'Live Forever' was ranked #I and 'Like a Rolling Stone' clocked in at #12). 11 The subject of the 'rock canon' has been tackled admirably by Carys Wyn Jones (2008). Rock scholarship continues to promote the idea of a rock canon, with, for example, two ongoing series of scholarly books devoted to individual classic rock albums, published by Schirmer and Continuum Press respectively. Ashgate also has so far published several books on classic rock albums within their Popular and Folk Music Series, including essay collections on the Beatles' Revolver (Reising, 2002) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Julien, 2009) and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side ofthe Moon (Reising, 2006), and monographs on Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Holm-Hudson, 2008) and Kate Bush's Hounds of Love (Moy, 2007).

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Two more historical essays follow, both exploring the symbiotic relationship between rock and the counterculture. 12 As John Covach explains in Chapter 4, the extraordinary psychedelic period of 1966-69 fostered a set of shared principles among rock musicians - musical ambition, the embracing of technology and virtuosity, and lyrically 'big ideas' - which he calls the 'hippie aesthetic', an aesthetic that would continue into the 1970s and reach its fullest expression in UK progressive rock, but which also manifests itself in surprising ways in much of mainstream rock throughout the 1970s and beyond. 13 Nadya Zimmerman's essay (Chapter 5), on the contrary, focuses on the band that practically served as poster children for the emerging San Francisco hippie counterculture in the mid-to-late 1960s, the Grateful Dead. Zimmerman exposes a certain irony on the part of the Dead in their openly advocating an anti-commercial 'back to nature' world-view while at the same time embracing the rapid technological advances in electronic instruments and amplification that allowed them to create and perform for an ever-growing audience of Deadheads their own distinctive brand of rambling drug-fuelled psychedelic rock. Chapter 6, Kevin Holm-Hudson's thought-provoking essay on what he calls 'sonic historiography' in post-1960s rock, could just as easily have been placed in Part II of this volume, given its close attention to the sound and substance of rock recordings. But his essay is as much about rock's history as it is musical semiotics, since, as Holm-Hudson defines it, sonic historiography is 'a packaging of rock's history in sound, as sound' (p. 105). His essential point here is that it takes only a certain distinctive riff, the special timbre of an electric instrument or even a particular studio effect on a rock recording for informed listeners 12 For an engaging book-length musicological study on the relationship between rock and the counterculture, including detailed analyses of what she terms 'psychedelic coding' in recorded tracks by Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and others, see Whiteley ( 1992). 13 During its creative zenith in 1969-77, progressive rock- with its penchant for formal complexity, frequent excursions into odd time signatures and crafting large-scale pieces in multiple 'movements'was probably the most misunderstood and critically maligned genre in all of popular music. Despite the enormous commercial success of UK progressive bands like Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) on both sides of the Atlantic, the US rock critics were particularly scathing in their reviews of progressive rock; for example, the neo-Marxist critic Lester Bangs, playing his 'authenticity' card, accused ELP in Creem magazine of 'the insidious befoulment of all that was gutter pure in rock' (1974, p. 44). But a resurgence of interest in classic UK progressive rock over the last fifteen years has led to an impressive body of published scholarship on this music, particularly from musicologists and music theorists who are better equipped to confront the formal complexities of progressive rock in purely musical terms. See, for example, Covach ( l997a), Holm-Hudson (2002), Macan ( 1997), Moore (200 1, pp. 64-118), Spicer ([2000] 2008) and Stump ( 1997). Echoing Allan Moore, Chris Anderton in a recent essay (201 0) seeks to broaden the definition of the genre beyond the usual crop of UK 'symphonic' progressive bands, arguing that progressive rock is best understood as a meta-genre embracing several substyles of experimental (mostly) European pop and rock from the early 1970s onwards. For more on the 'hippie aesthetic', see John Covach's excellent rock history textbook Whats That Sound? (2nd edn, 2009). Covach goes on in his book to account for the rise of punk and new wave in the later 1970s in terms of a conscious rejection of these hippie ideals and a deliberate return to musical and visual elements of past (pre-psychedelic) rock styles, not as homage but as a means of offering an ironic critique of the present (2009, pp. 439-43). See also his essay 'Pangs of History in Late-1970s New-Wave Rock' (Covach, 2003).

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to position that track historically and render the track more meaningful for them. Think, for example, of that unmistakable chiming timbre of the Rickenbacker electric twelve-string guitar ('Ricky 12'), as first used by George Harrison on a number of key Beatles tracks from early 1964, which so fascinated the young Californian Roger McGuinn upon seeing the movie A Hard Day :S Night that he would soon use the instrument himself for the signature opening riff on the Byrds' iconic breakthrough 1965 single, their 'electric' cover of Bob Dylan's 'Mr. Tambourine Man'; indeed, the distinctive sound of the Ricky 12 itself would quickly become emblematic of the style of mid-l960s electric folk rock. Furthermore, as I have asked elsewhere, 'What would the landscape of pop and rock have sounded like during 1984-87 ... if the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer had not been introduced in 1983?' (Spicer, 2005, ~ 14). Along these same lines, I suspect that a few decades from now pop and rock artists (assuming there are still such creatures) might well be using 'vintage' Autotune on their records in order to make a nostalgic sonic reference to the Noughties. 14 Rock's many subgenres are sometimes defined not so much by their distinctive musicstylistic characteristics as by their communities of fans and the clever marketing strategies of the popular music industry. David Hesmondhalgh's essay (Chapter 7) provides a fascinating account of the complex institutional politics within the UK record industry during the postpunk period of the 1980s that gave rise to so-called' in die' (essentially analogous to 'alternative rock' in the US) as a recognized genreY Revolving around the rash of new independent record labels (such as Rough Trade) that had sprung up in the UK during the punk explosion of the later 1970s, indie was lauded by its practitioners and fans as a deliberate reaction against the bloated excesses of mainstream 'corporate rock'. By the mid-1990s, however, as Hesmondhalgh well points out, 'a version of indie had come to occupy the centre ground of British pop music in the shape of bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp' (p. 128), thus becoming subsumed by the very mainstream rock it had initially sought to challenge. 16 14 For another interesting essay that deals specifically with the notion of sonic historiography in rock, particularly with reference to classic progressive rock and the music of King Crimson, see Robison (2002). On a related topic, Deena Weinstein's neat essay 'A History of Rock's Pasts through Rock Covers' ( 1998) considers how the timeworn practice in rock of covering past songs also has had an uncanny knack for commenting on rock's history. 15 'Tndie', of course, has since entered popular discourse in both the US and the UK as an adjective to describe not only music but also, for example, films that have been produced by smaller independent companies (such as the 2011 Oscar-winning indie film The King's Speech), yet indie as a recognized sub genre of pop and rock remains alive and well in the UK today, loosely embracing those myriad bands and artists that have chosen not to 'sell out' by signing to one of the major labels. Just last year (2010), for example, the Guardian newspaper started a column and online music blog called 'Ask the lndie Professor', helmed by UCLA cultural anthropologist Wendy Fonarow; see also her book Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Jndie Music (2006). For another attempt to answer the question 'What is In die Rock?', see Hibbett (2005). 16 A strikingly similar phenomenon occurred within the US record industry in the early 1990s, when quintessential 'alternative' band R.E.M. and quintessential 'grunge' band Nirvana, each of whom had started out on independent labels (IRS and Sub Pop) but were later signed to major labels (Warner and Geffen), saw their albums Out of Time (in May 1991) and Nevermind (in January 1992) rise to # l on the Billboard Top 200. (These two albums did not do too badly on the UK charts either, hitting# I in the case ofR.E.M. and #7 in the case of Nirvana, and all this happening three or four years before the

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During the early years of rock scholarship in the 1970s, before rock was recognized as 'serious' music worthy of serious study by musicologists and music theorists in academic music departments, the majority of academic writing on rock came from a sociological perspective. A host of books and essays started appearing in the second half of the 1970s -not coincidentally, right around the time of the UK punk explosion- from Simon Frith's pioneering book The Sociology ofRock ( 1978) to those influential and oft-cited early writings on pop and rock subcultures in post-Second World War Britain by scholars associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (most notably Hebdige, 1979). 17 As representative examples of more recent work done in this field, I have chosen two essays by US women professors of sociology. It is no secret that the overwhelming majority of rock's performers and practitioners since its first decade have been and continue to be (usually white) males. In Chapter 8, 'When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music', Mary Ann Clawson examines those cultural and sociological factors that account for why several of rock's female minority have been attracted to the bass guitar, which, as Clawson argues, 'may provide [women] with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production' (p. 151 ). 18 Clawson collected her data for this study by interviewing both male and female rock musicians active in the local alternative music scene in Boston in the 1990s, and her essay is an example of the valuable contribution that such ethnographic methodology can make to the study of rock and, especially, of the social dynamics within rock bands. 19 In this same vein, Deena Weinstein's informative and entertaining essay 'All Singers are Dicks' (Chapter 9) draws on evidence from her many years of interviewing rock musicians to support the negative sentiment that rock instrumentalists often feel about their front men. Part I concludes with Fred Maus's probing and evocative essay, 'Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe's Queerness' (Chapter 10). As we all know, rock and roll took its very name from 'rocking and rolling', a common euphemism for sex among African-American popular musicians in the earlier twentieth century, and a large part of rock's ethos has always involved sex and sexuality. One of the many consequences of the so-called 'new musicology' of the later heyday ofBritpop in 1995; conversely, while Oasis fared pretty well on the US charts. with (What:S the Story) Morning Glory? rising as high as #4 and its single 'Wonderwall' hitting #8, Blur and Pulp never had any of their albums or singles crack the US Top 50.) 17 The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies closed abruptly in 2002. Dick Hebdige. one of the several influential early figures in popular music studies to have graduated from the CCCS, is now Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Centre at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Also, though his book appeared some ten years after the crop of late-1970s publications, I should cite here German scholar Peter Wicke's Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology ( 1987. 1990). For a useful review of four other important books on the sociology of rock from the late 1980s. see Weinstein ( 1991 ). 18 On the larger topic of women in popular music, see Leonard (2007) and Whiteley (2000); see also Reddington (2007). 19 Indeed, there is much to be gained from the close study of local music 'scenes', which could be viewed as a natural extension of the aforementioned proliferation of work on pop and rock subcultures undertaken in the late 1970s. For an exemplary book-length study in this regard, focusing on the changing dynamics of the local music scene in Liverpool from the 1950s through the early 1990s, see Cohen ( 1991 ); for more on alternative rock subcultures and scenes in the US. see Kruse ( 1993).

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1980s and 1990s has been that the subject of a composer's gender and/or sexual orientation is no longer taboo, and, needless to say, this has had a profound effect on popular musicology as well. In the last decade or so, popular music studies has witnessed the publication of dozens of scholarly books and essays with words like 'masculinities' (for example Bannister, 2006; Jarman-Ivens, 2007), 'feminism' (Burns and Lafrance, 2002), 'sexing' (Whiteley, 1997) and 'queering' (Whiteley and Rycenga, 2006) in their titles. Many of us who 'do' close music analysis of pop and rock songs see music analysis and transcription as a way of forging a special kind of intimacy with the songs we love, and the same could be said of those popular musicologists who set out to explore the inner workings of a rock musician's sexuality and how this might help to explain the richness and complexity of their favourite songs. Fred Maus is one of those rare popular musicologists who is able to demonstrate how a careful consideration of what an iconic rock artist like Michael Stipe has publicly revealed (or not revealed) about his or her own sexuality might help us better to interpret the meaning of certain musical and lyrical details in their songs, as Maus does convincingly with his analysis of one ofR.E.M. 's signature songs from the band's early 1990s heyday, 'Losing My Religion' .20 Speaking of music analysis, we now move on to the ten essays in Part II of the collection, all of which focus on various aspects of the sounds, structures and styles of rock through detailed analysis of the music itself. Since all but one of the ten authors of these pieces rely to some degree on music notation in the service of their analysis, a brief commentary is needed on the rather uncomfortable relationship that rock scholarship has had with printed notes. There is no denying that pop and rock 'composers' (if it is appropriate to use that term) rarely attempt to write down their music, preferring instead to use the recording studio as their canvas. As Theodore Gracyk (1996, pp. 37-67) and several others have argued, 'rock' (in its broadest sense) differs most markedly from earlier forms of popular music in that it is distributed to the masses primarily through recordings. Recording technology has advanced rapidly since the early days of rock and roll in the 1950s, of course, and in today's digital age we are presented with more and more opportunities to listen to pop and rock songs in multiple formats on an ever-increasing array of sophisticated devices. We now can carry thousands of songs around with us in our back pockets to listen to anywhere or anytime, and yet- whether we prefer the portability of mp3s on an iPod or the richer sound quality of 'old school' vinyl records played on a high-fidelity home analogue system -when we listen to a recording of a pop or rock song we are experiencing an illusion of a live performance, painstakingly pieced together through multiple edits and overdubs and other feats of studio wizardry. Recordings capture the rock composer's intentions in a fixed form for mass distribution, and in this sense they constitute the true 'texts' of the songs we grow to know and love. Indeed, when pop and rock musicians go out on tour to perform their songs live, most of the time (although there are some notable exceptions - the Grateful Dead and other 'jam bands', for example) they seem intent on reproducing the sound of the original studio recordings as closely as possible because this is what their audiences expect to hear. It should come as no surprise then that, like the musicians themselves, many scholars of pop and rock music have been and continue to be content to dispense with 'scored objects' (to 2° For another convincing essay that shows how a consideration of a rock artist's gender and sexuality can help explain certain aspects of their music, specifically in relation to Morrissey and details of melodic contour in his vocal lines, see Hubbs (1996).

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use Richard Middleton's words )21 and avoid music notation altogether, whether because of a lack of music-technical competence or perhaps out of fear that any rock scholarship that relies on printed notes cannot possibly be 'authentic' (not to mention the time-consuming and often costly task of securing permission rights to reproduce notated excerpts from music and lyrics under copyright). To be sure, a transcription that uses conventional music notation can be woefully inadequate as a representation of some of the most important parameters of a pop or rock recording, particularly its timbres, yet it remains difficult to examine details of melody, harmony and rhythm in a rock song with any degree of precision without any kind of graphic representation, despite how awkward it may be to notate precisely those pitches that fall 'between the cracks' of equal-tempered tuning or rhythms that fall slightly behind or ahead of the beat. 22 The debate over the value of music notation in rock scholarship notwithstanding, there is clearly an increasing demand among budding pop and rock musicians both within and outside of the academy for full-score, note-for-note transcriptions such as those published in The Beatles: Complete Scores (1989, 1993), no doubt as an aid in learning to perform these songs accurately. 23 Judging by the hundreds if not thousands of tribute bands that continue to spring up all over the globe, each dedicated to performing the songs of a particular classic rock artist as faithfully as possible to the sound of the original studio recordings, it seems that classic rock is becoming a new kind of chamber music. 24 The first three essays in Part II focus on the harmonic language of rock. There has been more theorizing to date about harmony than any of rock's other musical parameters, which is 21 This description by one of the leading UK popular musicologists was part of what is probably the most scathing published attack launched to date against the so-called 'North American music theorists' who write about pop and rock music. Middleton goes on to suggest that 'characterized by a taken-for-granted formalism, [the work ofthe North American music theorists] rarely broaches the issue of pertinence, or demonstrates awareness of the danger ofreification' (2000, p. 6). For a representative survey of work in popular music analysis within American music theory, see Neal (2005). 22 For an illuminating essay on the poetics and politics of transcription in popular music analysis, see Winkler ( 1997). 23 The Beatles: Complete Scores, which claims on its front cover to provide 'full transcriptions from the original recordings [of] every song written and recorded by the Beatles', was the first such example, yet over the last two decades Hal Leonard Corporation (the book's US publisher) has produced dozens of other books in its 'Transcribed Score' series, featuring full-score transcriptions of recordings from a wide range of pop and rock artists such as .Timi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, the Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and Audioslave, to name but a few. The attention to detail in these Hal Leonard books is in stark contrast, of course, to the simplified and abridged 'sheet music' versions of pop and rock songs that one can still purchase both in hard copy or online at websites like sheetmusicplus. com. 24 This trend is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the work of the Toronto-based outfit 'Classic Albums Live', a stable of musicians dedicated to reproducing for each of their performances a classic rock album- such as the Beatles' Revolver, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side ofthe Moon, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, Nirvana's Nevermind and Radiohead's OK Computer, among the close to a hundred other albums in their repertoire -note-by-note and track-by-track from the original LPs (see their website at classicalbumslive.com). I have seen the group perform several times and can confirm that their concerts have the feel of a recital, much like what you might expect ot~ say, a chamber music group that specializes in mostly Mozart.

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understandable, given the grand tradition within musicology at large of developing harmonic theories of proto-tonal, tonal and post-tonal music that reaches back over at least a couple of centuries. The harmonic language of rock has much in common with tonal music in general, yet rock has fostered its own set of harmonic practices and conventions that often run contrary to those of classical major-minor tonality. Among the numerous essays and book-length studies published over the last three decades that have addressed this monolithic subject of rock harmony, I should cite here the early essays by Alf Bjornberg on 'Aeolian harmony' (1989) and Allan Moore on 'patterns of harmony' (1992) and 'the so-called "flattened seventh" in rock' (1995), Naphtali Wagner's important essay on what he calls 'the "domestication" ofblue notes in the Beatles' songs' (2003), the aforementioned essay by Walter Everett on 'rock's tonal systems' (2004b) and several books, including Moore's Rock: The Primary Text ([1993] 2001), Ken Stephenson's What to Listen For in Rock (2002) and, more recently, Everett's The Foundations ofRock (2009) and Philip Tagg's Everyday Tonality (2009). 25 The three excellent essays on rock harmony that I have selected for this volume are very recent (published in the last four years) and in many ways build upon or synthesize the ideas and theories of these earlier authors. 26 David Temperley's essay (Chapter 11) explores the concept that Allan Moore has aptly described as the 'melodic-harmonic divorce' in rock (see Moore, 1995). In many rock songsunlike art songs from the tonal tradition (and, indeed, most popular songs from the first half of the twentieth century), where pitches in the vocal melody can usually be gauged as consonant or dissonant with respect to the harmonic background provided by the accompaniment- the melody seems to exist independently of the underlying harmony, allowing, for example, dissonant 'non-chord-tones' in a pentatonic-based melody to resolve freely by leap rather than by step. As Temperley demonstrates through his analyses of a wide range of rock songs, this phenomenon often results in a stratified pitch organization in which the verses typically exhibit a greater degree of 'divorce' between melody and harmony than the choruses. Taking Walter Everett's magisterial 2004 survey of rock's tonal systems as her point of departure, Nicole Biamonte compiled the data for her exhaustive study (Chapter 12) by analysing harmonic passages from hundreds of songs in the classic-rock canon in an attempt to explain those harmonic progressions in rock that 'do not fit comfortably into the conventional paradigm of major-minor tonality: double-plagal and Aeolian progressions, and triad-doubled pentatonic and hexatonic modal systems' (p. 227). 27 Christopher Doll takes a different tack in Chapter 13, suggesting that many if not most harmonic passages in rock songs can be interpreted as 'transformations' of other musical passages, whether these are stock chord

25 Similar to Motti Regev's notion of a unifying 'rock aesthetic', 'rock harmony' is generally understood more broadly to embrace those harmonic practices that have developed across all styles of popular music since the 1950s. 26 I should also cite here two important recent essays by Guy Capuzzo (2004, 2009), one of which applies neo-Riemannian theory to the study of rock harmony and another on what he calls 'sectional tonality and sectional centricity' in rock. 27 For another very recent and exhaustive study of rock harmony, based on a statistical survey of harmonic progressions in songs from Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time', see de Clerq and Temperley (20 II).

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formulas (such as the twelve-bar blues), progressions from specific pre-existing songs or even harmonic precedents established earlier on in the same song. The next two essays are primarily concerned with issues of musical form and textural stratification in pop and rock recordings. Like David Temperley's essay, Chapter 14 by Allan Moore focuses on the relationship between the melody and accompaniment - what Moore calls the 'persona-environment relation' - in recorded songs, necessitating a close attention to details of harmony, rhythm and groove, but Moore's main goal is to develop a typology of ways in which the accompaniment (the song's 'environment') interacts with the vocal melody (the song's 'persona') in projecting a song's overall message. Through his analyses of a dizzying array of tracks in a wide variety of pop and rock styles, Moore argues that the accompanimental texture not only serves as a song's primary marker of style and genre but 'can also set the attitudinal tone of a song' (p. 278), supporting, amplifying or even contradicting the meaning of the lyrics. My own essay on what I call 'accumulative form' in pop and rock (Chapter 15) explores the ways in which rock recordings often showcase for the listener a process of textural growth, both across local spans - for example tracks with 'accumulative beginnings' in which the song's groove gradually assembles itself as its constituent riffs are layered into the texture one by one- and, in special cases, over the course of an entire track, in which the gradual accumulation leads towards a climactic payoff or 'cumulative moment' in the song's final chorus or coda. 28 The proliferation of accumulative forms in pop and rock since the 1960s is directly linked to the rapid advances in multitrack recording technology, and also underscores David Brackett's point that 'recordings tend to foreground the temporality of the music text' ([1995] 2000, p. 24) where the listener is drawn into a musical process as it unfolds in real time. The five remaining essays deal in their different ways with the thorny issue of style analysis- that is, each attempts to unravel those musical characteristics that define a particular subgenre of rock or, more specifically, the idiolect of a particular band or artist. 29 I do not feel guilty about my decision to include two essays on Led Zeppelin in this volume, since I suspect if readers were asked to pinpoint a single iconic band or artist who most clearly (and stereotypically) exemplifies 'rock', Led Zeppelin for many would be their obvious first choice (see also Fast, 2001). Chapter 16, Steve Waksman's essay on what he describes as the 'problem of cock rock' in Led Zeppelin, is something of an anomaly among the ten 28 The subject of form in rock is a topic that so far has not received its fair share of attention in the published scholarly literature (certainly when compared to rock harmony), perhaps owing to the lingering (and largely mistaken) Adornian assumption that form in popular music is necessarily trite, simplistic and- dare I say it- formulaic. For a useful analytical survey of the most important formal templates employed in pop and rock songs since the 1950s, including the twelve-bar blues, AABA form, 'simple' and 'contrasting' verse-chorus forms, and compound forms, see Covach (2005); see also Middleton ( 1999). Judging, however, by the number of recent conference papers (such as those presented at the special session on '(Per)Form in(g) Rock' at the 20 I 0 Society for Music Theory conference in Indianapolis, soon to be published in a special issue of Music Theory Online), and several recently completed or in-progress Ph.D. dissertations that tackle issues of form in pop and rock songs (for example Osborn, 2010; Stephan-Robinson, 2009), I expect we will see a flurry of publications on this subject in the not too distant future. 29 For further discussion on the hierarchical relationship between style and idiolect in popular music analysis, see, for example, Moore and Ibrahim (2005) and Spicer (2010).

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essays in Part II given its lack of any notated examples or transcriptions, yet Waksman's main concern here is to explain those musical and extra-musical features that mark 'cock rock' as a style, and, especially, the importance of that quintessential rock instrument the electric guitar as the phallic signifier of a 'male-oriented regime of power and pleasure' (p. 332). 30 Taking a very different approach to style analysis, John Brackett's detailed examination of rhythmic and metric practices in Led Zeppelin's music (Chapter 17) is as much a study in musical intertextuality as it is an analysis of Zeppelin's idiolect, showing how the band's flexible conception of rhythm and meter can best be understood as a unique assimilation and transformation of rhythmic and metric features characteristic of specific precursor genres and subgenres (such as Chicago blues and James-Brown-style funk) and, in certain cases, specific precursor tracks. 31 Musical intertextuality is also the central concern of Albin Zak's huge essay (Chapter 18), which offers a close analysis of Jimi Hendrix's iconic 1968 cover version of Bob Dylan's 1967 song 'All along the Watchtower'. Zak's The Poetics ofRock (2001) is probably the most important book published to date on the multifaceted history and practice of rock recording (see also Zak, 2010). 32 In this essay, he draws on his extensive knowledge of rock recording and studio practice as well as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s concept of 'signifyin(g)' in order to shed light on the complicated process through which Hendrix transforms Dylan's urban folk song into one of the most enduring classics of psychedelic blues-rock. 33 Chapter 19, 'The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel', by Walter Everett, deals with issues of musical intertextuality more broadly (what might be called 'stylistic intertextuality'), suggesting that Joel's eclectic piano-based rock can be thought of in terms of a stylistic continuum, with 'classical' ('learned') music on one side and 'popular' ('vernacular') music on the other. Everett uses Schenkerian analytical graphs to demonstrate how the harmonic language and voice leading of individual songs in Joel's oeuvre lies somewhere between these two stylistic poles. 34 The final essay in this volume, Jonathan Pieslak's 'Sound, Text and Identity in Korn's 30 This 1996 essay was a prequel to Waksman's exemplary book-length study on the history and significance ofthe electric guitar in rock, appropriately titled Instruments of Desire (1999). 31 Along with Cream and the several other so-called 'electric blues' bands that rose to prominence on the London scene in the mid-to-late 1960s, Led Zeppelin's music has often been criticized as lacking in originality, given its overt reliance on covers and 'reworkings' of classic American blues songs (for example Zeppelin's 1969 hit 'Whole Lotta Love', which was a reworking of Muddy Waters' 1962 recording of the Willie Dixon song 'You Need Love'); for two excellent essays on this topic, see Headlam ( 1995, 1997). 32 For another exhaustive study on the poetics of rock recording, specifically focusing on the music of the Beatles, see Ryan and Kehew (2006). 33 For three additional representative studies of intertextuality in pop and rock music, see Covach ( 1995), Lacasse (2000) and Spicer (2009). 34 Everett's application of Heinrich Schenker's venerable method of graphic analysis to pop and rock music has garnered considerable criticism, particularly from UK popular musicologists (see, for example, Griffiths, 1999), and space does not permit me to treat this topic adequately here. In Everett's defence, however, I should emphasize that Schenker's theory was first and foremost a theory of tonality, and Schenkerian graphs, when used appropriately, can go a long way towards demonstrating how the harmonic language and voice leading of pop and rock songs differs from that of classical tonal pieces. For further examples of applying Schenkerian theory to the analysis of pop and rock, see Everett's

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"Hey Daddy'" (Chapter 20), is another standout example of 'close reading' of a single track. Pieslak examines carefully not only the lyrics and the sound and structure of the recorded music itself, but also the iconography of the album's artwork and packaging in the service of his situating Korn's idiolect within the 1990s subgenre of heavy metal known as 'nil metal' .35 So, there you have it: my Great Rock Academic Circus. To echo what the Beatles once said, I hope you have enjoyed the show, but also, more importantly, that these twenty diverse essays have provided a well-rounded picture of the field of rock scholarship, one that might encourage a new generation of scholars to join the circus themselves. As I mentioned at the outset of this introduction, the sheer vastness of the field made the process of narrowing my selection to only twenty essays difficult and, inevitably, certain topics had to be left out. Some readers may be bothered, for example, by the fact that these essays all focus on the central corpus of rock music from the US and the UK and do not include at least one representative study of how rock has since disseminated across the globe - a phenomenon that might be called the 'rock diaspora'- and established national identities beyond its Anglophone roots (a collection edited by Tony Langlois on 'Non-Western Popular Music' is forthcoming in this series). 36 In the hands of another ringmaster, then, the line-up of acts could well have looked quite different, yet the rock academic circus at large shows no signs of slowing down. Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! References Anderton, Chris (2010), 'A Many-Headed Beast: Progressive Rock as European Meta-Genre', Popular Music, 29, pp. 417-35. Bangs, Lester ( 1974), 'Blood Feast of Reddy Kilowatt! Emerson, Lake and Palmer Without Insulation', Creem, 5 (March), pp. 40--44, 76-78; reprinted in John Morthland (ed.) (2003), Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Tastes: A Lester Bangs Reader, New York: Anchor, pp. 47-55. Bannister, Matthew (2006), White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s lndie Guitar Rock, Aldershot: Ashgate. Bayer, Gerd (ed.) (2009), Heavy Metal Music in Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate. The Beatles: Complete Scores (1989, 1993), London: Wise; Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard. Bjorn berg, A If ( 1989), 'On Aeolian Harmony in Contemporary Popular Music', Nordic Branch Working Papers, no. DK I, Goteborg: TASPM, pp. 1-8; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 275-82. Borthwick, Stuart and Moy, Ron (2004), Popular Music Genres: An Introduction, New York: Routledge. monumental two-volume study The Beatles as Musicians (1999/2001) and his essays on Paul Simon (1997) and Steely Dan (2004a); see also Burns ([2000] 2008) and O'Donnell (2006). 35 Like punk and progressive rock, heavy metal has received a great deal of attention in the scholarly literature; see, for example, Bayer (2009), Pieslak (2007), Waksman (2009), Walser (1993) and Weinstein (2000). 36 For two such studies that treat the subject of rock outside of the UK and US, see Manabe (2009) and Szemere (200 I).

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Brackett, David ([1995] 2000), Interpreting Popular Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Berkeley: University of California Press. Brackett, David (ed.) (2008), The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader (2nd edn), New York: Oxford University Press. Burns, Lori ([2000] 2008), 'Analytic Methodologies for Rock Music: Harmonic and Voice-Leading Strategies in Tori Amos's "Crucify'", in Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays (revised and expanded 2nd edn), New York: Routledge, pp. 63-92. Burns, Lori and Lafrance, Melisse (2002), Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music, New York: Routledge. Capuzzo, Guy (2004), 'Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 26, pp. 177-99. Capuzzo, Guy (2009), 'Sectional Tonality and Sectional Centricity in Rock Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 31, pp. 157-74. Cateforis, Theo (ed.) (2007), The Rock History Reader, New York: Routledge. Cohen, Sara ( 1991 ), Rock Culture in Liverpool, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Covach, John (1995), 'Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humor, and "This is Spinal Tap"', in Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (eds), Concert Music, Rock and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, pp. 399-421. Covach, John (1997a), 'Progressive Rock, "Close to the Edge," and the Boundaries of Style', in John Covach and Graeme Boone (eds), Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-31. Covach, John (1997b), 'We Won't Get Fooled Again: Rock Music and Musical Analysis', in David Schwartz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (eds), Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 75-89. Covach, John ( 1999), 'Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology', in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds), Rethinking Music, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 452-70. Covach, John (2003), 'Pangs of History in Late-1970s New-Wave Rock', in Allan F. Moore (ed.), Analysing Popular Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 173-95. Covach, John (2005), 'Form in Rock Music: A Primer', in Deborah Stein (ed. ), Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 65-76. Covach, John (2009), What s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History (2nd edn), New York: Norton. Covach, John and Boone, Graeme (eds) ( 1997), Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press. de Clerq, Trevor and Temperley, David (20 II), 'A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony', Popular Music, 30, pp. 47-70. DeCurtis, Anthony (ed.) ( 1992), Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dettmar, Kevin J.H. (2006), Is Rock Dead?, New York: Routledge. Dettmar, Kevin .T.H. and William Richey (eds) (1999), Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, New York: Columbia University Press. Everett, Walter (1997), 'Swallowed by a Song: Paul Simon's Crisis of Chromaticism', in John Covach and Graeme Boone (eds), Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 113-53.

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Everett, Walter (1999/2001), The Beatles as Musicians, 2 vols, New York: Oxford University Press. Everett, Walter (2004a), 'A Royal Scam: The Abstruse and Ironic Bop-Rock Harmony of Steely Dan', Music Theory Spectrum, 26, pp. 201-35. Everett, Walter (2004b), 'Making Sense of Rock's Tonal Systems', Music Theory Online, 10, 4; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 301-35. Everett, Walter (ed.) ([2000] 2008), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays (revised and expanded 2nd edn), New York: Routledge. Everett, Walter (2009), The Foundations of Rock: From 'Blue Suede Shoes' to 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes', New York: Oxford University Press. Fabbri, Franco (1982), 'A Theory of Musical Genre: Two Applications', in David Horn and Philip Tagg (eds), Popular Music Perspectives, Goteborg and Exeter: IASPM, pp. 52-81. Fast, Susan (2001), In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music, New York: Oxford University Press. Flippo, Chet (1975), 'Let it Read', Rolling Stone, 190, pp. 77-80. Fonarow, Wendy (2006), Empire ofDirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Jndie Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Frith, Simon ( 1978), The Sociology of Rock, London: Constable. Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew (eds) (1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Routledge. Frith, Simon and McRobbie, Angela (1978), 'Rock and Sexuality', Screen Education, 29, pp. 3-19; reprinted in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds) ( 1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Routledge, pp. 371-89. Gammond, Peter ( 1991 ), The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, New York: Oxford University Press. Gracyk, Theodore ( 1996), Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gracyk, Theodore (2007), Listening to Popular Music: Or, How J Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Griffiths, Dai ( 1999), 'The High Analysis of Low Music', Music Analysis, 18, pp. 389-435; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 63-109. Head lam, Dave ( 1995), 'Does the Song Remain the Same? Questions of Authorship in the Music of Led Zeppelin', in Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (eds), Concert Music, Rock and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, pp. 313-63. Headlam, Dave (1997), 'Blues Transformations in the Music of Cream', in John Covach and Graeme Boone (eds), Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 59-92. Hebdige, Dick ( 1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New York: Methuen. Hibbett, Ryan (2005), 'What is Indie Rock?', Popular Music and Society, 28, pp. 55-77. Holm-Hudson, Kevin (ed.) (2002), Progressive Rock Reconsidered, New York: Routledge. Holm-Hudson, Kevin (2008), Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Aldershot: Ashgate. Hubbs, Nadine ( 1996), 'Music of the "Fourth Gender": Morrissey and the Sexual Politics of Melodic Contour', in Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry (eds), Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, Genders 23, New York: New York University Press, pp. 266-96.

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Jarman-Ivens, Freya (ed.) (2007), Oh Boy 1 Masculinities and Popular Music, New York: Routledge. Jones, Carys Wyn (2008), The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums, Aldershot: Ashgate. Julien, Olivier (ed.) (2009), Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, Aldershot: Ashgate. Kruse, Holly ( 1993), 'Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture', Popular Music, 12, pp. 33-41. Lacasse, Serge (2000), 'lntertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music', in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 35-58; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 147-70. Leonard, Marion (2007), Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse, and Girl Power, Aldershot: Ash gate. Macan, Edward ( 1997), Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, New York: Oxford University Press. McClary, Susan and Walser, Robert ( 1988), 'Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock', in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds) ( 1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Routledge, pp. 277-92. Manabe, Noriko (2009), 'Western Music in Japan: The Evolution of Styles in Children's Songs, HipHop, and Other Genres', Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York. Marcus, Greil ( 1975), Mystery Train: Images ofAmerica in Rock 'n 'Roll Music, New York: E.P. Dutton. Marcus, Greil (2005), Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, New York: PublicAtfairs. Middleton, Richard (1999), 'Form', in Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (eds), Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 141-55. Middleton, Richard (2000), 'Introduction: Locating the Popular Music Text', in Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-19. Moore, Allan F. ( 1992), 'Patterns of Harmony', Popular Music, 11, pp. 73-106. Moore, Allan F. ( 1995), 'The So-Called "Flattened Seventh" in Rock', Popular Music, 14, pp. 185-202; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 283-99. Moore, Allan F. ([1993] 2001 ), Rock: The Primary Text (revised and expanded 2nd edn), Aldershot: Ashgate. Moore, Allan F. (2002), 'Authenticity as Authentication', Popular Music, 21, pp. 209-23; reprinted in Allan F. Moore (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 131-45. Moore, Allan F. (ed.) (2007), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Aldershot: Ashgate. Moore, Allan F. and Ibrahim, Anwar (2005), "'Sounds Like Teen Spirit": Identifying Radiohead's Idiolect', in Joseph Tate (ed.), The Music and Art of Radiohead, Aldershot: Ash gate, pp. 139-58. Moy, Ron (2007), Kate Bush and Hounds ofLove, Aldershot: Ashgate. Neal, Jocelyn (2005), 'Popular Music Analysis in American Music Theory', Zeitschrift der Gesellschafi fur Musiktheorie, 2, 2-3, pp. 173-80. Negus, Keith (1996), Popular Music in Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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0 'Donnell, Shaugn (2006), 'On the Path: Tracing Tonal Coherence in Dark Side ofthe Moon', in Russell Reising (ed.), 'Speak to Me': The Legacy of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 87-103. Osborn, Brad (2010), 'Beyond Verse and Chorus: Experimental Formal Structures in Post-Millennia! Rock Music', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Pieslak, Jonathan (2007), 'Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah', Music Theory Spectrum, 29, pp. 219-45. Reddington, Helen (2007), The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era, Aldershot: Ashgate. Regev, Motti (2002), 'The ''Pop-Rockization" of Popular Music', in David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (eds), Popular Music Studies, London: Arnold, pp. 251-64. Reising, Russell (ed.) (2002), 'Every Sound There Is': The Beatles' Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll, Aldershot: Ashgate. Reising, Russell (ed.) (2006), 'Speak to Me': The Legacy of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, Aldershot: Ashgate. Robison, Brian (2002), 'Somebody is Digging My Bones: King Crimson's "Dinosaur" as (Post) Progressive Historiography', in Kevin Holm-Hudson (ed.), Progressive Rock Reconsidered, New York: Routledge, pp. 221-42. Ryan, Kevin and Kehew, Brian (2006), Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, Houston: Curve bender. Sheinbaum, John J. (2002), 'Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Values', in Kevin HolmHudson (ed.), Progressive Rock Reconsidered, New York: Routledge, pp. 21-42. Spicer, Mark (2005), Review of Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, Music Theory Online, 11, 4. Spicer, Mark ([2000] 2008), 'Large-Scale Strategy and Compositional Design in the Early Music of Genesis', in Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays (revised and expanded 2nd edn), New York: Routledge, pp. 313-44. Spicer, Mark (2009), 'Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon's Late Beatles Songs', Gamut, 2, pp. 347-75. Spicer, Mark (2010), "'Reggatta de Blanc": Analyzing Style in the Music of the Police', in Mark Spicer and John Covach (eds), Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 124-53. Spicer, Mark and Covach, John (eds) (201 0), Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stephan-Robinson, Anna (2009), 'Form in Paul Simon's Music', Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY. Stephenson, Ken (2002), What to Listen For in Rock: A Stylistic Analysis, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stump, Paul ( 1997), The Music's All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, London: Quartet. Szemere, Anna (200 I), The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary, University Parle Pennsylvania State University Press. Tagg, Philip (2009), Everyday Tonality, New York and Montreal: Mass Media Music Scholars' Press. Toynbee, Jason (2000), Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Wagner, Naphtali (2003), '"Domestication" of Blue Notes in the Beatles' Songs', Music Theory Spectrum, 25, pp. 353-65. Waksman, Steve (1999), Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waksman, Steve (2009), This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk, Berkeley: University of California Press. Walser, Robert (1993), Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Weinstein, Deena ( 1991 ), 'The Sociology of Rock: An Undisciplined Discipline', Theory, Culture, Society, 8, pp. 97-109. Weinstein, Deena (1998), 'The History of Rock's Pasts through Rock Covers', in Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman (eds), Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 137-51. Weinstein, Deena (2000), Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (rev. edn), Boulder, CO: Westview. Whiteley, Sheila (1992), The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counterculture, New York: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila (ed.) ( 1997), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, New York: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila (2000), Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity, New York: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila and Rycenga, Jennifer (eds) (2006), Queering the Popular Pitch, New York: Routledge. Wicke, Peter ( 1987, 1990), Rockmusik: zur Asthetik und Soziologie eines Massenmediums, Leipzig: Philipp Reclam; English translation: Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winkler, Peter (1997), 'Writing Ghost Notes: The Poetics and Politics of Transcription', in David Schwartz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (eds), Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 169-203. Zak, Albin J. (2001), The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zak, Albin J. (2010), I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Part I Histories, Aesthetics and Ideologies

[1] Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music BRUCE BAUGH

Can there be an aesthetics of rock music? My question is not: Can traditional ways of interpreting and evaluating music be applied to rock music, for clearly they can, with very mixed results. My question is rather: Does rock music have standards of its own, which uniquely apply to it, or that apply to it in an especially appropriate way? My hunch is that rock music has such standards, that they are implicitly observed by knowledgeable performers and listeners, and that these standards reflect the distinctiveness of rock as a musical genre. Rock music involves a set of practices and a history quite different from those of the European concert hall tradition upon which traditional musical aesthetics have been based. That being so, any attempt to evaluate or understand rock music using traditional aesthetics of music is bound to result in a misunderstanding. It is not that rock music is more modern, since there are many modernist composers in the European tradition, their modernity being precisely a function of their relation to that tradition, which they aim to radicalize and subvert. 1 The difference between rock and "serious" music is that rock belongs to a different tradition, with different concerns and aims. In this paper, I will try to get at the nature of those differences, and in so doing, if only in a negative way, the route that an aesthetics of rock music might take. I will initially make the contrast between rock and European concert music as strong and sharp as possible, which will lead to some one-sided and simplistic distinctions between the two genres. Nevertheless, even when the distinctions are properly qualified and nuanced, I think the difference remains real and substantial. If I were to indicate this difference in a preliminary way, I would say that traditional musical aesthetics is concerned with form and com-

posJtJOn, whereas rock is concerned with the matter of music. Even this way of putting things is misleading, since the form/matter distinction is itself part of traditional aesthetics. But leaving aside the inappropriateness of the term, by "matter" I mean the way music feels to the listener, or the way that it affects the listener's body. One important material aspect of rock music is the way an individual tone sounds when played or sung in a certain way. Making a tone sound a certain way is a large part of the art of rock music performance, something rock inherits from the performance-oriented traditions from which it springs, particularly the blues. This is obvious in the case ofti1e voice, which is why in rock, as in blues and most jazz, it is the singer and not the song which is important. But it also true in the case of the electric guitar, an instrument which takes on the expressive function of the voice in much of rock music. The emphasis on the very sound of a musical note as a vehicle of musical expression was summed up in guitarist Eric Clapton 's statement that his ideal is to play a single note with such feeling and intensity that it would cause listeners to weep (and not, cynics please note, because the music is painfully loud, but because it is painfully beautiful.) The materiality of tone, or more accurately, of the performance of tones, is only one important material element of rock music. Two others are loudness and rhythm. Both of these are also more properly felt by the body than judged by the mind, at least as far as rock music is concerned, and the proper use of both is crucial to the success of a rock music performance, a success which is judged by the feelings the music produces in the listener's body. The fact that rock music aims at arousing and expressing feeling has often been held against it, as if arousing

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24 feeling were somehow "cheap," or unworthy of true musical beauty. But the alternative is to look at the material properties of rock music, or those properties correlative to the bodily feelings it arouses, as the key to rock's own criteria of musical excellence. These material or "visceral" properties of rock are registered in the body core, in the gut, and in the muscles and sinews of the arms and legs, rather than in any intellectual faculty of judgment, which is why traditional aesthetics of music either neglects them or derides them as having no musical value. Classical aesthetics of music explicitly excludes questions concerning how music feels or sounds, and the emotional reactions music provokes, from considerations of musical beauty. This exclusion is argued for in Kant's Critique ofJudgment, and follows from Kant's definition of "the beautiful" as that which is an object of a judgment claiming universal validity. 2 What pleases me because of the sensations it produces in me, says Kant, is merely agreeable. I call something beautiful, by contrast, when I claim that anyone should find its form, or the arrangement of its parts, intrinsically pleasing, not because of the sensations the form arouses or because of its usefulness, but because the form is inherently suitable to being perceived, and so leads to a harmonious free play of the imagination and the understanding. Pleasures and pains based on mere sensation (Empfindung), which constitute the "material" part of a perception (Vorstellung), are interested and purely subjective. The idiosyncratic responses sensory stimuli produce in me because of my particular dispositions and physical constitution cannot be the basis for a judgment that claims to be valid for all perceiving subjects, since "in these matters, each person rightly consults his own feeling alone," and these feelings will differ from person to person (Kant, p. 132). The elements of a work of art that produce sensations, then, such as tones or colors, may add charm to the work or provoke emotions, but they add nothing to beauty. When someone speaks, improperly, of a beautiful musical note, this is "the matter of delight passed off for the form" (Kant, pp. 65-66). Kant does allow (in section 14) that certain tones and colors may be intrinsically beautiful when they are "pure": that is, when they are considered not in their immediacy as mere sensations, but reflectively, as having a determinate

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism form in virtue of the measurable frequency of vibrations of light or air, or the ratio of one frequency to another in the case of juxtaposed tones or colors. Even here, however, the beauty belongs to the form of the tone or color (its frequency or ratio), and not to its merely felt or subjective matter (see sections 51-52). In any case, too much attention to the individual notes is a dangerous distraction from the proper object of aesthetic regard, compositional form. "The matter of sensation ... is not essential. Here the aim is merely enjoyment, which ... renders the soul dull" and the mind dissatisfied (Kant, p. 191). This is a moral fault, and not just an aesthetic one. The hearer who seeks pleasurable or exciting sensations in music forms judgments concerning musical worth that are conditioned by his body and his senses (Kant, p. 132), since they are based on passively experienced pleasures and pains (Kant, p. 149). Such judgments of musical beauty are heteronomous: free, active, judging reason is subordinated to the passive body's involuntary reactions. The beauty of fine art, on the other hand, is not based on sensations, but on the mind's free and autonomous judgment of the suitability of a form for perception (section 44). Consequently music, since so much of its appeal depends on the actual sensations it produces in the listener rather than on composition alone, "has the lowest place among the fine arts" (Kant, p. 195). Kant, notoriously, was no music lover. Everyone is familiar with his complaint that music lacks urbanity because "it scatters its influence abroad to an uncalled for extent . . . and . . . becomes obtrusive," a remark that contains a grain of truth, especially in an age of powerful stereo systems and "boom boxes," but which does not indicate much appreciation for music. Yet although Kant himself was insensitive to musical beauty, others more sensitive took up his preoccupation with beauty of form in their aesthetics of music. So Hanslick, who knew music well, made every note of the musical scale "pure" in Kant's sense of having determinate form, in that each note is "a tone of determinate measurable pitch, " 3 inherently related to every other tone in virtue of the ratios between the pitches, which determine their relation on the scale (Hanslick, p. 95). By making notes "pure" in this way, Hanslick partially rescued musical notes from the disreputable position of being merely the

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Baugh Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music

25

cause of conditioned, subjective sensations and pleasures, which could form the basis only of impure and heteronomous aesthetic judgments. This, though, was only a first step in Hanslick's project of elevating music from the position of lowest of the fine arts to the highest and most formal art of all. "Music is unique among the arts," wrote Hanslick, "because its form is its content and ... its content is its form" (Hanslick, p. 94). In music, unlike painting or literature, there can be no content apart from the form itself, no subject matter independent of the composition or organization of the work. Musical beauty, then, is entirely based on form, that is, on tonal relationships (Hanslick, p. xxiii), and not on any feelings or emotions aroused or expressed by the music (Hanslick, p. 95). By making the matter of music (musical tones) formal, and by making form identical with content, Hanslick made the art Kant regarded as the basest and most material into the highest and most formal. Of course, the story doesn't stop with Hanslick. The preoccupation with musical form continues on into twentieth century aesthetics, notably in Adorno's philosophy of music, but in a more everyday way, formal concerns predominate in music criticism in general, from journalism to academia. 4 The obvious rejoinder to this characterization of traditional aesthetics is that it is not exclusively formal, but takes into account non-formal or material elements as well. The timbre of a voice or instrument is clearly of great importance to European concert music; if they weren't, top caliber bel canto sopranos and Stradivarius violins wouldn't command so much respect and such high prices. Music criticism also takes performance aspects of music into account. But timbre and performance are usually secondary, and are often discussed in terms of the "faithfulness" or "adequacy" of the performance/interpretation to the composition performed or to the composer's "intentions." One justification for playing music on period instruments and in period style is that this better captures what the composition was trying to express, not simply that it sounds better or is more pleasant to listen to. In that case, performance and the notes' sounds are judged in terms of what the composition requires. In classical aesthetics of music, matter is at the service of form, and is always judged in relation to form. Even though tradi-

tiona! aesthetics is not exclusively formal, formal considerations predominate. When this preoccupation with form and composition is brought to bear on rock music, the chief result is confusion. Usually, rock music is dismissed as insignificant on account of the simplicity of its forms, a simplicity which is real, and not a misperception by those unfamiliar with the genre. Alternatively, more "liberal" critics will try to find significant form where there is very little form at all, and at the expense of neglecting what is really at stake in rock music. This liberal tolerance is a worse mistake than conservative intolerance. In the first place, it is highly condescending to suppose that rock music has value only when it approximates the compositional forms of baroque or romantic music. The Beatles, in particular, were victims of this patronizing attitude. Is "Penny Lane" a better rock song than "Strawberry Fields" because the former contains flourishes of Baroque trumpet and the latter doesn't? 5 Does knowing that "She's Leaving Home" ends on an Aeolian cadence add to our appreciation of it as a rock song?6 I don't think so. Yet for a time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, critics fawned over complicated works by Yes or Genesis because traditional aesthetics of music could find something to say about their form, never noticing that criteria appropriate to the music of Handel or Boulez might be inappropriate when applied to rock music, and have very little to do with the informal standards of practice and evaluation employed by people who actually perform or listen to rock music on a regular basis. To the extent that some rock musicians took this sort of criticism seriously, the results were disastrous, producing the embarrassing, pretentious and-in the final analysis-very silly excesses of "art rock." To the extent art rock succeeded, it did so because it was rock, not because it was "art." This was especially noticeable in the case of the mercifully short-lived subgenre, the "rock opera." The Who's Tommy7 was a good rock opera because it had good rock music and was done tongue-in-cheek (hence its "Underture"), but other attempts were merely bombastic, neither rock nor opera. Rock's borrowings from "classical" music had similar results. Combining a soulful rhythm and blues vocal with a Baroque organ line worked in Procui Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale," 8 but in

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26 other instances the incorporation of "classical music" (usually this meant a string section) led to rather slight pop songs collapsing under the weight of extraneous instrumentation. 9 So what standards are appropriate to rock music? I think that the basic principles of an aesthetics of rock can be derived from turning Kantian or formalist aesthetics on its head. Where Kant prized the free and autonomous judgment of reason, and so found beauty in form rather than matter, an aesthetics of rock judges the beauty of music by its effects on the body, and so is primarily concerned with the "matter" of music. That makes beauty in rock music to some extent a subjective and personal matter; to the extent that you evaluate a piece on the basis of the way it happens to affect you, you cannot demand that others who are affected differently agree with your assessment. But that does not mean that rock's standards are purely and simply an individual matter of taste. There are certain properties a piece of rock music must have in order to be good, although knowledgeable listeners may disagree concerning whether a given piece of music actually has those properties. In every case, these properties are material rather than formal, and they are based on performancebased standards of evaluation, rather than compositional ones. The most obvious material property of rock is rhythm. Rock music, from its origins in blues and country and folk traditions, is for dancing. It's got a back-beat, you can't lose it. In dance, the connection between the music and the body of the listener is immediate, felt and enacted rather than thought. A bad rock song is one that tries and fails to inspire the body to dance. Good rhythm cannot be achieved through simple formulas; the sign of a bad rock band is that the beat is not quite right, even though the correct time signature and tempo are being observed. A song with beat and rhythm is one that is performed well, not well composed, and this emphasis on performance is one rock shares with other forms of popular music. It is less a matter of tempo than of timing, of knowing whether to play on the beat, or slightly ahead of it or behind it, and this is one of those "knacks" that Plato would have refused the status oftruly scientific knowledge: it cannot be captured or explained by any stateable principle. It is not accessible to reason. It might be a bit unfair to claim rhythm and

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism timing as distinctive elements of rock music, since rhythm, beat and timing are important considerations in traditional aesthetics, and are capable of formalization in musical notation. Some classical music is based on traditional European dance forms; some music is written expressly for dance, such as ballet; some music is structured primarily around rhythm, rather than tonal sequences. All these forms of music, then, have a prominent relation to the body because of their connection to dance. Yet the relation is not the same as in the case of rock music. In the first place, the forms of dance that found their way into classical music were already highly formalized versions of what were (perhaps) once folk dances. Whatever their origins, the courtly dances to which Beethoven and Mozart provided the accompaniment were appreciated for their formal qualities (precision and intricacy of movement, order and geometry of patterns), not for their somatic or visceral aspects. On the contrary, in courtly dance, matter and the body are subject to form and the intellect. This was never more true than in Romantic ballet, where the chief effect of the dance consists of the illusion that highly strenuous and athletic movements are effortless, and that the bodies of the dancers are weightless. Here the body is used to negate the body: in ballet, the materiality of the body itself becomes pure form. This is less true of modern music, such as Stravinsky's, but even in this case the music and its performance are regulated by formal structures to which the musicians and dancers must accommodate their motions. In contrast, the effect of the music on the body is of prime importance for rock music and its antecedents (blues, jazz), so that the music is regulated by the dancers: musicians will vary beat, rhythm and tempo until it feels good to dance to. Rock music has no correct tempo, beat or rhythm independent of its effects on the body of the listener or dancer, which is why when non-rock musicians play rock, it often sounds "flat" and feels "dead": it is not that the musicians are playing the wrong tempo, notes or beat, but only that no standard score captures the subtleties or timing and rhythm that a good rock musician can feel. Feeling is the criterion of correctness here, probably because the dance forms on which rock is based do not deny the body's physicality, but emphasize it: feet stomp, bodies gyrate, bodily masses are propelled by

Rock Music Baugh

Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music

masses of sound with insistent and compelling rhythms. But beat is not the only thing, or the most important. There is a significant body of highly regarded rock music which has no swing, and which you can't dance to because you are not meant to dance to it. From the mid-1960s onward, rock music broke out of the rigid confines of verse/chorus/verse in 4/4 time. But the significance of this change is not that it made rock more interesting formally. The importance of the change lay rather in the way it called into question some of the boundaries rock set for itself, and opened up new possibilities for expression through the matter of music, through elements other than rhythm. Let me briefly summarize the history of how this transition took place. In rock music, the voice had always been the main vehicle of expression, and the factor that could make or break a song. One need only compare a Fats Domino original with its pallid Pat Boone "cover" to see that the expressivity of the voice itself, rather than the composition, makes a rock song good. As in blues, it is the performance that counts, and standards of evaluation are based on standards of performance. In this sense, rock music reverses the priorities of European concert hall music, and questions of "faithfulness" to the music rarely arise. The only question is whether the performance/interpretation is convincing, not whether it is "faithful" to some (usually non-existent) score. No one got too upset when Joe Cocker performed the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" in a way that was not in the least suggested by the original recording. In fact, the originality of Cocker's interpretation was counted a virtue by most. Listeners to European concert hall music are not nearly so tolerant in this regard: they will accept some deviation from the original score, but within limits established by the score itself, rather than by the effectiveness of the performance. Few discerning rock listener's liked Deodato's pop version of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, but they disliked it because it was inane, not because it was a misinterpretation and a "sacrilege." Again, it is a matter of degree, but there is a heavier emphasis on performance, rather than composition, in rock music. These performance elements of rock music are not easily accounted for by traditional aesthetics. The performance standards for rock vo-

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calists have little to do with the virtuosity of an opera singer or with an ability to hit the note indicated in the composition at the time indicated. Some of the best rock vocalists, from Muddy Waters to Elvis to Lennon to Joplin, are technically quite bad singers. The standards have to do with the amount of feeling conveyed, and with the nuances of feeling expressed. On the other hand, it is not the vocalist who can sing the longest and loudest who is best, either, heavymetal notwithstanding. A good rock vocalist can insinuate meaning with a growl or a whisper. This does constitute a virtuosity of sort, but one that connects directly with the body, provoking a visceral response which may be complicated and hard to describe, but easy to recognize for those who have experienced it. Still, what the body recognizes may not lend itself to notation or formalization, and it is unlikely that a more adequate form of notation could capture these "material" qualities. In the 1960s, the modes of expression that had been uniquely associated with the voice were taken up, with various degrees of success, by the instruments themselves, especially by the guitar. I will mention only two fairly striking examples, Cream's performance of the blues song "Spoonful" at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1968, 10 and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," recorded in concert on New Year's Day, 1970. 11 Neither of these songs, as performed, have much in the way of musical structure, and they do not swing. 12 But they do allow Clapton, with Cream, and Hendrix to explore different ways an electric guitar can sound. Both guitarists have been guilty of virtuosity for its own sake on many occasions, but in these performances, their playing goes beyond mere show-boating. Clapton's playing ranges from droning sitar-like passages to bursts of tightly clustered notes; Hendrix's use of feedback in the central passage is the anguish the music conveys, rather than the bald symbolism of his Woodstock performance of "The Star Spangled Banner." 13 In both cases, the guitarists have dropped their "see what I can do with a guitar" pose in favor of "hear what I can say with a guitar." And in both cases, it is a matter of how the tones are played, not the tones themselves, that makes the music successful. In instances like these, rock achieves the expressivity through musical instruments more closely associated with jazz or blues, a use of the

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28 guitar far removed from its earlier uses as either a rhythm instrument or a bit of instrumental "filler" between choruses. On the other hand, neither Clapton nor Hendrix, nor any other good rock instrumentalist, takes an intellectualized approach to music. Both play with an intensity that still connects directly with the body, and like good rock singers, both are often not that good technically; they take chances and they make mistakes. Which is why they are unpredictable and exciting in a way that flawless musicians are not. Even when they hit the wrong notes, they do so in interesting and even exciting ways, creating a tension that can add to musical expression. When they hit the right notes, it is not because the notes are right that makes them great guitarists, but the way the notes sound, and the "timing" of the notes. Part of the intensity of rock performance has to do with an aspect of rock that is often held against it: the sheer volume or loudness of the music. Loudness, in good rock music, is also a vehicle of expression. Obviously, very loud music has an effect on the body, and not just on the ears; you can feel it vibrate in your chest cavity. This can, of course, become simply exhausting and overwhelming, but used properly, it can add to expressivity. The best rock performances, such as the ones discussed here, make extensive use of dynamics, much as a good blues singer does. And just as the blues sometimes must be shouted or hollered to convey the right emotion, so some passages of rock music must be played loud in order to have the proper effect. Bad rock musicians, like any bad musician, take a mechanical or rule-based approach to dynamics and sonority, resulting in derivative and simplistic music. But loudness can be good, if used wisely. 14 Rhythm, the expressivity of the notes themselves, loudness: These are three material, bodily elements of rock music that would, I submit, constitute its essence, and might form the basis for a genuine aesthetics of rock. Adorno called for the emancipation of dissonance; an aesthetics of rock requires an emancipation of the body, an emancipation of heteronomy. Such an emancipation is also required for the many forms of music centered on the voice and on dance, rather than on compositions and the mind's free judgment of formal beauty. In fact, preoccupation with formal beauty is appropriate to only a very small fragment ofthe world's music.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism I realize that this brief account of rock music leaves out of consideration the question of what makes a good rock song, which raises a whole different set of questions, ones where issues of compositional form are clearly relevant, and which would have to deal with the vexed question of the relation of words to music. 15 But my concern here has been with what the knowledgeable listener finds important in rock music, which is almost always performance rather than composition, and the "matter" of the notes rather than the form of the whole. Whatever form the aesthetics of rock will take, it will not be the Kantian one that underlies conventional musical aesthetics. If these prolegomena do nothing more than avert the misunderstandings that arise when formalist aesthetics over-reaches its proper domain in being applied to rock music, they will have done enough.t6 BRUCE BAUGH

Department of Philosophy University College of the Cariboo Kamloops, B.C. V2C 5N3 Canada I. See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum, 1985). 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); further references given parenthetically in the text. 3. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 71; further references given parenthetically in the text. 4. In addition to Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, see his In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone (London: New Left Books, 1981), which deals at length with the formal qualities of Wagner's superficially formless music (form as repetition of gestures and motifs; harmony, color and sonority as elements in composition, etc.). As did Hanslick, Adorno makes even the apparently material aspects of music into formal elements of composition. 5. Released as the "A-side" and "B-side" respectively of a "single" in 1967; later included in Magical Mystery Tour, EMI/Capitol, 1967. 6. On the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heans Club Band, EMI/Capitol, 1967. 7. Decca, 1969. 8. Released as a single by A&M records in 1968. 9. This was the problem with most of Procul Harem's music, at least on their first three albums. In the Beatie's "A Day in the Life" (on Sgt Pepper's), strings were used in an unorthodox and interesting way. In less capable hands, the same technique had awful results; cf. the Buckingham's "Susan" (1967), a song that has mercifully faded into obscurity, where the string passages bear no plausible relation to

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the song, but are there simply because "A Day in the Life" received critical praise. Rock music does not get any worse than this. 10. On Cream, Wheels of Fire, Polydor/Atco, 1968. II. On Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsies, Reprise/Capitol, 1970. 12. "Spoonful" is based on a descending progression from G to E; all the rest is variation, the point being that the improvised variations are what count here. 13. On Woodstock, Warner-Cotillion, 1970. 14. The clearest illustration of stupid and derivative rock is the movie, Spinal Tap. Unfortunately, the heavy-metal

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music portrayed there is actually far more laughable than the parody. 15. To my mind, the best essay on this subject remains Robert Christegau's "Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe)" in The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 230-243. 16. I would like to thank a number of people whose thoughts and comments are incorporated in this essay: Adrian Shepherd,. James 0. Young, an anonymous referee for the JAAC, and Jamie Baugh. None of them are to blame for what appears here.

[2] Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train as Rock 'n' Roll History Mark Mazullo

Since its first appearance in 1975, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music has been acclaimed as a classic of its genre.! lt has been discussed in classrooms devoted to the study of American "popular music"; it has been widely recognized as one of the first attempts to understand rock 'n' roll in terms of the broader context of American culture; and it received spectacular notices in both the scholarly and popular presses upon its publication. Its impact, both on the community of "countercultural" rock commentators of the late 1960s to the mid-1970s and on today's academics concerned with popular music, has been considerable. Mystery Train is not simply a book about music. Many of its tenets, in fact, derive directly from certain specific views of the academic discipline of American Studies, which Marcus studied during his years at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-to-late 1960s.Z Like many scholars of American literature before him, Marcus constructed a view of the rock 'n' roll tradition in order to explain the "exceptional" characteristics of American culture. His primary assertion was that the rock 'n' roll repertory should be understood not as an expression of certain subcultures of class and race but rather as a musical expression of a more general national identity. The author thus described his project as "an attempt to broaden the context in which the music is heard; to deal with rock 'n' roll not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture."3 Paradoxically, then, rock 'n' roll was best understood as a cultural form that worked against the American grain, because of its "antiestablishment" message, while still representing a distinctive national character. In other words, clinging to the countercuitural images and agendas of the late 1960s, Marcus posited a notion of "Americanism" that would embrace rock 'n' roll in its entirety. Mystery Train identified the bedrock of a rock 'n' roll canon for the mid-1970s by distinguishing six figures as the most telling representatives of this musical style: two "Ancestors"-Harmonica Frank and Robert Johnson-had influenced four diverse "Inheritors"-The Band, Sly Stone,

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Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley-through their expression in a potent subcultural musical style.4 The rock 'n' roll medium had allowed these artists to communicate a "version of America" that, for Marcus, exposed the idiosyncrasies of the nation's unique cultural sphere. He viewed this music from the perspective of America's larger artistic canon, seeking to claim for certain musicians the same aesthetic and historical significance that has been accorded to such American writers as Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne. His culture-critical project was thus positioned within the broader context of American literary studies: he argued that the music under discussion, like the nation's great literature, "dramatize[s] a sense of what it is to be an American; what it means, what it's worth, what the stakes of life in America might be. This book ... is rooted in the idea that these artists can illuminate those American questions and that the questions can add resonance to their work."5 In the end, Marcus's claim was that all American artists were best thought of as "symbolic Americans."6 In what follows, I would like to consider Mystery Train as a central text in the tradition of writing on rock 'n' roll. Rather than merely revisiting one influential source and considering its continuing discursive power, I wish instead to use this examination of Mystery Train as a means of entering into a larger historiographical discussion of the writing of rock histories. Historiographical inquiries have recently found themselves at the center of musicological discourse. Investigations of the historical reception of certain classical-music repertories have brought to the discipline a growing awareness of the social and cultural uses to which music has been put. Music history textbooks, music criticism in the popular press, and discussions of music in literary works are a few of the many critical-historical genres that have come under scrutiny as the musicological community attempts to confront its own past while claiming continued legitimacy in the current situation of curricular and disciplinary reforms. 7 Equally indicative of musicology's current state is the broadening of its concerns to include the realm of popular music. If the study of popular music is to be considered a concern of musicology, it seems clear that the same lines of historiographical questioning that have revealed the agendas of certain institutions of high culture should also be applied to the broad and varied literature on popular music. Because historiography lends itself so well to mapping the cultural space that music occupies, one of the potentially rich studies awaiting today's musicologists is an examination of the ways in which music scholars and critics have treated different musichistorical repertories. At issue is the kind of writing that the rock 'n' roll repertory has received and its mediating function on the music it discusses. Equally important to this enterprise is a discussion of the many roles that writers

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on music play: the way a music scholar and/or critic fulfills the roles of fan, critic, and historian will determine the kind of history being written. Again, the attitude of the scholar toward the object or repertory of investigation has been taken up as a topic in recent musicological discourse.8 As the critical-historical discourse on popular music comes to be considered, a sensitivity to these roles will guide the reception of these textsjust as the writers' conception of their own roles had determined their treatment of their musical subject at hand. Mystery Train embodies strategies implicit in rock history writing that derive from larger trends in American intellectual history. The written history of rock 'n' roll is directly related to the history of those social groups whose concerns and ideals this music has come to represent-most characteristically, the American counterculture. Because, as much current musicological work has demonstrated, the written history of a musical repertory is dependent at least in part on its historical-critical reception, the connection between rock and its historians becomes a central aspect of rock's history itself. A broadening of the study of popular music to include an examination of the narratives proposed by one powerful literary arm of the rock community makes possible an interpretation of the social group that creates these historical accounts as an "institution." In current literary theory, such socially constructed, self-perpetuating institutions are recognized as crucial to the production and reception of cultural texts. The thesis proposed here, influenced by work in literary studies, is that a musical repertory's reception in various social spaces becomes a central and intrinsic aspect of its historical "meaning." Thus, an investigation of the much-read narratives of certain segments of the rock community should not be content with noting only their sociological implications, but rather should explore their powerful role in the spheres of cultural production and reception.9 Finally, any contextualization of written histories also necessitates taking their own historical location and corresponding cultural matrix into account. The institutional claims made for rock 'n' roll changed significantly during the late 1960s and early 1970s-a period of perceived crisis for this musical tradition. The role of these claims in the formation of a rock-historical narrative should not be underestimated. It is in this context that I will consider Marcus's Mystery Train. The author's close tie to one of the rock institution's most prominent mouthpieces, Rolling Swne magazine, is also crucial to some of the historical and ideological constructions that emanated from that source.IO Rather than read these documents as transparent windows into rock 'n' roll's "real history," we might consider instead what is at stake when a written history emerges in times of crisis. What kind of history is produced? Whose crisis is made apparent?

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And how is the subject of this history employed by these groups in acts of their own cultural and political legitimation? ln the 1970s, many counterculrural intellectuals considered rock music to be experiencing a time of pivotal crisis. Thus it was argued that the "authentic" style of the mid-to-late 1960s was fighting a losing battle on several fronts. Many iconic rock stars from this period had recently diedmost from an excess of drugs and alcohol. New genres and styles were challenging the hegemony of the 1960s rock sound: the work of such singer-songwriters as Carole King, James Taylor, and Carly Simon; the art rock or progressive rock movements; the increasingly threatening sounds of disco; and so on. In addition, rock's former bastions had been disgraced after the violent eruptions at the Altamont music festival in the summer of 1969 and the decline of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district into slum conditions. Finally, and most disturbingly to this group, rock's socalled antiestablishment message was being challenged by what was thought to be a large-scale disavowal of the political sphere on the part of young people across the country.!! As the upheaval that characterized the 1960s waned, many involved in that decade's alternative projects sought continued social and political expression by producing historical accounts of its culture. In particular, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll ( 1976) helped to const-ruct a view of rock 'n' roll's history from this perspective.l2 In its multiauthored effort to explain rock 'n' roll's continued relevance in American society, this text reached back to the early history of rock 'n' roll as well as to related genres of American popular music, such as the blues. By doing so, it manufactured an uninterrupted narrative of rock's trajectory of social and political dissent. Accordingly, it employed the term "rock 'n' roll" consistently to signify the musical style as a whole, preferring the inclusivity of this terminology to the more common convention that refers to music after the mid-1960s as simply "rock." Established in 1967 in San Francisco, Rolling Stone magazine flowered in the early-to-mid-1970s through its association with the New Journalism, through its ostentatiously self-described influence on the nation's leftist political activities, and through its many satellite projects, launched by the Hearstian ambitions of its publisher, ]ann Wenner. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll was perhaps the most important of these publications: for the first time, it assembled the viewpoints of all of the magazine's major critics into a comprehensive narrative of rock 'n' roll's history. The most interesting thing about this book is that while it represents a variety of opinions and remembrances of the rock 'n' roll tradition, it also provides a unified statement from a certain generation on

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that tradition. Not surprisingly, Marcus's sweeping conception of rock 'n' roll culture as broadly and inherently "American" was adopted by Rolling Stone: as Mystery Train was being written, the editors there also attempted to broaden the horizons of the journal. In 1974, for instance, Wenner changed his official description of the magazine from "just a little rock 'n' roll newspaper from San Francisco" to "[a] biweekly general interest magazine covering contemporary American culture, politics, and arts, with a special interest in music."l3 The format of an illustrated history allowed Rolling Stone to capture the visceral essence of rock 'n' roll, thus providing an option for fans who did not care to wade through the lengthy written passages. In accordance with the style and format of the parent magazine itself, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll also underscored rock 'n' roll's function as a constituent of America's increasingly image-driven culture. At the very front of the book one found three illustrations whose placement preceded the introduction by the editor, Jim Miller, and which were doubtless intended to encapsulate the key features of the musical style. In the first, the little-known 1950s rocker Ersel Hickey represented the quintessential image of stylized, white, working-class rock 'n' roll-the electric guitar, the cuffed pants, the turned-up collar, and the duck-tailed hair. The second, a two-page spread depicting an energetic crowd of teenage girls held back by a middle-aged police force, reminded the viewer that rock 'n' roll was and always has been a phenomenon both charged with sexuality and at odds with authority. The third, a studio portrait of the Five Satins, who became famous with the 1956 hit "In the Still of the Nite," highlighted the importance of the musical traditions of black America within rock 'n' roll's history. It was with these three photographs that the editors of the Illustrated History prefaced their story-to be told through the lens of the 1970s. This was a tale that evoked the participatory society that rock 'n' roll was believed to have created through rebellion, style, sexuality, and inclusivity of race, class, and gender. In the editor's introduction, Miller confirmed this message and broadened its scope. He began by appropriating the traditions of folk music: here was a "history of rock 'n' roll" that began not with Elvis Presley, nor even with rhythm and blues, but with an anecdote about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, as they brought their 1960s-style folk back on the road in the 1970s. The easy conflation of "folk music" (of a particularly politicized cast) and rock 'n' roll, an introductory strategy that provided the narrative with more overtly political credentials than it could have mustered without the association, was matched by a second appropriation in the opening chapters, this time of the blues.I4 Finally, throughout the book one read the same aesthetic refrain: rock 'n' roll was no mere fad for

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the young but a bona fide artistic medium whose texts represented, in their maturity, the summoning forth of social, political, and economic freedom. The many chapters in the Illusrrated History written by the critic Greg Shaw demonstrate even more evocatively the rock-historical position held by the Rolling Stone community. In his essays "The Teen Idols," "The Instrumental Groups," and "Brill Building Pop," Shaw argued that the period between Buddy Holly's and Ritchie Valens's deaths in 1959 and the first American visit by the Beatles in February 1964 was a problematic one in the history of the tradition, mainly because "nobody could say for sure which were the essential ingredients for success in this new, mysterious and incredibly lucrative field of teenage music."IS Shaw's writing also evoked the facile rhetoric of the "revolution" that so characterizes rock 'n' roll history writing of this period. For instance, in his chapter on the obscure instrumental groups of the first "post-rock-and-roll" phase (ca. 1958-64), he argued that "As if in response to this amputation of rock & roll from its roots, in the late Fifties white instrumental bands began appearing throughout the country, helping to keep the music alive at a local level and directly influencing the English bands that would bring rock out of its doldrums later on in the Sixties."l6 Because rock 'n' roll is so predominantly a vocal style, this essay would seem to hold little or no importance in the grander scheme of things. Yet Shaw attempts to make clear this period's significance in the shaping of a rock 'n' roll aesthetic: Instrumental groups were almost without exception a regional phenomenon, a product of the local music scenes that have been the source of virtually every significant innovation in rock & roll. As a general rule, professional musicians in the music capitals-New York, Los Angeles and London-had become insulated from influences outside the music industry, while local bands, playing every night in front of audiences with whom they had a direct rapport, initiated new styles, dances and music developments. The immediacy of this interaction between fans and musicians has been crucial to rock's evolutionary process.' 7 Of note here is the message regarding rock 'n' roll's authenticity-the argument that a direct link to fans was the determining factor in any repertory's potential for inclusion in the institutionalized history of rock 'n' roll. In all, Shaw's contributions to the Illusrrated History exemplify the position that so many of the contributors would take: authentic rock 'n' roll began with Elvis and the rockabilly generation, suffered a setback between 1958 and 1964, and was rejuvenated with the arrival of the Beatles. But more important than the creation of a narrative from the mid1950s forward was the attempt to find earlier roots for rock 'n' roll in the

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annals of American experience. In his introduction, Miller characterized the style as one that defined its audience's "sensibility, style of life, and fantasies." But of the many powers of rock 'n' roll that Miller summoned, one-"the evocation of an heroic American past"-stands out as the most telling. Just as Miller began this history by adopting for the history of rock 'n' roll various other related American musical traditions, his colleague Greil Marcus, one of Rolling Stone's premier critics, had in the previous year attempted to appropriate for this narrative nothing less than all of America's mythic past. Despite a debate in the mid-1970s over the continued relevance of rock music in that decade, Mystery Train received overwhelming support from the community of countercultural intellectuals. Marcus's reputation was, by this point, secure. As rock 'n' roll's strongest link to the intellectual academy, he was a rare breed of rock 'n' roll critic: both a fan and a scholar, he confronted the music's passion and sexuality while making politically proper and intellectual sense of its messages. His standing among the counterculturalliterati was made clear by the editor's acknowledgments in the introduction to the Illustrated History. Here, Miller described his colleague-using hip French lingo, alliteration, and a literary reference to a popular novel of the time-as Rolling Stone's "coordinating editor, San Francisco liaison, Berkeley bon vivant, and the once and future king of rock raconteurs." The reviewers of Mystery Train shared the same admiration for Marcus. In a discussion in the New York Review of Books, for example, Mark Crispin Miller regretted that rock 'n' roll's spirit had been stripped of its authenticity and culturally co-opted in the mid-1970s, and he bemoaned the fact that "unfortunately, the time is right for a history of rock 'n' roll."18 Miller went on to discuss several new contributions to the burgeoning rock 'n' roll literature; more than these other histories, he wrote, Mystery Train was capable of telling "the continuing story of a finished thing."l9 Thus, while he regretfully found rock 'n' roll to be a dead cultural phenomenon, Miller affirmed both Marcus's politicized message and his methodology. Marcus located the different periods of rock 'n' roll's history at various points in a repeating cycle: it emerges, rebels, slips back into conformity, and waits in an almost hibematory state until it amasses enough discursive power to speak eloquently again of its cultural milieu. He read into the rebellion of rock 'n' roll its immortality. Though Miller disagreed with this healthy prognosis, he could not resist its appeal, for in it lived the regenerative hopes of the counterculture. Accordingly, he argued that Marcus "puts certain pretentious critics to shame. In fact, there is more of rock's

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spirit in this book than there is in rock music." Here, rock 'n' roll's ideology-as institutionalized in this reading-shines through: the tradition is cast as a cultural movement that, for the most part, is not to be discussed in established intellectual arenas. Its powerful means of cultural signification are most likely to be misunderstood by those who do not passionately confront rock 'n' roll's line of fire. Instead, it takes the inexhaustible rock 'n' roll fan-and all the better if this fan has the rare academic credentials-to blend the otherwise incompatible systems of rhetoric into an enlightening and moving analysis.ZO In an extended review in the Village Voice entitled "Elvis Presley as Moby Dick," Frank Rich also emphasized Marcus's stature as a man of letters.ZI He began with an affirmation of Marcus's vision of America: "Marcus sets out to define that heady space where our history and our art merge into a single, durable vision of our country-a vision that is capable of illuminating the deepest and darkest recesses of our collective democratic soul." Rock 'n' roll was now seen as an institution with roots, like other "adult" forms of culture, in America's past. Rich saw no problems with digging into the nineteenth century for the "meaning" of rock 'n' roll: "It's a measure of how long and rich a view Marcus takes of these musicians and, concurrently, a vindication of the value he places in their work, that it never becomes necessary to shove Watergate or Vietnam into our faces to give the rock of Mystery Train irs share of meaning." Again, Marcus had provided the necessary myth by which to remove rock 'n' roll from the political failures of the 1960s. Although initially an outspoken radical, rock 'n' roll had been transformed from a mirror of the troubled contemporary social panorama to an expression of America's glowing past. Rich concurred with both Marcus's vision of America and his reading of rock 'n' roll's complicity in the shaping of our cultural identity. He concluded that the music, a force of great social agency, "may not be doing such a bad job of keeping our democratic vistas intact." To understand Marcus's work and its broad appeal, it is helpful to investigate his own reliance on at least three influential accounts of American intellectual history. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, Marcus had fashioned his own major in American Studies and had immersed himself in the celebrated midcentury constructions of American literature. In the work of the American literary critics F. 0. Matthiessen and Leslie Fiedler and the British writer D. H. Lawrence, Marcus came upon an impressive tradition of cultural criticism that provided him with several ideas central to his own critical methodology. In the author's note, for instance, he included Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel in

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a list of "books that mattered a great deal to the ambitions of my own book, and to its content."ZZ Matthiessen's widely read American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson arul Whir:man ( 1941) had left a strong impression on midcentury American literary criticism. In his opening manifesto, Matthiessen had maintained that the artistic program of five canonical American writers represented American cultural politics at its most basic: "Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville ... all felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution [and] to provide a culture commensurate with America's political opportunity.... What emerges from the total pattern of their achievement ... is literature for our democracy."23 Although Marcus mentioned neither American Renaissance nor its author, early readers such as Frank Rich commented that Mystery Train was "determinedly and proudly in the tradition of such ground-breaking works of American cultural criticism as ... Matthiessen's American Renaissance."24 Like Matthiessen, Marcus was clearly involved in manufacturing a canonical community of "democratic" artists whose grouping in one volume could, in Matthiessen's words, "make each [artist] cast as much light as possible on all the others."25 Along these lines, Marcus asserted that "in a democracy, an artist denies his deepest nature by ignoring the country as a whole," and "to do one's most personal work in a time of public crisis is an honest, legitimate, paradoxically democratic act of common faith; ... one keeps faith with one's community by offering whatever it is that one has to say."26 And just as America's earliest fiction was linked to the anxiety of post-Revolutionary society, so too, argued Marcus, did these rock 'n' rollers step in at a time when the country was, in his words, "up for grabs." If Matthiessen's work seems to have provided a general model for Marcus's thought, an even deeper influence came from D. H. Lawrence, whose advocacy of the liberation of the body, writings on psychoanalysis, and general dissatisfaction with established cultural sensibilities had turned him into a youth-culture icon. Lawrence's work was widely read during the 1960s; the resurrection of his ideas responded to the counterculture's desperate search for legitimate intellectual ancestors.27 As Marcus mentioned, Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature ( 1923) greatly affected the ideas he expressed in Mystery Train. He evoked Lawrence's most trenchant words on American artistry: "The artist usually sets out ... to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. Now we know our business in these studies: saving the American tale from the American artist."Z8 Marcus quoted a portion of this

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passage in his discussion of Sly Stone and in the same vein sought out the "American tale" in the work of all of his canonical rock 'n' rollers. Both Lawrence and Marcus espoused the doctrine of American exceptionalism, an entrenched intellectual tradition asserting that America's social, political, and economic conditions inevitably give rise to a unique-that is, "exceptional"-cultural sphere.29 For exceptionalists, one of the unique qualities of American art lies in the relationship that it fosters between the artist and the audience. Lawrence had written that Melville "was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. "30 Marcus also viewed the performer-audience dynamic as a crucial component of rock 'n' roll's artistic potential, one that could be generalized into an individual-community dynamic and serve as a model for democracy. This paradigm acts in accordance with one central theme in Lawrence's writing: the conflict in twentieth-century America between extreme individualism and the desperate yearning to escape from it. In a key passage from Mystery Train, Marcus identified this same dialectic as the underlying essence of rock 'n' roll: "The tension between community and self-reliance; between distance between one's audience and affection for it; between the shared experience of popular culture and the special talent of artists who both draw on that shared experience and change itthese things are what make rock 'n' roll at its best a democratic art, at least in the American meaning of the word democracy."31 This dichotomy is explored most thoroughly in Marcus's expansive and widely admired essay on Elvis Presley, which serves as the heart of Mysr:ery Train. He quotes Lawrence extensively on the topic of freedom and argues that Presley's work captures the fundamentally American dialectic between individual freedom and community responsibility: "There is a modesty of spirit [in Elvis's country-style singles]. In this world you will hope for what you deserve, but not demand it; you may celebrate your life, but not with the kind of liberation that might threaten the life of someone else. The public impulse of the music is not to break things open, but to confirm what is already there, to add to its reality and its value. This is the kind of freedom D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote about America in an essay called 'The Spirit of Place.' "32 Finally, Marcus and Lawrence also shared an insistence on art's proper function as critique. Lawrence had praised American literature for the indirectness of its symbolism: "Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge."33 He had been mesmerized by the Americans, who "keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things .... Their ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come off."34 The heart of American aesthetic criticism is

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the removal of this "spiritual get-up." Because "authentic" rock 'n' roll, as Marcus and his colleagues constructed it, should always convey a potent and unspoiled social message, Marcus preferred that it imitate classic American literature by offering a metaphorical or veiled critique instead of succumbing to the pedestrian or "solipsistic" methods of social criticism that were prevalent in the music-even much of the rock music-of the mid-1970s.35 The American literary critic Leslie Fiedler had also acknowledged D. H. Lawrence's work as epochmaking in the understanding of American culture. In his influential Love arul. Death in the American Novel ( 1960) Fiedler had portrayed American life as a continuous cycle of related themes: "There is a pattern imposed both by the writers of our past and the very conditions of life in the United States from which no American novelist can escape, no matter what philosophy he consciously adopts or what theme he thinks he pursues."36 This view is echoed by Marcus in his assertion that rock 'n' roll embodies "a certain American spirit that never disappears no matter how smooth things get." Similarly, he claimed to illuminate "unities in the American imagination that already exist."37 In his work, Fiedler had attempted to determine the fundamental nature of the American psyche by applying a psychoanalytic criticism to the American novel. Like Lawrence, Fiedler regarded American novels as texts from which the critic can extract the secrets of a collective American culture, its soul, its archetypes, and so on. Thus, just as Fiedler had interpreted the character of Fedallah in Melville's Moby-Dick as representing "the Faustian pact, the bargain with the devil, which our authors have always felt as the essence of the American experience,"38 Marcus's chapter on the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was based on precisely the same interpretation. With Fiedler obviously in mind, he wrote: There were demons in Uohnson's] songs-blues that walked like a man, the devil, or the two in league with each other-and Johnson was often on good terms with them; his greatest fear seems to have been that his desires were so extreme that he could satisfy them only by becoming a kind of demon himself.... The only memory in American art that speaks with the same eerie resignation [as Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues"] is that moment when Ahab goes over to the devil-worshipping Parsees he kept stowed away in the hold of rhe Pequod.39

The thematics of Johnson's work could not have played more perfectly into Marcus's transposition of Fiedler's ideas on the American novel into the field of rock 'n' roll. And yet, although Marcus wanted to claim Johnson as one of that tradition's two most important ancestors, he wrote that "I have no stylistic arguments to make about Johnson's influence on the other performers in this book, but I do have a symbolic argument."40

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This statement, and many others like it, was central to Marcus's whole project. Among other things, it revealed his reliance on the kind of history and criticism that his predecessors had also espoused. Distrustful of an analytical or empirical "history of [stylistic] processes" or events, these writers had offered instead a "mythical" stance, which emphasized the spiritual bond between the artist, the text, and the rock 'n' roll fan (i.e., the critic). Fiedler, for example, had introduced his literary study with the following: "This is not ... an academic or scholarly book, though it is indebted throughout to works of scholarship .... I have not ... written what is most often meant these days by a 'critical' study, mere textual analysis, ahistorical, anti-biographical."41 And Lawrence, in a passage on James Fennimore Cooper, had written that "The Last of the Mohicans is divided between real historical narrative and true 'romance.' For myself, I prefer the romance. It has a myth meaning, whereas the narrative is chiefly record."42 Over a decade before Mystery Train was written, the American historian Richard Hofstadter had identified features of this style of writing as "anti-rationalism" and had discussed this mindset in the larger context of American anti-intellectualism.43 Though Hofstadter had agreed that "anti-intellectualism is not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to ideas," he nevertheless asserted that "the common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life."44 Such a definition is useful in that it articulates the antagonism between groups with opposing historical or critical perspectives. Thus, when Mark Crispin Miller argued that Marcus, "with his lively anecdotal style, puts certain pretentious critics to shame," we gain a clue toward understanding Marcus's similarly derogatory assessment of the institution of mid-century American musicology. Marcus refers to musicology on several occasions throughout Mystery Train, asserting that empirically or analytically based musicology could only describe historical and aesthetic processes. On the other hand, a critical method that focused sympathetically on the workings of myth could go further: it could explain these phenomena. Academic musicology thus represented a merely mechanical historical consciousness, one that only produced objective chronicles and could not enter the deeper recesses of personal or national experience. It was surely for this reason that Marcus apologized for "going into the musicology" of a certain Elvis Presley recording when he discussed stylistic aspects of the song throughout its recorded history. His musical analyses always remained subordinated to the mythical commentary that

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it served only as a tool. On Robert Johnson's guitar playing, for example, he evaded specific musical commentary with such statements as "[his] technique was not only more advanced, it was deeper, because it had to be."45 Finally, Marcus preferred to valorize psyches and personas-that is, mythical entities--over what he felt to be the ineffectual histories of processes and events: The question of history may have been settled on the side of process, not personality, but it is nor a settlement I very much appreciate. Historical forces might explain the Civil War, but they don't account for Lincoln; they might tell us why rock 'n' roll emerged when it did, but they don't explain Elvis any more than they explain Little Peggy March. What a sense of comexr does give us, when we are looking for someone in particular, is an idea of what that person had to work with; but for myself, it always seems inexplicable in the end anyway. There are always blank spots, and that is where the myths take over.46 In 1978, three years after the appearance of Marcus's Mystery Train-and quite independently from that work-the Canadian historian Sacvan Berkovich commented upon a characteristic style of American writing that has persisted since its inception with the Puritans. Berkovich, along with other current scholars of the Puritan period, called this genre the "American jeremiad." Berkovich characterized it as "an officially endorsed cultural myth ... one major thread in the process of self-justification, the myth of America."47 The authors of the many jeremiads discussed by Berkovich shared two features: they first highlighted America's sense of a national mission, and they then lamented their own generation's lack of success both in remaining true to that mission and in building a better world. In his analysis of American jeremiads, Berkovich was both fascinated by their abundance and astounded that this rhetorical style had lasted over centuries "in a country that, despite its arbitrary territorial limits, could read its destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission, and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest."48 Berkovich cited several examples of the jeremiad: Here was the anarchist Thoreau condemning his backsliding neighbors by reference to the Westward errand; here, the solitary singer, Walt Whitman, claiming to be the American Way; here, the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, descendant of slaves, denouncing segregation as a violation of rhe American dream; here, an endless debate about national identity, full of

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rage and faith, ... conservative politicians hunting out socialists as conspirators against the dream, left-wing polemics proving that capitalism was a betrayal of the country's sacred origins.49

From this perspective, Mystery Train can be read as belonging squarely within this tradition; it was, indeed, a particularly telling jeremiad for the generation of the 1960s. As Marcus wrote: "to be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or of money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes."50 In Berkovich's view, the jeremiad as a genre was essential to the forging of an idea of American national identity. "It was a ritual designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting 'signs of the times' to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols."51 Marcus's Mystery Train strove to do just that, and to do it precisely at a time when its institutional frame of reference and corresponding generation were undergoing a profound identity crisis. Its response to the perceived crisis involved three points of argumentation: the celebration of certain types of past rock 'n' roll perceived to be conducive to alternative culture; the effort to dispel the warnings of its imminent death; and, through linkage with a mythical image of a past "exceptional" America, the providing of selected genres of rock 'n' roll with an opportunity for immortality. This may be what Mark Crispin Miller meant when he asserted that there was more of rock 'n' roll's spirit in this book than there was in the music itself. Berkovich argued that "even when they are most optimistic, the jeremiads express a profound disquiet. Not infrequently, their affirmations betray an underlying desperation-a refusal to confront the present, a fear of the future, an effort to translate 'America' into a vision that works in spirit because it can never be tested in fact."52 Into Marcus's optimistic project, then, we can read an effort to test the American soil for the possibility of growing a renewable counterculture mythology. And because for these exceptionalists the central category of the American imagination was a rebellion against authority, this particular construction of rock 'n' roll's historical narrative was based on the debatable premise that any truly "authentic" rock 'n' roll must inevitably be antiestablishment. In the prime years of what rock ideologues termed authentic rock 'n' roll (or "rock")-that is, the mid-to-late 1960s-"antiestablishment" referred to anyone who encouraged such things as a more free and inclusive participation in an integrated society; a deep suspicion of socially validated norms of education, evaluation, and economic advancement; an acceptance of spontaneously liberated sexualities; and so on. The history of

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myths is particularly well suited to such a stance. As Benedict Anderson put it in a now famous description of the manner by which the idea of a national community is constructed, the "imagined community" is justified through myth, for myths transcend reality, historical boundaries, and any need for empirical verification. 53 Marcus sought to locate this ideal community in rock 'n' roll culture: "In the work of each performer [discussed in Mystery Train] there is an attempt to create oneself, to make a new man out of what is inherited and what is imagined; each individual attempt implies an ideal community, never easy to define, where the members of that community would speak as clearly to the artist as he does to them. The audiences that gather around rock 'n' rollers are as close to that ideal community as anyone gets."54 Thus, as rock 'n' roll's public intellectuals decided that the American experience was not to be substantially altered via direct political action, they fashioned instead an idealistically participatory world, in which America's institutions were inexorably undermined by rock 'n' roll culture. Further, the tradition's early history quickly became appropriated within this narrative as well; the result was a group of written histories positing a supposedly linear and uninterrupted underground phenomenon. It is through such jeremiads as Mystery Train that the notion of community has become a central image in rock 'n' roll writing. And, since the conflation in the 1960s of the heretofore distinct music-historical traditions of rock 'n' roll and folk, any discussion of the "rock community" must consider the influence of the ideology of folk on the creation and development of such communities. The literature on folk music is vast, however, and does not always intersect with that on rock 'n' rolL Still, partly because of the real historical interactions between the two musical styles and partly because of the imagined conceptions of folk community on the part of rock writers, some writers have nevertheless found it useful to consider the role of the "folk" in the creation of rock 'n' roll history and criticism. In the inaugural volume of the journal Popular Music (1981), for instance, Simon Frith charged that certain writers on rock 'n' roll had (mis)understood this music as a type of folk music. Such an equation was anathema to Frith's "sociological point of view." For the Marxist sociologist, folk and rock 'n' roll are very different forms of music making: folk is created via "pre-capitalist modes of music production," while rock 'n' roll "is, without a doubt, a mass-produced, mass-consumed commodity."55 Further, issues of social class, generation, and patterns of leisure activity complicate the likening of such disparate music-historical phenomena as folk, rock, and rock 'n' rolL Still, Frith's larger point in exploring these accounts of popular culture was to note that "rock is used by its

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listeners as a folk music-it articulates communal values, comments on shared social problems."56 The writers to whom Frith was referring, those active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, borrowed the ideology of folk for the purposes of explaining rock 'n' roll, thus claiming that the rock community was in essence synonymous with the folk community. While Frith argued that the foundations for this mythical rock community were not based on any sociological facts, he nevertheless understood the myth-making process as integral to an understanding of how music works socially: "The importance of the myth of rock community is that it is a myth. The sociological task is not to 'expose' this myth or to search for its 'real' foundations, but to explain why it is so important. Just as the ideology of folk tells us little about how folk music was actually made but much about the folk scholars' own needs and fancies, so rock myths 'resolve' real contradictions in class experiences of youth and leisure."57 In other words, according to Frith, when these and other narratives about rock 'n' roll's history and significance appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, claiming rock 'n' roll's centrality in American culture, they employed an ideological argument in order to legitimize their own social, political, and cultural agendas. And while he found the sociological basis of their claims faulty to the core, Frith clearly felt that the function and power of these claims was attractive enough to merit discussion. For Frith, the "rock ideologues of the 1960s-musicians, critics and fans alike," claimed that "rock 'n' roll's status as a folk music was what differentiated it from routine pop; it was as a folk music that rock 'n' roll could claim a distinctive political and artistic edge."58 Ironically, the antihistorical and antisociological argument made by these writers also downplayed the necessity of confronting the specifically musical attributes of the repertories in question. As Frith put it: The cultural claims made for rock by the end of the 1960s ... derived from the assertion that the music was the authentic experience of a youth community.... The rock claim was that if a song or record or performance had, in itself, the necessary signs of authenticity, then it could be interpreted, in tum, as the sign of a real community-the musical judgment guaranteed the sociological judgment rather than vice versa. There was no need to provide an independent, non-musical description of the rock "community," nor to describe how such a community came to make music for itself. What was at issue was a set of musical conventions.S9

Frith also found the rock ideologue's understanding of these musical conventions wanting: the acceptance or rejection of any musical utterance was based entirely on a "judgment" that had no real foundation beyond that of the sound's ability to move a listener to accept the values of the ideological community.

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After examining the discrepancies between the actual American folk movement and the ideology of the rock community, Frith turned his attention to the issues of class and the conflating of distinct music-historical repertories: "The most interesting question about rock is its class basis: hm did rock 'n' roll, the working-class form of the 1950s, get institutionalized as a feature of middle-class suburban youth culture ?"60 Frith answered partially that "the street experience of leisure ... has been sentimentalised, distanced, organised into the rock 'n' roll experience. Rock 'n' roll, in other words, has celebrated street culture both for its participants and for its suburban observers, and by the mid-1960s such a celebration meant more to the latter group."61 A further inquiry, one sensitive to Marcus's argument and its success in the rock community, would address the manner by which the idea of the class- and generation-based community was transformed into that of the national community. Understood differently, with Marcus's work in mind, Frith asks whether the meaning of "antiestablishment" in 1950s rock 'n' roll signified the same thing that it did after the student protest movement began in the early 1960s. Or perhaps the construction of rock 'n' roll as chronically antiestablishment and inevitably bound up with leftist politics is a manufactured historical image, crafted out of a self-willed blindness toward the historicity of the terminology. Frith described the historical transformation of rock 'n' roll into rock: The rock 'n' roll experience was an experience of community-teenage community, dance-hall friendships-but this was not really central to it. The music created its community by keeping other people out, and the resulting society was transient-people grew up, tastes changed, real friend and relations were everywhere, at home and work. Rock 'n' roll made cultural sense not as an experience in itself, but in the context of a specific experience of work and power. When rock 'n' roll became rock in the 1960s it was removed from these contexts and drained of its original signifi cance. Consciousness of class becomes a matter of self-indulgence; the rod 'n' roll experience was something which could be consumed; culture became commodity.... What has happened is less a change in the ways music is made than in the ways that it is used and interpreted.6Z

Frith's regard for the social and historical specificity of different musical repertories is exemplary. We may disagree with his particular way of constructing the disparate cultural movements, but the important thing is that they are treated separately, and that the social and political use of musical repertories-in other words, rock 'n' roll's mediation through these writings-becomes a necessary historical complement to the music itself.

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In the 1970s the proponents of the new institutionalized narrativemainly middle-class adolescents, rock fans, now turned older-asserted that rock was keeping alive the only representation of democracy left in the "silent seventies," when the establishment's warped democratic ideal was holding the nation hypnotized. At the same time, these print-culture intellectuals found new vitality, historical sanctuary, and the support of a pseudo-nationalist ideology in their own literature's glimpses backward. It would appear, however, that this construction of authentic rock 'n' roll as an unassimilable, quintessentially antiestablishment phenomenon could flourish institutionally only after the 1970s had triggered this response from a generation in search of its own cultural legitimacy. Writers from this generation capitalized on an ideology of folk music in order to explain rock 'n' roll as a music with direct ties to a fundamental American essence. For the historiographer, such motivations must themselves be regarded as significant components of the musical tradition's history. Beyond the scope of the history of rock 'n' roll, these ideas constitute one of the most common strategies involved in the making of countercultural narratives. Historical writing on rock 'n' roll illuminates the strange paradox of the American counterculture: on the one hand asserting an antiestablishment position on social, cultural, and political matters, while on the other arguing, in its historical constructions, for a totalizing description of a characteristic American essence. For the purposes of writing rock 'n' roll history from this perspective, then, the only authentic rock 'n' roll would be that which, through its association with the folk movement, identifies this specific national character. In this way, the work of such American thinkers as Emerson and Whitman can be related to the message of the historians of antiestablishment rock 'n' roll: that a society is best served by a constant infusion of artistic material deriving from the fundamental character of its folk.63 Because of the fortuitous merger of rock 'n' roll and folk in the 1960s, this national character could be constructed from the ground up. A familiar syllogism thus arises: a nation's soul is in its folk; rock 'n' roll music is folk music; therefore, rock 'n' roll is the discourse of the uniquely American experience. Further, the ardent appeals of the rock 'n' roll fan-who is able to tap into this national essence via the music's visceral powerare transformed into powerful historical and critical tools. But the rock 'n' roll history proposed by Marcus and his colleagues in the "silent seventies" could only have been written after the folk-rock movement in the 1960s redefined that music's sociohistorical claims. lt is the inclusion of 1950s rock 'n' roll into this narrative and the widespread disparagement of other forms of "inauthentic" pop (and even some forms of rock) that did not conform to the antiestablishment claims that become the concern of

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today's historian. Stated differently, the historiographical problem is the conflation of music-historical epochs-the manner by which the history of one period (and musical style) is told according to the terms of another, vastly different, system. The message is simple: the complex history of this musical tradition cannot be adequately addressed with a paradigm that is ahistorical.

Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of rhe American Musicological Society in New York in November 1995. I wish to acknowledge the assistance and support of James Hepokoski, Ralph Locke, judith Tick, David Grayson, and Graham Wood. Finding accurate (and meaningful) terminology in the study of popular music has been problematic. On the one hand, we can differentiate between such styles as folk, rock, and rock 'n' roll on the basis of musical, historical, and sociological criteria. On the other, the popular usage of these and other terms has been so loose as to have warranted a dilemma. The wish to differentiate between "rock 'n' roll" and "rock," for instance, is made troublesome by the many sources and publications, such as Rolling Stone magazine, which in places refer to "rock 'n' roll" as the entire movement since the mid-1950s. In another famous history of music from this period, the author, Charlie Gillett, even argued for a distinction between "rock 'n' roll"-which "petered our around 1958"-and "rock and roll"-which "is a posthumous classification for music that shared similar qualities of 'rock 'n' roll."' See Charlie Gillett, The Sauna of the City: The Rise of Rock 'n' Roll, rev. ed. (London: Souvenir Press, 1982), 3. Because of such discrepancies in the sources, in this essay I will, with a few pointed exceptions, refer to the entire movement as "rock 'n' roll." 1. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (New York: E. P. Duuon, 1975; rev. 1982, 1990, 1997). Since Mystery Train, Marcus has wriuen prolifically on American music and culture. However, because my concern in this essay is with the way in which rock 'n' roll history was constructed during the early to mid-1970s, this other work, while it retains several of his most characteristic metaphors, ploys, and so on, is not of relevance here.

2.

Some details of Marcus's education and career can be found in the author's note in

Mystery Train. See also Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History

(New York: HarperCollins, 1991 ), 40-42, 109-11. According to Draper, as an undergraduate at Berkeley in 1964, Marcus "fashioned his own major, American studies, then became a political science graduate student [there]" (109). By 1970, he was one of Rolling Stone's "most respected music critics" ( 41 ). 3.

Marcus, 4.

4. Marcus's choices were indicative of his time: he wrote Mystery Train between fall 1972 and late summer 1974, when these artists were active and popular (see the author's note in Mystery Train). In revised versions, he includes an introductory note that describes the idiosyncrasies of these choices and notes the failure of certain of these artists to make as great an impact on the history of rock 'n' roll as he had originally prophesied. Marcus did not call his book a history, nor did his reviewers take it as such specifically. But its moves toward the manufacturing of a canon-be it personal, subjective, or heuristic-is unmistakable. Thus

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Mystery Train functioned as a history at least in the sense that it told one music-historical tale by emphasizing certain participants and events over others. The book, however, certainly did not overtly seek or claim to be canon forming in the sense with which this term has been characterized in the current culture wars. Also at issue here is the multiplicity of potential historical explanations. I do not suggest that Marcus (or any other writer on the subject) claimed that his story was the only one available. But since his account and many others have remained influential in the popular understanding of rock 'n' roll's history and sociocultural significance, one would wish at least to understand the discursive power inherent in such constructions. It may be a commonplace assertion that "real" or "true" histories are an impossibility. The historian's task, however, is to understand the mechanisms behind the creation of the multiple accounts, and it is such a project that concerns me here. 5.

Marcus, 4.

6.

Marcus, 4.

7. In particular, these investigations have focused chiefly on the influential tradition of German music criticism of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Stephen Rumph, "A Kingdom Not of This World: The Political Context of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Beethoven Criticism," 19th Century Music 19 (Summer 1995): 50--67; Sanna Pederson, "A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity," 19th Century Music 18 (Falll994): 87-107; and Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). My work here is meant to represent the kind of historiographical concerns expressed in these and other sources.

8.

The polar positions on this topic have been voiced perhaps most strongly in the recent polemical debate between the musicologists Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer. See Kramer, "The Musicology of the Future," repercussions l ( 1992): 5-18, and the interchange that ensued: Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodem Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer"; Kramer, "Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson"; and "Gary Tomlinson Responds," Current Musicology 53 (1994 ): 18-24, 25-35, 36-40. 9. One central text for "institution theory" is Peter Burger and Christa Burger, "The Institution of Art as a Category of the Sociology of Literature: Toward a Theory of the Historical Transformation of the Social Function of Art," in Burger and Burger, The Institutions of Art, trans. Loren Kruger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). By "institution of art," the authors do not mean, in a mundane sense, "social formations such as publishers, bookstores, theatres, and museums" (4 ). Rather, they understand the idea of the institution conceptually; theirs is "a theory of the historical transformation in the social function of art" (5). The theoretical claim, then, is that the function of art or any cultural practice (in this case, rock 'n' roll) can be discerned at least in part in the narratives produced by its surrounding communities. Of course, we can acknowledge the existence of several narratives at any given time, which may indeed disagree with one another. My focus on a certain narrative here should not imply that "the institution of rock 'n' roll" is monological; it comprises many separate but interrelated spheres, so one encounters ambiguities in its messages. But, insofar as it makes truth claims, the narrative that I discuss here nevertheless operates as an influential force. For the Burgers, whose work investigates the specific sphere of autonomous art, a multiplicity of institutionalized narratives is not problematic: "the singular term 'institution of art' highlights the hegemony of one concep.tion of art .... This does not preempt the institutional claims of alternative conceptions ....

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Nevertheless, we may assume that the hegemony of the autonomous conception of art compels rival conceptions to define themselves against it" (6-7). One further task, then, would be to discern the discursive power of the claims formulated by the "institurion of rock 'n' roll." Such an investigation must initially take place under the auspices of reception history. 10. Marcus's career as a writer on rock 'n' roll began in the late 1960s, when he worked in San Francisco for the underground newspaper Express- Times. He began working at Rolling Stone in 1969 and also worked during this period at Creem, probably the second most influential rock 'n' roll publication in the country at this time. See Marcus, xv-xvii. 11. Popular histories of American culture and society written in the mid-1970s also highlighted this political situation. For instance, the historian Marty )ezer began writing his The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982) m 1973, "at a time when American society, polarized by the Vietnam War, seemed to be coming apart" (1). His main desire in explaining the period between 1945 and 1960, in fact, was "to explore the causes of the social and political disintegration" of the mid-1970s (1). In one of the most celebrated histories of rock 'n' roll, The Sound of the City (cited above), Charlie Gillett discusses at length an earlier crisis of rock 'n' roll's "authenticity"that which took place at the end of the 1950s, when the first wave of rock 'n' roll began to lose steam as it was co-opted by the capitalist forces of the music industry. Of course, it is the area of politics that differentiates the crisis of the 1970s from this earlier one, when the discourse surrounding rock 'n' roll's waning "authenticity" centered mainly around its musical attributes. 12. Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1976). During this same period, the magazine that most clearly rivaled Rolling Stone, Creem, also published its own book-form version of rock's history: Rock Revolution (New York: Popular Library, 1976). The editorial group of this smaller volume shared many of the comributors to the Rolling Stone Illustrated History: Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ed Ward, and Greg Shaw. 13.

Draper, 286.

14. The significant role of the blues in the history of rock 'n' roll is not, however, to be discounted. My point here is to emphasize the project by which the editors of Rolling Stone conflated various traditions of American popular music-subgenres, so to speak-into a single monolithic sociohistorical web. For one of the most recent discussions of these various streams (i.e., subgenres), their interconnectedness and their contrariety, see Philip Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992 ). Ennis's work is useful to the investigation of the rock institution in that he defines a "musical stream" as "a palpable part of social reality, made up of several elements: an artistic system, an economic framework, and a social movement" ( 21). According! y, he argues that each of the various historical streams that together form the sphere of American popular music needs to be explained in its totality-that is, with sensitivity to what distinguishes each in terms of its production, distribution, and reception. 15.

Greg Shaw, "The Teen Idols," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated Hiscory, 112.

16.

Greg Shaw, "The Instrumental Groups," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated His wry, 124.

17. Shaw, "The Instrumental Groups," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated Hiscory, 124-Z'i. This same argument was used elsewhere in the volume by Marcus to criticize the post-Rubber Soul

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work of the Beatles, who, it was argued, had sacrificed that crucial link with their fans as they recorded more and gave up the nightly live performances that had characterized their early years. See Marcus, "The Beatles," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History. 18. Mark Crispin Miller, "Where All the Flowers Went," New York Review of Books, 3 Feb. 1977, 31. Miller's title refers not only to the folk song made popular by Pete Seeger but also to the aging of rock's followers, their absorption into mainstream society, and their ideological shifts from coumerculrural demonstrators to more general, and in some cases academic, cultural commentators. Relevant to this discussion is Hans Robert Jauss's view that histories of the "authentic period" of any art form are always formulated under the assumption that the "authentic enterprise" had already reached its peak. See Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, vol. 2 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-45. 19. Along with Mystery Train, Miller discussed the following texts in his review essay: Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll {New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1976); Tony Palmer, All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music (New York: Penguin, 1976); Dick Clark, Rock, Roll, and Remember (New York: Cromwell, 1976); Roy Carr, The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record (New York: Harmony Books, 1976); Ben Fong-Torres, ed., What's That Sound? (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976); and Anthony Fawcett, John Lennon: One Day at a Time (New York: Grove Press, 1976). 20. This type of criticism might be characterized with the term "fan-as-critic," a paraphrase of some of Theodor Adorno's comments on the problems in distinguishing between the jazz fan and the jazz "expert" or critic. See, for instance, his "Perennial Fashion-Jazz," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber {Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 119-32. Of course, such a formulation is problematic in today's academic climate, with competing critical methodologies claiming social and political legitimacy for their own system. I acknowledge this problem but stand with those who maintain that distance from one's subject of study is necessary to yield significant historical-critical observations. For a sharp and especially insightful criticism of the trend in cultural studies to remain in fan mode while writing cultural criticism, see Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Can the Disempowered Read Mass-Produced Narratives in Their Own Voice?" Cultural Critique (fal11988): 171-99. 21.

Frank Rich, "Elvis Presley as Moby Dick," Village Voice, 26 May 1975, 41.

22.

Marcus, xvii.

23. F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941 ), xv. 24.

Rich, 41.

25.

Matthiessen, xiv.

26.

Marcus, xv.

27.

See Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

28. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1923), 2. It seems as if Lawrence had taken his cue from Hawthorne, who was obsessively concerned with the idea of a moral in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne had written: "Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the

Rock Music Mystery Train as Rock 'n' RoU HisUJry 167

author has provided himself with a moral-the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief." See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Heritage Press, 1935 ), xvi. 29. The tendency to singularize the American experience, a position commonly attributed to the field of American Studies for obvious reasons, is as old as the nation itself. Often hostile to European intervention in matrers of culrural criticism (one manifestation, perhaps, of Americans' anxious defensiveness regarding their deference to European culture in general), exceptionalist critics maintain that the American model is unique and therefore misunderstood by critics who espouse foreign paradigms. In the years after World War I, for instance, American intellectuals responded to foreign ideological explanations for the gargantuan world crisis by thematizing the democratic and egalitarian nature of American culture. On this point, see David Noble, "The Reconstruction of Progress: Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and Postwar Historical Thought," in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 61-75. American exceptionalist scholarship also thrived during the Cold War, when liberal thinkers, confronting the anxieties of an increasingly internationalist governmental policy, countered this political maneuvering with a narrative that constructed the people of our nation as distinct from those Europeans who had succumbed to the forces of fascism and Stalinism. See Thomas Hill Schaub, "Introduction: The Liberal Narrative," in American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 ). Even today, exceptionalism is thriving. In a recent essay on American literary studies, Philip Fisher, professor of English at Harvard University, suggests that "ideology," in the strict sense of the word, is an impossibility in American society. Fisher claims that the "speculative society" fostered by advanced American capitalism is a force strong enough-and rooted so deeply in our tradition-to dispel any single model of domination and power, such as those offered by the Frankfurt School critics and, later, Michel Foucault. He finds in the absence of a centralized American state a system of multiple "rhetorics" that function more or less independently and locally in the creation and maintenance of America's unique culture. See Philip Fisher, "American Literary and Cultural Studies Since the Civil War," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1992), 232-50.

30.

Lawrence, 146.

31.

Marcus, 6.

32.

Marcus, 163. Lawrence's essay appears in Studies in Classic American Literature.

33.

Lawrence, viii.

34.

Lawrence, 146-47.

35. In lamenting the absence in the 1970s of the "grander mythic dimensions" of rock 'n' roll of the 1950s and 1960s, Marcus argued that "so much of the rock 'n' roll of the postBeatles era is closed-off and one dimensional, like the politics it serenades and reinforces [and] the aesthetic of solipsism is freezing the imagination and our ability to respond openly" ( 107). The "problem" of rock 'n' roll in the !970s-particularly progressive or art rock-is a vast one. Compare this problem with the analogous situation at the end of the 1950s, when critics bemoaned Elvis Presley's "decline toward melodramatic popular songs." See, for instance, Gillett's discussion of this period in The Sound of the City, 55.

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36. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), xi.

37.

Marcus, xvii.

38.

Fiedler, xxii.

39.

Marcus, 22.

40.

Marcus, 21.

41.

Fiedler, vii.

42.

Lawrence, 58. Again, Lawrence is drawing on Hawthorne. In the same preface to

The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne had written: "When romances do really teach

anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing ir ro stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first." Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, xvii. 43.

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-lntellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963 ).

44.

Hofstadter, 21, 7.

45.

Marcus, 27.

46.

Marcus, 128.

4 7. Sacvan Berkovich, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), xii, xiv. 48.

Berkovich, 11.

49.

Berkovich, 11.

50.

Marcus, 20.

51.

Berkovich, xi.

52.

Berkovich,. xiv.

53. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 54.

Marcus, 6.

55. Simon Frith," 'The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community," Popular Music I ( 1981 ): 159. 56.

Frith, 159.

57.

Frith, 168.

58.

Frith, 159.

59.

Frith, 159-60.

60.

Frith, 167

Rock Music Mystery Train as Rock 'n' Roll History 169

61.

Frith, 168.

62.

Frith, 166.

63. For an excellent discussion of the sources of this intellectual position, see Gene Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972). Bluestein's work is most illuminating in its tracing of the folkloristic position from Herder through the Americanists discussed here. His discussion primarily concerns the literary folklore tradition. Bur his arguments pertain with equal significance to the musical sphere. For instance, Bluestein argues that "a major tendency to identify the folklore of a supposed outcast and lowly segment of our people as the locus of the highest spiritual and esthetic values ... , first affirmed by Emerson and Whitman, was reinforced and expanded by the work ofJohn and Alan Lomax" (116). The pertinence of this passage for the history of rock 'n' roll becomes clear when one recalls that the very first paragraphs in the first chapter of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll"Rock Begins," by Robert Palmer--detail the very same work by the Lomaxes that Bluestein discusses here.

35

[3] Synergies and Reciprocities: The Dynamics of Musical and Professional Interaction between the Beatles and Bob Dylan Ian Inglis Introduction

Confronting-and comprehending-developments in the history of popular music demands an elusive combination of industry and insight. The need for industry is necessitated by the undeniable depth of musical activity and the complexity of the circumstances surrounding its production and consumption. Far from being a relatively peripheral leisure and entertainment option, popular music has been described as a "form of communication and a sphere of culture that routinely diffuses and amplifies its influence deeply and sensuously into the lives of those who create it, listen to it, use it, dance to it" (Lull 30). The requirement for insight stems from the subjective, not to say idiosyncratic, appeals that particular musical forms have for their audiences and the ways in which those audiences utilize such forms-factors that can only properly be considered through the suspension of value judgments about their cultural or artistic significance. This point is neatly made by Brian Longhurst: "I am suspicious of accounts which write off whole forms of music because they do not seem to conform to traditional standards of high art or because they have mass appeal. Who is to say that children's enjoyment of Kylie Minogue or Take That necessarily has pernicious effects?" (251). Without the application of industry and the possession of insight as outlined above, there is a danger that much writing about popular music's history will become-if it has not done so already-fragmented and partisan, signifying little more than the announcement of the author's allegiance to particular artists, styles, and periods. Moreover, these problems may be compounded by a tendency to reinvent (deliber-

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54 Popular Music and Society ately or unwittingly) accounts of the past that place greater or lesser emphasis on their importance and achievements. Perhaps this is inevitable. C. Wright Mills has written of the social sciences generally that "the master task of the historian is to keep the human record straight, but that is indeed a deceptively simple statement of aim" (161). Obstacles to this task include the unreliability of memory, the discovery of new documentary evidence, changes in emphasis and intention, and decisions over selection and interpretation. But Mills is adamant that these need not be insuperable obstacles to the achievement of historical understanding: "Social science deals with problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within social structures . . . [T]hese three-biography, history, society-are the coordinate parts of the proper study of man" (159). Placed within the context of popular music, the issue that these considerations lead to can be stated in a very precise way: "It is about how we should understand what we already think we know" (Bradley 3). Simon Frith has provided a useful distinction between the ways in which the history of popular music can be written. First, as progress: "[P]ast sounds unfolding in logical order to the present" (4); new acts replace old ones, performers develop and improve their skills with each record, audiences become more knowledgeable. Secondly, as cycle: "[T]he rise and fall of stars ... the endless emergence of new trends from the musical margins" (5); to the extent that styles are repeated, patterns are observed, parallels sought and recognized, contemporary popular music recalls and recycles the past. Thirdly, as hidden: "[T]racing the unexpected connections ... to point out what no one else realised" (6); like a reporter closing in on a scoop or a detective reconstructing the case, the researcher is involved in a search for clues until the truth is eventually revealed. If there is to be a way that allows the history of popular music to be adequately written and understood, it must incorporate all of these approaches. This applies equally whether the subject is the history of rock and roll itself (Gillett), the development of a particular genre, such as the blues (Oliver), or the biography of an individual performer (Guralnick). In what follows I hope to narrow down the area under investigation even more to concentrate on the specifics of musical and professional interactions, often intermittent, between two of popular music's most celebrated and influential performers-the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Rock Music

Synergies and Reciprocities 55 In doing so, I shall attempt to combine the discourses identified by Frith-progress, cycle, and hidden-which define its literature. In addition, I hope to emphasize the intersections of biography, history, and society, discussed by C. Wright Mills. To facilitate such an investigation I will employ two concepts whose genesis lies outside accounts of popular music: synergy from business studies, and reciprocity from anthropology. They are not at all intended to stand as prescriptions for future research; rather they are heuristic devices that may allow a point of entry into a little recorded yet highly important segment of the recent history of popular music.

Synergy Synergism goes beyond co-operative effort. Synergistic co-operation brings a wider law into operation, in that the total effect of things acting together is greater than the sum of individual or separate effects achieved. -Yoneji Masuda (5)

In his account of the encroaching information age, Masuda's analysis of the framework of future societies repeatedly emphasizes the inspirations to be drawn from a spirit of synergy and mutual assistance. However, synergy involves and implies much more than mere teamwork or voluntary sacrifice. It centers around the proposition that individuals, acting from their own standpoint, will, in combination, create a synthesis of energies to achieve a common goal that would otherwise remain unattainable. Several factors in the formulation of this belief give it a precision that prevents its contents from being reduced merely to the observation that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The first such factor is the existence of a common goal, mutually recognized via common needs, that does not conflict with the goals of individuals. This means that there are no calls for sacrifice. Individual concerns are not abandoned or surrendered in favor of a group objective; they are one and the same. Secondly, individual action is voluntary; there must be no coercion, or disapprobation if action is not volunteered or is unsuccessful. The third characteristic is that individuals and groups will cooperate actively in pursuit of their goal; the methods and the organization will be

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56 Popular Music and Society dynamic, not static. The fourth factor is self-control; individuals and groups specify, monitor and control their own actions as they move toward the common goal. With these conditions "individuals and groups will build an order of social action among themselves in order to attain their goal by working together synergistically" (Masuda 119).

Reciprocity [T]hose "vice versa" movements between two parties known familiarly as "reciprocity." -Marshall Sahlins (188)

Sahlins's concentration on the concept of reciprocity as the major form of transaction in primitive society derives from Polanyi's distinction between patterns of reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange as forms of economic integration. According to this classification, redistribution implies an allocative central point into and out of which there are movements; exchange requires acts of barter within a system of pricemaking markets; reciprocity occurs between and within symmetrically arranged groupings. Polanyi stresses the importance of "the factual connection between reciprocative behaviour on the interpersonal level, on the one hand, and given symmetrical groupings, on the other" (Polanyi 124). Sahlins appends to these themes the observation that reciprocity is not "an unconditional one-for-one exchange" (190) but "a whole class of exchanges, a continuum of forms" (191). In addition, he asserts that in recognizing that variety, we may "glimpse the interplay between reciprocity, social relations, and material circumstances" (190), thus shifting the significance of such transactions beyond the strictly economic. These two contributions will be seen to be especially significant in their application to popular music. On the continuum of forms that defines acts of reciprocity, Sahlins locates three points. They are not independent categories, but positions at which differences can be recognized. Generalized

Balanced

Negative

Rock Music

Synergies and Reciprocities 57 Generalized reciprocity, at the solidary extreme of the continuum, refers to acts of genuine altruism, assistance or gifts freely given, with no obligation of return. "Failure to reciprocate does not cause the giver of stuff to stop giving" (194). The breastfeeding of babies or being a blood donor are examples of such behavior. Balanced reciprocity is the midpoint; perfectly balanced reciprocity, involving the simultaneous exchange of the same type of goods or services to the same value, is unlikely. In practice, the concept "may be more loosely applied to transactions which stipulate returns of commensurate worth or utility within a given period" (19495). There is thus an expectation that at some point there will be an exchange of equivalents; a birthday gift or an invitation to dinner carry with them the assumption that the act is at least likely to be returned, in like or similar form. Negative reciprocity, the unsociable extreme, is necessarily exploitative. "[I]t is the attempt to get something for nothing with impunity ... the participants confront each other as opposed interests, each looking to maximise utility at the other's expense" (195). Deceit, trickery, even violence, can accompany such transactions. Masuda's vision of the sophisticated and technologically reliant management structure of the future, and Sahlins's account of economic anthropology in primitive societies are, to say the least, unlikely points from which to launch an investigation of 20th-century popular music. Nevertheless, an analysis of the musical cooperation and professional interaction that characterizes the relationship between Bob Dylan and the Beatles does benefit substantially from the incorporation of these approaches. By drawing on the concept of reciprocity to illuminate the routine, substantive examples of cooperation between the two sets of performers, and that of synergy to examine their conscious involvement in working toward a set of shared musical objectives, I hope to demonstrate that histories of popular music can be presented in a manner that adequately bridges the gulf between anecdotal journalism and often unduly laborious musicology, of which many familiar examples of both abound. The Beatles and Bob Dylan Brian Epstein: These boys are going to explode. I am completely confident that one day they will be bigger than Elvis Presley. -Epstein (51)

41

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58 Popular Music and Society Bob Dylan: John Hammond, he's the big producer, you know. Well, hey, he says I'm gonna be bigger than Presley. Bigger than Presley! -Dylan qtd. in Scaduto (108)

Born within thirty months of each other in the early 1940s, and growing up in the culturally devalued industrial environments of Duluth and Liverpool, it seems unsurprising that, as teenagers, both Dylan and the four members of the Beatles should independently be drawn to and immersed in what Guralnick has described as the "music that expressed a kind of pure joyousness, a sense of soaring release that . . . seems unlikely ever to be recaptured" (qtd. in DeCurtis and Henke 24). Rock and roll in the 1950s produced many memorable performers, but in first and second hand accounts of the formative musical years and subsequent careers of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, three recurring models are cited. The first of these, not unexpectedly, is Elvis Presley: Paul McCartney: "Every time I felt low, I just put on an Elvis, and I'd feel great, beautiful. I'd no idea how records were made and it was just magic. Oh, it was beautiful!" (qtd. Davies 39-40). Farida McFree: "I was with Bob Dylan the night Presley died. He really took it very bad. He was really grieving. He said that if it wasn't for him, he would never have gotten started. That he opened the door" (qtd. in Heylin 298). The second major common influence was Little Richard: John Lennon: "The new record was 'Long Tall Sally.' When I heard it, it was so great I couldn't speak. You know how you are tom. I didn't want to leave Elvis .... I didn't want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind" (qtd. in Goldman 66). And Bob Dylan listed his ambition in his 1959 high-school yearbook: "To join the band of Little Richard" (qtd. in Shelton 39). And Buddy Holly was the third source of inspiration: "Stylistically, no pop act came near Buddy Holly in John and Paul's affection at that time" (Coleman, John Lennon 95). "A new and lasting musical model emerged-Buddy Holly. Bob began to imitate Holly's sweet, naive, almost childlike voice. The vocal quality of many Dylan recordings shows his debt to Holly" (Shelton 53). There was one more historical antecedent common to both. Bob Dylan's debt to and admiration for Woody Guthrie is obvious, substan-

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43

Synergies and Reciprocities 59 tial, and well-documented. "Woody Guthrie was the archetypal American troubadour ... a giant humanist, a heroic American culture figure, a major poet, still largely undiscovered, and a singer and composer of some of our greatest songs .... Woody was Dylan's first Tambourine Man. Guthrie provided a way of looking at the world" (Shelton 76). In the early 1960s, Dylan was a regular performer of Guthrie's songs (including "Pastures of Plenty," "Car Car," "Jesus Christ," and "Hard Travelin' "), defined him as his first major musical idol, visited him in hospital in New Jersey, and adopted him as a source of spiritual guidance. Three decades later, it was especially significant that the song with which he chose to open his appearance at the Madison Square Garden 30th Anniversary Concert in October 1992 should be "Song to Woody" from his first LP Bob Dylan (March 1962). Michael Gray has asserted that the critical influences handed on to Dylan by Guthrie were subject matter, humor, idealism, and "the seminal need of the artist to stand alone, true to his individual vision" (15). In Britain in the 1950s, while the name of Woody Guthrie was relatively unknown, his songs (and those, too, of Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter) were interpreted and popularized by Lonnie Donegan, a former singer with the Chris Barber Jazz Band, who became the leading figure of skiffle music and arguably the country's first genuine pop star. He was also one of the very few British performers to enjoy success in the United States; "Rock Island Line" reached No. 8 in the Billboard singles charts of April 1956, eight years before the Beatles themselves led the "British Invasion" of 1964. "Donegan's influence on British popular music has been incalculable. He had a basic three-chord style, easy to copy, and the line-up of his group inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to make do-it-yourself music. Here was self-made rock 'n' roll" (Coleman, John Lennon 50). The four Beatles were among the hundreds of thousands inspired in just that way; indeed the group Paul McCartney was invited to join by John Lennon in July 1957 was the Quarry Men Skiffle Group, boasting the standard skiffle line-up of guitar, banjo, washboard, tea-chest bass, and drums, and whose selection of songs included "Rock Island Line," "Cumberland Gap," "Freight Train," and "Last Train to San Fernando." Although Donegan drew on his own jazz experiences and a musical knowledge derived from the classical world (his father was a violinist in the Scottish National Orchestra) to create a distinctly British variation of

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60 Popular Music and Society the American folk tradition, it was a style that contained some startling indications of future musical directions. "He was nasal-voiced, played guitar and banjo, but mesmerized a nation" (Coleman, John Lennon 50) is a description not of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s but of Lonnie Donegan in the mid-1950s. By 1964, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were in comparable positions. Both had spent the years since the start of the decade constructing solid local reputations, in Liverpool and New York respectively. Both had, in the previous twelve months, gained national celebrity in their own country, yet both remained relatively unknown internationally. In Britain, the release of "She Loves You" in August 1963, followed by a hugely successful appearance at the Royal Variety Show in November 1963, had led to the emergence of the phenomenon known as Beatlemania. In the United States, The Freewheelin 'Bob Dylan was released in May 1963; it included "Blowin' in the Wind," soon to be adopted as the anthem of the Civil Rights movement, and which provided a hit record for Peter, Paul and Mary (in July 1963, their cover version reached No. 2 in the Billboard charts). Also in July, Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival; in August, he participated in the Civil Rights march on Washington, led by Martin Luther King; and in December, he received the Tom Paine Award of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. At this period, their audiences were "at opposite ends of the spectrum, Dylan with aging Beatniks into peace and poetry, and the Beatles with teenyboppers into penpals and posters" (Williams 45). But January 1964 saw the appearance of two records whose impacts and influences would, in their different ways, eventually create the synergy that was to lead to a blurring of audience distinctions, the refmement of old and the emergence of new musical styles, unprecedented demonstrations of artistic co-operation, and nothing less than a redefmition of the structures and cultures of popular music. The Times They Are A-Changin' enabled Bob Dylan to become a pop star; "I Want to Hold Your Hand" introduced the Beatles to the United States, and subsequently, to the rest of the world. Still without a hit single or LP, Dylan's concert at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in May 1964 sold out quickly and comfortably. The review in The Times compared his "sheer personal magnetism" with that of Callas, Segovia, and Count Basie (Shelton 255). Following the performance, there were events that while certainly not comparable with the

Rock Music

Synergies and Reciprocities 61 Beatlemania raging on both sides of the Atlantic, suggested that his audience was expanding to encompass more than the archetypal purists with whom folk music had long been associated in Britain. Anthea Joseph, who accompanied Dylan on parts of his British visit, has recalled: "We were walking out of the stage door . . . and Bob disappeared under this wave of humanity who were sort of grabbing at his clothes and his hair. He was terrified! It wasn't something you expected. I mean, that happened to pop stars. You knew it happened to pop stars-but not singersongwriters" (Heylin 95).1 While major chart success would continue to elude him for a further twelve months, the fans' response in London was significant in that it anticipated, tentatively and briefly, the sentiments and allegiances that would soon become permanently associated with the performer. Two months later, in July 1964, Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival indicated, again in a quiet and unrecognized manner, forthcoming musical changes. It was here that he gave the first public performance of "Mr. Tambourine Man," one of the tracks which would later appear on Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965), the LP that defmitively and controversially marked his transition from acoustic folk to electric rock music. For the Beatles, the first six months of 1964 were to be the period in which the long-standing belief of manager Brian Epstein that the group would eclipse Elvis Presley was to be realized. Following their initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, which was watched by an audience of seventy million or 60 percent of all American television viewers, they held the top five positions in the Billboard singles chart of March 31, 1964, plus an additional seven entries lower in the Top 100. Beatlemania quickly spread around the world. In June, more than 100,000 people thronged the streets of Amsterdam to see them. In Australia, where they had in March held the top six positions in the singles charts, with a total of ten in the Top 20, 300,000 fans surrounded their hotel in Adelaide, 250,000 in Melbourne. Recalling the group's U.S. tour of August 1964, their U.S. agent, Norman Weiss concluded: "The Beatles and Elvis are both in show business. After that, any comparison is just a joke. No one, before or since, has had the crowds the Beatles had" (Davies 221). When Dylan and the Beatles met for the first time, in August 1964, at the group's New York hotel, they met, if not as equals, certainly as

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62 Popular Music and Society equivalents. Both were essentially singer-songwriters, yet whose early live performances and recording profiles had presented them, to a degree, as singers of others' songs. Bob Dylan (March 1962) featured two original compositions among its thirteen tracks; Please Please Me (March 1963) included eight original compositions in its fourteen tracks. But subsequent releases quickly abandoned this convention; all eleven tracks on Dylan's third LP, Another Side of Bob Dylan (August 1964) were self-compositions, as were all thirteen tracks on the Beatles' third LP, A Hard Day's Night (August 1964). This facet of their musical activity was more than merely fortuitous. "Then unique in being prolific enough to fill complete LPs with their own material, Dylan and the Beatles were bound eventually to collide and react to each other" (MacDonald 98). Both had been repeatedly cited as spokesmen for their generation, whose music was seen to be representative of wider social and political concerns. Such affirmations came from other performers, like Peter, Paul and Mary: "Bob Dylan is the most important songwriter in the country today. He has his finger on the pulse of American youth" (Shelton 164); and Joan Baez: "Bob Dylan's songs are powerful as poetry and as music . . . . Bob is expressing what all these kids want to say" (Shelton 181). They also came from a fascinated, and sometimes confused, news media. The populist Daily Mirror stated: "Fact is that Beatie people are everywhere. From Wapping to Windsor. Aged seven to seventy. And it's plain to see why these four cheeky, energetic lads from Liverpool go down so big. They're young, new. They're high-spirited, cheerful" (Norman 192); whereas the communist Daily Worker believed that "The Mersey sound is the voice of 80,000 crumbling houses and 30,000 people on the dole" (Davies 201). Both, in addition to enjoying popular acclaim, were to become accustomed to seeing their compositions subjected to increasingly serious academic scrutiny of a kind unfamiliar within popular music. In December 1963, William Mann, the music critic of The Times, had, in his wholly favorable review of With the Beatles, commented: "One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat-submediant key-switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of 'Not a Second Time"' (Dowlding 57).2 The Guardian's assessment of Dylan's songs in 1965 referred to the way in which his

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Synergies and Reciprocities 63 "loose framework of assonant and consonant rhyme, using shifting eight to twelve syllable iambic rhythms, which adjust themselves as naturally to speech as to song put him in a league with the youthfully committed Pound, Auden and MacNeice" (Shelton 22). Both were admirers of the other's music. By the time of the first meeting, arranged by journalist AI Aronowitz, "Harrison and Lennon, especially, were self-confessed fanatics, and listened to his albums almost with reverence" (Giuliano 54). Dylan, for his part, was unequivocal in his praise for the Beatles: "I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go. In my head the Beatles were it" (DeCurtis and Henke 212). Much emphasis has been imposed by commentators on the Beatles' introduction, by Dylan, to marijuana at their meeting. While some accounts may be inflated by hyperbole-"a small but auspicious event occurred . . . that would grow to affect the consciousness of the world" (Brown and Gaines 134)-there is little doubt that the combination of the wearying effects of a lengthy and arduous U.S. tour, their abrupt transition from consumers of alcohol to consumers of cannabis, and their recognition of Bob Dylan as a lyricist and composer whose achievements seemed to rival their own, decisively shaped their future musical output and personal ambitions. Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer, who was present at that meeting, has commented that "a friendship instigated and pursued through mutually admired recordings was made flesh through marijuana and the shared exploration of deepest inner space" (Taylor 92). The impact appears to have been acknowledged equally by the individual group members. "It was Paul ... who was the most profoundly affected ... he was thinking, he declared, really thinking for the very first time ... he would never be the same again" (Salewicz 170). "To George Harrison, Dylan was a revelation. Never in his short life had he met anyone so persuasively hip" (Giuliano 54). "McCartney and especially Harrison also became admirers of Dylan at this time, but it was Lennon whose work was most obviously affected" (Hertsgaard 127). In fact it was John Lennon's efforts to emulate him that show the first and most obvious signs of Dylan's influence. Analysts of Beatles' songs including MacDonald and Hertsgaard have cited "I'm a Loser" from Beatles for Sale (December 1964) as the group's first song whose introspective and despondent lyrics presaged a move away from the

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64 Popular Music and Society essentially simplistic conventions of the standard pop song toward the honest self-scrutiny and melancholy to be found in many of Dylan's songs about relationships, including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Boots of Spanish Leather," and "One Too Many Mornings." From that point on in the career of the Beatles, the significance of Bob Dylan was rarely absent and increasingly apparent: "Nascent signs of Dylan's influence had been evident on the previous Beatles for Sale, but on Help! those first tentative efforts have developed into fully realized musical achievements" (Hertsgaard 127). In addition to the title track itself, "It's Only Love," McCartney's "I've Just Seen a Face" and, definitively, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" demonstrated a clear resolution to continue along this path. Lennon himself has admitted of the latter song, which was one of the very few Beatie tracks of the period on which he, as lead vocalist, was not double-tracked: "That's me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan" (Sheff and Golson 165). And while relatively few critics have commented on the composition and performance of "Yesterday" in this context, choosing instead to report on the song's achievements after its inclusion on Help! (having attracted more than 2,500 cover versions, it is now, by far, popular music's most recorded song), it is interesting to recall Billboard's original review: "Paul goes it alone on a Dylan-styled piece of material" (Coleman, McCartney 59). In a similar observation, Justin Hayward, of the Moody Blues, has asserted: "The moment I heard it, I knew it was a classic ... [T]here was some influence, particularly in the opening, of Bob Dylan; there's an inversion that Paul uses on the open chord that reminds me of "The Times They Are A-Changin" (Coleman, McCartney 71). The recording sessions for Help!, released in August 1965, commenced in February of that year. Only a month before, in January, Bob Dylan had started recording sessions for his next LP, to be released in March, and which would just as emphatically confirm the way in which his musical trajectory had been disrupted and reoriented by the Beatles, and the by now rampant "British Invasion" of the United States. "The title Bringing It All Back Home hinted in part at a wresting of musical initiative from British performers at that time spearheading a revival of blues-based rock" (Day 150).

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Synergies and Reciprocities 65 Specifically, Bringing It All Back Home marked Dylan's adoption of electric instrumentation (on the LP's first side) in his attempt to attain the sheer energy of the Beatles' recordings. Although the second side was largely free of any additional instrumentation, its inherent rationale was corroborated by several subsequent and related events. The first was the release in May of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," the LP's opening track, which became Dylan's first hit single in the United States, reaching No. 39 in the Billboard chart. The second, described as "a turning point . . . which changed him from a folk star into an international pop superstar" (Shelton 288) was his eight-date sellout tour of Britain in May and June. The early exuberance shown by the audiences a year earlier had by now developed into a form of Dylanmania, which continued throughout the summer. By the autumn, Dylan had achieved five entries in the Top Ten album charts, five entries in the Top 30 singles charts, and had seen major chart successes for cover versions of his compositions by Joan Baez ("It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), the Byrds (''Mr. Tambourine Man" and "All I Really Want to Do"), Johnny Cash ("It Ain't Me, Babe"), Cher ("All I Really Want to Do"), and Manfred Mann ("If You Gotta Go, Go Now"). As early as January of that year, the Beatles (along with the Animals3 whose rock version of "House of the Rising Sun" had topped the singles charts in both Britain and the United States) had frequently drawn attention to Bob Dylan in their various media interviews. The effect of their advocacy proved to be far-reaching: "If a single external factor triggered Dylan's British breakthrough, it was the Beatles' public endorsement" (Shelton 288). Thirdly, in June, "Like a Rolling Stone" (featuring an array of musicians including AI Kooper on organ and Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar) was released. Six minutes long, it reached No. 2 in the United States and No. 3 in Britain; Dylan himself has testified to the song's importance: "If you're talking about what the breakthrough was for me, I would have to say "Like a Rolling Stone" (Heylin 127). The fourth, and in many ways the most conclusive, event was possibly "the most written-about performance in the history of rock 'n' roll" (Heylin 133). His appearance at that year's Newport Folk Festival in July, backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the furious response it evoked from the organizers, fellow performers, and many of the audience, signaled, symbolically and substantively, an irrevocable fracture to, and initiated a major reassembly of, American popular music. Aidan Day has reported on the observation offered by

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66 Popular Music and Society Geoffrey Stokes: "In a burst of innovation an entire new genre of white pop was created by a merger of the folkies' outsider intellectualism with the newly revivified energies of rock ... [O]nce Dylan's folkie audience started to merge with the Beatles', it started asking 'Why can't they do it? Are they (dread word) superficial?'" (153). The principal strand of the new genre, which merits the closest scrutiny in this context and presents an especially apposite way in which to assess the consequences of the musical synthesis facilitated by Dylan and the Beatles, is one that was picked up and developed on the West Coast of the United States. The assertion that "the birth of folk-rock has been attributed by some to the Byrds and their cover of "Mr Tambourine Man" (Heylin 128) is supported by Roger McGuinn, who, after duplicating George Harrison's choice of a twelve-string Rickenbacker electric guitar (as seen in the group's movie A Hard Day's Night), freely admits "I saw this gap, with Dylan and the Beatles leaning toward each other in concept. That's where we aimed" (Shelton 308). The two individual components of the developing folk-rock-Dylan's lyrics and the Beatles' music-together created a new musical form. It led to the relocation of the center of creative musical activity from England to California; it laid the foundations for the emergence of psychedelic rock in 1967; it alerted both the Beatles and Bob Dylan to engage in a critical and active dialogue with others concerning the musical refinement and reinvention of their own work; and it continues to inform and instruct many recent and contemporary developments in Britain and the United States. What the Byrds pulled off in 1965 with the landmark "Mr. Tambourine Man" was a resonant synthesis of the Beatles' charged pro forma precision and Dylan's mythopoeic incantations. It turned out to be a startlingly perfect fit, inspiring much that has followed, from their mentors' subsequent Rubber Soul and Blonde on Blonde to the work of such disparate inheritors as Tom Petty, R.E.M., U2, and Crowded House. (DeCurtis and Henke 309)

Of all the Beatles' LPs, it is Rubber Soul (December 1965) that provides the most unequivocal example of the manner in which their mid1960s musical output derived from their contact with Bob Dylan. On individual tracks-Harrison's "If I Needed Someone," McCartney's "I'm Looking Through You," Lennon's "Girl" and "Norwegian Wood" -in both lyrical and/ or melodic form, clear parallels are apparent. But

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Synergies and Reciprocities 67 more than that, the whole LP demonstrates their realization "from Dylan's example, that they didn't have to separate their professional work from their inner lives" (MacDonald 145). Likewise, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (May 1966)-rock music's first double albumbetrays its reciprocal influences on tracks that include "I Want You," "Just Like a Woman," and "Fourth Time Around," his parody of "Norwegian Wood," which, according to Gray, "outshine(s) its victim ... it has more subtlety and greater range" (193). While one might even point to the composition of the album cover itself as echoing Rubber Soul's in terms of the dominant colors, background and stance, it is the "funky, bluesy, rock expressionism" (Shelton 321) of the LP as a whole that best illuminates the consequences of his liaison with the Beatles and their contemporaries, and which irrefutably defined his new status: "Bob Dylan-superstar. . . . Only the Beatles and the Stones could generate more excitement. . . . [I]n just a matter of months, he had become the most exciting pop force in the English-speaking world" (Scaduto 222). That the creative musical output of Dylan and the Beatles was at a prolific peak through 1965 and 1966 is indisputable. A period of a little more than eighteen months was punctuated by LPs like Bringing It All Back Home, Help!, Highway 61 Revisited, Rubber Soul, Blonde On Blonde, and Revolver; and by singles such as "Ticket to Ride," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Day Tripper," "Paperback Writer," "Positively Fourth Street," and "Eleanor Rigby." Each new recording in tum seemed to absorb what had preceded it, stimulate what followed, and help to fashion an environment in which music was not separate from, but integral to, a critical reassessment of the conditions and constraints experienced by the young across the United States and Europe. Nowhere was this more convincingly demonstrated than in the burgeoning counterculture of the time around San Francisco. In the years 1965-67 it had all come together astonishingly coherently. There were clear catalysts whose hold on spiritual values kept the thing on track. Dylan was one, his music threading through Kesey's trees at La Honda; the Beatles, who had inspired many of the San Francisco musicians to form bands and dress up, were another. (Taylor 110)

At the same time, the Beatles were redefining their group function; very few of their compositions were by now authentic Lennon-McCart-

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68 Popular Music and Society ney collaborations. Typically, a song would be written by, and lead vocals performed by, one or other of the group; "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby," on which McCartney dispensed with the group's instrumentation in favor of string accompaniments are merely the most familiar examples of this trend. By contrast, Bob Dylan was seeking the security and companionship to be drawn from a group. In the summer of 1965, in an act that Time described as "the most decisive moment in rock history" (Shelton 315), he enlisted the support of the Canadian group, the Hawks; renamed the Band, they joined Dylan on his world tour of 1965-66, the start of a long association in which they quickly proved to be much more than a backing group, contributing hugely to the content and form of his subsequent music. With the notable exception of Elvis Presley, who had abandoned live performances after his release from the U.S. Army-from March 1960 until August 1969, when he appeared at the International Hotel Show Room in Las Vegas, he participated in two live performances but made 27 movies-a commitment to regular and extensive touring was almost obligatory in the early and mid 1960s. In addition to being profitable in its own right, it was perceived as a useful way in which to advertise new recordings and thus to encourage sales; it was recognized as an appropriate manner in which to maintain contact with and loyalty from audiences; and it could be used to establish a reputation (for musical ability or exciting shows) that relied on alternative skills than those required in the recording studio. The Beatles and Bob Dylan had long been party to this convention, from schoolboy performances in Liverpool and Hibbing onward. In 1966 there was no reason to suppose that this would change; indeed, to withdraw from touring would have been considered ill-advised in the extreme. But Dylan's motorcycle accident in July of that year near his home at Woodstock4 led to a cessation of any more live performances (apart from a fifteen-minute appearance at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Show in January 1968 at Carnegie Hall, and a television appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in May 1969) for the next three years; his eventual return to the stage was with the Band at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1969. And just one month after Dylan's enforced retirement, the Beatles played the last concert of their career at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. Unlike Dylan's, theirs was an entirely voluntary and, in fact, much postponed decision.

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Synergies and Reciprocities 69 The fact that the live careers of popular music's two most celebrated, imitated, and creative performers should apparently come to an end within a few weeks of each other was instrumental in persuading the industry to rethink the relationship between itself, the artist, and the audience. Significantly, one of the first responses by EMI and CBS was the hasty release of compilation albums-A Collection of Beatles Oldies (December 1966) and Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (March 1967)-in an attempt to maintain a merchandising presence. When new material from the Beatles and Dylan was eventually released, it was immediately apparent that the intervening hiatus had channeled them in contradictory directions. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1967) has been described by its producer as "a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. ... [A]s well as changing the way pop music was viewed, it changed the entire nature of the recording game-for keeps" (Martin, Summer 1). The technical complexity, the abundant studio virtuosity, the outrageous ambition of that LP could not have contrasted more strongly with the "sense of musical, physical, spiritual and religious calm" (Shelton 389) that characterized Dylan's John Wesley Harding (January 1968). Even though the Beatles had acknowledged him by including him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, Dylan himself was unmoved by its contents: "The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper which I didn't like at all. ... I thought it was a very indulgent album.... I didn't think all that production was necessary" (Heylin 184). Their next LPs, too, were equally divergent in their musical range and artistic scope. While the thirty tracks on The Beatles (November 1968) ostentatiously demonstrated the individual Beatles' ability to engage in pop, rock and roll, blues, soul, Nashville Skyline (April 1969) extended the pattern seen on John Wesley Harding in its selection of gentle and melodic country tunes. In retrospect it is plausible to suggest that these two sets of LPs established separate templates for much musical activity through the 1970s. Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles-seen by Ian MacDonald as a "masterpiece of programming" (261)-presaged a concentration on meticulous and painstaking studio-concocted music, sometimes incapable of live performance, which typified the output of performers like Yes, Mike Oldfield, Genesis, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues, and which led to a wave of what are often misleadingly called "concept albums." John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline pointed toward a simple, clean,

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70 Popular Music and Society performance-based music known as country-rock, to be expanded and exploited by Poco, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, andultimately and definitively-the Eagles. By this point, the synergy that had resulted from the convergence of Dylan's and the Beatles' musical activities had ended. The Beatles had acrimoniously disbanded in April 1970 and would spend much of the next few years in the courts. With the exception of New Morning (October 1970), Dylan's recordings during these same years were to be poorly received; in its review of Self Portrait (June 1970), Rolling Stone posed the question "What is this shit?" (Day 159), while The Guardian referred to Dylan (November 1973) as "the most embarrassing piece of plastic ever released in the name of a great artist" (Day 160). Not until his and the Band's U.S. tour in January/February 1974 (their first for eight years) and the release of Blood on the Tracks (January 1975) would his work evoke the positive critical response of the previous decade. But while the direct, creative fusion of the mid 1960s might have disappeared, Dylan and the Beatles did mutually continue to exchange, to contribute, to reciprocate. George Harrison is the Beatie whose contact and involvement with Bob Dylan is most readily recorded. Their first of many active musical collaborations was the joint composition in November 1968 of "I'd Have You Anytime," subsequently to appear on Harrison's All Things Must Pass (December 1970) along with his version of Dylan's "If Not for You." Also included on the same LP was Harrison's own "Behind that Locked Door," composed, he has since revealed, "when Bob Dylan was playing at the Isle of Wight soon after his Nashville Skyline album. I wrote this song about him. It was a good excuse to do a country tune with pedal steel guitar" (Harrison 206). And another joint composition, the unreleased "Every Time Somebody Comes to Town" was also recorded around this time. In August 1971, when he staged the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, Harrison persuaded Dylan to leave his temporary self-imposed seclusion and return to the stage; performing with Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell, he sang several of his older songs, including "Just Like a Woman" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." In January 1988, when the Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, Dylan was one of several musicians who enthusiastically

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Synergies and Reciprocities 71 joined Harrison and Ringo Starr on stage to perform "I Saw Her Standing There." The Travelling Wilburys Volume 1 (1988) and Volume 3 (1990) reunited Dylan and Harrison in the studio with Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty in a joint writing and recording venture. On Dylan's Under the Red Sky (September 1990), Harrison played lead guitar on the title track. And at Dylan's 30th Anniversary Concert in October 1992 at Madison Square Garden, Harrison performed "Absolutely Sweet Marie," introduced Bob Dylan, and joined him (and others) for a version of "My Back Pages." Harrison himself is adamant in his continuing regard for Dylan, as he freely admits: "Bob was always the gaffer as far as I was concerned. With all due respect to John, I don't think there's anyone in the business who's ever even come close" (Giuliano 55). Ringo Starr, too, has maintained frequent musical links with Dylan. During the wave of interest in country music stimulated by Nashville Skyline, he traveled to Nashville to record his own country album Beaucoups of Blues (September 1970), guided and produced by Pete Drake, who had contributed to both Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding. In January 1976, he was one of the guests (along with Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Stephen Stills and others), when Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue performed at Houston Astrodome in a benefit concert for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. In the same year, he recorded Dylan's composition "I Didn't Want to Do It" intended for inclusion on Rotogravure (September 1976), but later dropped from the LP. And on Thanksgiving Day 1976, he joined Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Muddy Waters and others on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Palace, to perform with, and celebrate the music of, the Band at The Last Waltz concert. When Dylan recorded Shot of Love (August 1981), Ringo Starr was among the musicians he invited to play on the track "Heart of Mine." And they appeared together on stage again in Monaco during Dylan's 1989 World Tour. Paul McCartney is the Beatie who has preserved the greatest professional distance from Bob Dylan, preferring largely to collaborate with artists of undoubted, but subordinate, talents (Denny Laine, Eric Stewart, Elvis Costello), or to engage in astutely choreographed but essentially ephemeral studio projects with other star performers (Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson). By insisting on complete control at all times, not just over the creative process, but the administrative, organizational and

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72 Popular Music and Society logistical aspects of his professional activities, McCartney's opportunity for genuine alliances and continuing reciprocities in musical production seems to have been eliminated. One biographer has asserted that with the exception of his wife and family, "Paul has no other close friends-just employees and acquaintances" (Flippo 376). However, his preferred approach to his work should not imply that he has been indifferent to the influence of Bob Dylan; McCartney has stated: I think it was mutual admiration, certainly from our side, there was admiration. I mean, to this day ... he influenced us and a lot of people. He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further ... But the nice thing about Dylan for me was that he brought back poetry ... we got so huge that that kind of student thing got cut short, but Dylan re-introduced that into all our lives. (Williams 53)

One example of a more procedural professional connection has been suggested regarding the recording of Wings' LP Wild Life (November 1971), allegedly completed in three days: "Paul later said he had been inspired to do an album that quickly after reading in one of the music papers that Bob Dylan was now doing that. Paul said, 'If it's good enough for Bob, that's cool'" (Flippo 321). The critical dismantling received on the LP's release might well have been significant in discouraging McCartney from similar acknowledgments in the future. The dynamics of the artistic relationship that might have existed between Bob Dylan and John Lennon are the most elusive to locate. On a social level, their contact seems to have been limited to irregular meetings over the years; on a performing level, there are no occasions when one contributed to the other's recordings, or when they played together on stage. However, Richard Williams believes that this is irrelevant: "[T]he brief attenuated relationship between John Lennon and Bob Dylan ... was founded on something deeper and truer: the mutual recognition of two world-famous 25-year-olds who were travelling into uncharted territory faster than anyone could guess, and faster than either of them knew how to cope with" (45). As late as 1980, evidence of that mutual recognition was to be found in Lennon's assessment of Dylan's recent, and enthusiastic, conversion to Christianity: For whatever reason he's doing it, it's personal for him and he needs to do it. I'm not distressed by the fact that Dylan is doing what Dylan wants or needs to

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Synergies and Reciprocities 73 do ... I understand it and have nothing against it or for it. If he needs it, let him do it ... I understand him completely, how he got in there, because I've been frightened enough myself to want to latch on to something. It's that wanting to belong. (Sheff and Golson 101-02)

Always the most conspicuous and vociferous follower and defender of Dylan among the Beatles, Lennon was also the only one of the four who directly acknowledged him by name in song. The lyrics of "Yer Blues" on The Beatles (November 1968) and "Give Peace a Chance" (July 1969) by the Plastic Ono Band refer to him in passing and uncontroversially. But in December 1970, "God" from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, proclaimed Lennon's denial of Elvis, the Beatles, and Zimmerman; this, coupled with the fact that in subsequent interviews, he attacked Dylan for his change of name, and thus his inauthenticity, appeared to consolidate his rejection of the artist. However, since the LP's sparse, uncluttered production is far removed from the Beatles' output at that time, and much more attuned to the spirit engendered by Bob Dylan on his recent LPs, the implied rejection is a little ambiguous. In the same year, Dylan's book Tarantula was finally published, several years after it was written, but according to Dy Ian, a consequence of Lennon's demonstration with John Lennon in His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works that rock stars could indeed write books. For much of the 1970s, of course, John Lennon decided to seek insulation in a voluntary personal and professional retreat, releasing no new material between Walls And Bridges (October 1974) and Double Fantasy (December 1980), and making few live appearances. Privately, however, his musical activities continued, including three parodies of Dylan's work that are still unreleased, but whose titles alone display a continuing preoccupation with the man whom, according to Paul McCartney, "he loved ... so much" (Williams 54). They are "Serve Yourself," a riposte to "Gotta Serve Somebody" (1979); "Mama Take This Make-up offa Me" in response to "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (1973); and "Stuck Inside of Lexicon with the Roget's Thesaurus Blues Again," a pastiche of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" (1966). And a further demonstration of the ambiguity, not to say disingenuousness, inherent in his continuing evaluation of Dylan, was revealed in one of Lennon's final interviews: "For a period, I was very impressed with him. But I stopped listening to Dylan with both ears after

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74 Popular Music and Society Highway 64 [sic] and Blonde On Blonde. ... Anyway, I was never a fan. Of anything. I stopped being a fan when I started doin' it myself' (Sheff and Golson 102-03). Given Lennon's tendency to alternate lavish praise and blunt criticism in his references to the musical output of others (including Paul McCartney) in interview and on record, it is not surprising that Dylan, too, should have been targeted in this way. What is slightly surprising, given the duration of their friendship, is that the two do not appear to have considered any joint compositions. Apart from a brief reference in his accompanying notes to the Biograph compilation (1985), where Dylan mentions their attempts to write a song together on a tape recorder, there is no suggestion of any other collaborative activity between the two. However, one other observation contained in those notes shows that just as Lennon had continued to evaluate Dylan and his work, so too did he wish to comment on Lennon's life and work: "The same people who praise you when you're dead, when you were alive they wouldn't give you the time of day. I like to wonder about some of those people who elevated John Lennon to such a mega-God, as if when he was alive they were always on his side" (Shelton 496). Conclusion That the Beatles and Bob Dylan were a major and mutual source of influence on each other, professionally and musically, is unsurprising. In any field, much endeavor is the product of a constant pattern of absorption-of expectations, processes, demands, and explanations-which determine the conditions in which such endeavor occurs. Apart from anything else, the sheer scale of the commercial success and artistic acclaim that accrued to each of them independently was to have considerable repercussions on the conventional practices of the popular music industry. Since both were working within that industry, it was therefore inevitable that, along with every other participant, they would at the very least be exposed to those internal influences. Similarly, that they were operating contemporaneously in an era of profound social and political change meant that both were aware of, and thus able to respond to, external events. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 immediately preceded the Beatles' conquest of the United States. Bob Dylan's early career coincided with the activities of the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin

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Synergies and Reciprocities 75 Luther King, and later with race riots in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Watts. Timothy Leary was expelled from Harvard for misuse of LSD in May 1963; in the same year the first U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam. In Britain, a Labour government, led by Harold Wilson, was elected in October 1964, after thirteen years in opposition. By 1964, the contraceptive pill, invented in 1960, was widely available; pirate radio stations appeared around the coast of Britain. Clashes between Mods and Rockers took place in British resorts through 1964 and 1965. In November 1965, Kenneth Tynan became the first person to say "Fuck" on British television. In January 1966, the Trips Festival in San Francisco marked the start of the Hippy movement. England won the World Cup in July 1966; in November, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. Israel emerged as victors from the Six Day War in June 1967; in July, homosexuality was legalized in Britain. Che Guevara was killed in October 1967. In 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. In September 1968, Hair opened in London's West End. Through that year student protests led to demonstrations in Britain, France, and West Germany. In July 1969, Apollo 11 landed men on the moon; and in August, Charles Manson's "family" murdered five people, including Sharon Tate, in Los Angeles. Clearly, to explain the success of the Beatles and Bob Dylan by reference to one or more of these events-as some have attempted to dowould be simplistic and myopic. Equally, to ignore them outright would be dogmatic and obtuse. If the output of any artist or performer needs to be contextualized before it can be comprehended, then this is the context within which the careers of Dylan and the Beatles must be approached. And within this context, the concepts of synergy and reciprocity can be used as appropriate tools, or devices, to facilitate comprehension. Masuda's analysis of synergy identified four basic characteristics as essential components of the successful movement toward a transformed and more desirable situation: common goal, voluntary action, active cooperation, and self-control. The foregoing discussion of Bob Dylan and the Beatles demonstrates that each of these conditions was present. The common goal for both was commercial success and musical development. Both had the traditional ambition of popular musicians to be the new Elvis Presley, but less traditionally-uniquely, perhaps-once that goal was attainable, both were prepared to deviate from the conventionally ordered and approved routes to maintain it. Decisions to stop tour-

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76 Popular Music and Society ing, abrupt changes of musical style, even their refusals to conform to the obligations of predictable and routine questioning at press conferences, all testify to a shared belief that the artistic environment in which they found themselves could be dismantled and restructured. It is evident, too, that their musical activities were entered into voluntarily and independently. There was no legal, contractual, or managerial compulsion for them to act in pursuit of the goals they had in the ways they did. Their precocious success ensured, for example, that for both of them the fear of the cancellation of a recording contract, which so stultifies and constrains many performers, particularly in the early stages of their careers, was absent. The condition specifying that cooperation toward goals is to be active, rather than static, was likewise satisfied by both sets of performers. In fact, the range and quality of their musical and professional activity-including song-writing, recording and touring-especially during the period from 1964 to 1966, might stand as their single most remarkable accomplishment. Dylan's output in 1965 alone has been described as "an amazing, breathtaking burst of prolific creativity" (Gray 168). In the same vein, the Beatles' producer, George Martin, has acknowledged: "At the start, I thought: God, this can't last forever. They've given me so much good stuff that I can't expect them to keep on doing it. But they did. They amazed me with their fertility" (Martin, All You Need 166). Self-control is the final characteristic of Masuda's formulation. The ability to articulate responsibility for decisions, to justify and maintain them, to specify conditions for change, to engage in innovative and radical behavior, is as I have argued elsewhere (Inglis), only to be found among those performers whose status is sufficiently high to allow for deviations. The Beatles and Bob Dylan are the clearest examples of popular musicians who enjoyed and used their status in ways which emphatically realized and celebrated artistic self-determination. By fulfilling these conditions as they did, Dylan and the Beatles created a synergy that not only substantially fashioned their own musical and professional activities but in addition, transformed the contours of popular music in the 1960s and since. Sahlins's schema of reciprocity is doubly useful. First, it theorizes the mechanisms through which the necessary conditions for the production of synergy-or "synergistic feedforward" (Masuda 118)-can be attained. Secondly, it substantiates the particular dynamics of the contin-

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Synergies and Reciprocities 77 uing relationship between the Beatles and Dylan. Marked by a diversity of actions, which has included joint compositions, studio collaborations, live performances, and which spans thirty years, that relationship provides a consummate example of balanced reciprocity. Lacking any dimension of obligation, associations between parties are initiated and maintained through a broad understanding that there are likely to be returns of correspondent adequacy and equivalent value. These processes can only function efficiently, however, so long as there exist strong collective sentiments between the parties. In this respect, the repeated mutual declarations of affection, respect, and admiration from Dylan and the Beatles reveal that the necessary social bond was there. Thus it has allowed for, and been expressed in, three decades of musical and professional interaction.

Notes I am grateful to John Donnelly and Dave Brazier of the University of Northumbria for the invaluable information and advice they gave me during the preparation of certain parts of this paper. 1. It should be noted, however, that other accounts of the nature of Dylan's reception by the fans offer a more conservative picture. British folk singer Martin Carthy, who attended the Royal Festival Hall concert, has said that he witnessed no signs of exaggerated fan behavior (Brazier). 2. The Beatles' own reaction to such praise showed a certain bewilderment. Asked in 1980 to comment on his use of Aeolian cadences, Lennon stated: "To this day I have no idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds" (MacDonald 75). 3. The first two singles released by the Animals were their versions of songs that had appeared on Bob Dylan: "Baby Let Me Take You Home" (April 1964) which was adapted from "Baby let me follow you Down" and "House of the Rising Sun" (June 1964). Both songs had originally featured in the repertoire of Josh White. 4. The consequences of his accident allowed Dylan to withdraw from a number of imminent activities to which he was committed, including a 64-date U.S. tour scheduled to commence in August and the completion of a planned hour-long television documentary.

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78 Popular Music and Society References Bradley, Dick. Understanding Rock'n'Roll. Buckingham: Open UP, 1992. Brazier, David. "A Conversation with Martin Carthy." The Telegraph 42 (1992): 88-96. Brown, Peter, and Steven Gaines. The Love You Make. London: Macmillan, 1983. Coleman, Ray. John Lennon. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. -.McCartney: Yesterday and Today. London: Boxtree, 1995. Davies, Hunter. The Beatles. London: Heinemann, 1968. Day, Aidan. Jokerman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. DeCurtis, Anthony, and James Henke, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. New York: Random House, 1992. Dowlding, William J. Beatlesongs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Dylan, Bob. Tarantula. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Flippo, Chet. McCartney. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988. Frith, Simon. "Backward and Forward." The Beat Goes On. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. London: Pluto, 1996. Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City. London: Souvenir, 1970. Giuliano, Geoffrey. Dark Horse. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. Goldman, Albert. The Lives of John Lennon. London: Bantam, 1988. Gray, Michael. Song and Dance Man. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1972. Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. London: Little, Brown, 1994. Harrison, George. I Me Mine. London: Allen, 1982. Hertsgaard, Mark. A Day in the Life. New York: Delacorte, 1995. Heylin, Clinton. Dylan: Behind the Shades. London: Penguin, 1991. Inglis, Ian. "Conformity, Status and Innovation: The Accumulation and Utilization of Idiosyncrasy Credits in the Career of the Beatles." Popular Music and Society 19.3 (1995): 41-74. Longhurst, Brian. Popular Music and Society. London: Polity, 1995. Lennon, John. In His Own Write. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. - . A Spaniard in the Works. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Lull, James, ed. Popular Music and Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head. London: Random House, 1994. Martin, George. All You Need Is Ears. New York: StMartin's, 1979.

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Synergies and Reciprocities 79 -.Summer of Love. London: Macmillan, 1994. Masuda, Yoneji. Managing in the Information Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Norman, Philip. Shout! London: Hamilton, 1981. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning. London: Cassell, 1960. Polanyi, Karl. "The Economy as Instituted Process." Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensburg, and Harry W. Pearson. Glencoe: Free Press, 1957. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock, 1974. Salewicz, Chris. McCartney. London: Queen Anne, 1986. Scaduto, Anthony. Bob Dylan. London: Allen, 1972. Sheff, David, and G. Barry Golson. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York: Playboy, 1981. Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home. New York: Morrow, 1986. Taylor, Derek. It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. London: Bantam, 1987. Williams, Richard. "The Trip." Mojo Nov. 1993: 40-60.

Ian Inglis, senior lecturer in sociology, School of Social, Political & Economic Sciences, University ofNorthurnbria, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 SST, U.K.

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[4] The Hippie Aesthetic: Cultural Positioning and Musical Ambition in Early Progressive Rock John Covach This study takes its point of departure from two problems that regularly recur in historical accounts of rock music. The first problem consists of a strong tendency among many writers to neglect much mainstream rock from the 1970s, often to focus on the rise of punk and its transformation into new wave in the second half of the decade, or perhaps also to chronicle the emergence of disco and the strong reactions to it. Bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Elton John, the Eagles and many others are frequently mentioned only in passing, while highly successful progressive rock bands such as Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Yes are neglected almost entirely. 1 The second problem is that rock music from the 1966-69 period- frequently referred to as 'psychedelic' music- is often kept separate from the mainstream 1970s rock that follows. There is even a tendency on the part of some writers to view the early seventies as a period of decline for rock, resulting in a celebration of psychedelia without much consideration of its clear musical effect on the rock that followed. 2 These two tendencies result in unbalanced historical accounts of rock that not only leave out much of the music many listeners today associate with 'classic rock', but also miss some of the important larger themes in the development of the style as a whole. 3 One historical thread that can be traced almost all the way back to rock's earliest days in the mid-1950s is the theme of musical ambition- the idea that pop can aspire to be a 'better' or more sophisticated kind of music by employing techniques and approaches often borrowed The two large-scale video documentaries of rock's history, Rock & Roll (WGBH Boston and the BBC, 1995) and The History of Rock 'n 'Roll (Time-Life Video and Television, 1995), could be taken as examples of the way in which seventies mainstream rock is treated in most historical accounts. Both documentaries run to ten episodes and each devote a full episode to punk. while giving less consideration to seventies mainstream rock. The Time-Life documentary is better in its treatment of seventies rock. devoting an entire episode to the seventies ('Have a Nice Decade'), but even here the treatment is uneven and driven partly by a theme that casts this music as decadent. The two large-scale documentaries could be used as examples of this second tendency as well. Among rock critics and journalists, there is an overwhelming bias to view the late sixties in a positive light and seventies music as an unfortunate decline into commercialism at the expense of musical authenticity. The American 'classic rock' commercial radio format holds seventies mainstream rock at the center of its play lists, even though it also neglects most progressive rock except the most well-known tracks by the most successful groups. This occurs, at least in part, because tracks over five or six minutes in length do not fit well within the classic-rock format, which -like most commercial radio formats- is concerned with drawing and keeping the largest possible audience. Long songs increase the possibility that listeners will tune to another station.

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from other styles (like classical and jazz) to make pop more interesting and original. In the second half of the 1960s, the musical ambition increasingly evident in a series of recordings by Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys begins to coalesce into an attitude toward music making that I call the 'hippie aesthetic'. Identifying and delineating this aesthetic attitude helps us to recognize the strong connections between psychedelic rock in the late 1960s and the variety of rock styles that proliferated in the 1970s, suggesting a stylistic arc that extends from about 1966 to at least as far forward as 1980. Consideration of the hippie aesthetic not only helps to unify styles that are often considered in relative isolation from one another, but it also establishes what disco and punk (and new wave) were rejecting at the end of the 1970s, clarifying how these styles created enough stylistic distance from mainstream rock to be considered new and different to listeners at the time. As we shall see, progressive rock turns out to be the 1970s style that most clearly and completely manifests the hippie aesthetic. Placing progressive rock at the center of a historical account of the 1970s is perhaps the most radical interpretive assertion in what follows. Before engaging in a more detailed discussion of these issues, however, it is probably helpful to acknowledge that this essay offers an American perspective on rock's history. An understanding of rock's history from a British, Italian, or other perspective may well differ from the one presented here. In Italy, for instance, progressive rock eclipsed many other rock styles in the 1970s, making Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and even Gentle Giant much bigger stars in Italy than they were elsewhere at the same time. And in the UK, Yes regularly won polls and stole headlines in the music newspapers Melody Maker and New Musical Express during the early 1970s, garnering praise for the sophistication of their music and arrangements, as well as for the instrumental virtuosity of the band members. The American market remained the key to greatest success for many acts, however, and even there, progressive rock bands did quite well, even if the field of play was arranged in some significantly different ways. 4

The Historical Frame Before considering the attitudes that helped form the culture and aesthetics of late 1960s and early 1970s rock, it will be useful to briefly review the history ofthese years. In the 1966--69 period, rock music was filled with musically ambitious experimentation and eclecticism. During these years, rock musicians continually experimented with many musical styles and approaches, creating diverse and often surprising musical combinations. In San Francisco, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead experimented with classical influences, and with long, improvised arrangements influenced by jazz practices (this was especially true in live performances). In Los Angeles, the studio experimentation of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys that had resulted in Pet Sounds and 'Good Vibrations' began to give way to the new jazz and country influences in the Byrds' music, as well as the dramatically dark music of Jim Morrison and the Doors. In London, the mainstream went psychedelic under the influence of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream, significantly affecting American bands, while the American critics frequently write- however tacitly and even unintentionally- as if the history of rock in the United States is the history of rock everywhere. Most American writers are aware that there are some differences with the way this history can be viewed in Britain, but perspectives drawn from elsewhere in Europe are far less understood in the US.

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more radical and often avant-garde experimentation of the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, and Tomorrow remained within the British psychedelic culture. 5 The 1970s were a period of musical development and expansion for hippie rock. Rock musicians refined some of the stylistic blends from the psychedelic years into a wide variety of specific sub-styles. In progressive rock, British bands such as Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and Henry Cow extended and further explored the use of classical music in rock, often producing concept albums of symphonic scope and filled with classical references and aspirations. 6 Following along stylistic lines explored by Cream's long jams and Miles Davis' fusion of jazz with rock, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea's Return to Forever brought jazz to rock audiences, while horn bands like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and song-oriented bands such as Traffic and Steely Dan brought a strong dose of jazz to their music. In the late 1960s, the Byrds and Bob Dylan had both experimented with bringing together country and rock styles, and in the 1970s Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, and America all refined this approach, blending vocal harmonies and acoustic guitars with a strong pop sensibility. Jim Morrison's theatrical tendencies with the Doors were picked up by Alice Cooper and David Bowie, who each adopted stage personae and were outdone in this regard late in the decade only by blood-spewing, flame-spitting stage productions of Kiss. The blues rock tendencies of the Rolling Stones and the Yard birds were continued by Deep Purple, whose blending of blues and classical would form the foundation for later heavy metal, and Led Zeppelin, whose ambitious 'Stairway to Heaven' became one of the decade's most well-known tracks. The earnestness of 1960s singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon was continued by Elton John, Billy Joel, and (in a career rebirth from her Brill Building days of the early 1960s) Carole King. Far from being a period that is stylistically distinct from the late 1960s, the 1970s are clearly a continuation and extension of psychedelia, different mostly in the separating out of late-60s stylistic features to form a wide variety of distinct sub-styles. In the 1976-79 years, punk and disco markedly reject the hippie musical values that can be traced back to the mid 1960s. In the second half of the 1970s, many fans and musicians began to believe that rock had become too professional and polished, and that the music had been This paragraph and the two that follow quickly summarize the more detailed treatment of these years contained in my book, Whats That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). For historical accounts of progressive rock, see Edward Macan, Rocking The Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Stump, The Musics All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (London: Quartet Books, 1997); Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The Time ofProgressive Rock, I968-I978 (Chicago: Open Court, 1998); and Christophe Pirenne, Le Rock Progressif Anglais (1967-I977) (Paris: Editions Champion, 2005). 6 King Crimson and Henry Cow are the exception here in that their engagement with classical music was more oriented toward avant-garde music than toward nineteenth-century symphonic music. According to Chris Cutler, this was practically a point of honor for Henry Cow, and one way that they separated themselves out from the other progressive-rock bands of the time. To a certain extent, however, all of these bands employed techniques derived from twentieth-century classical music. Cutler's analysis of rock music's development in the sixties and seventies can be found in his File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Autonomedia, 1993), pp. 106-35 especially.

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compromised by the tremendous growth of the music industry, calling the result 'corporate rock'. One result of this backlash was punk, which celebrated a back-to-basics simplicity, while another was disco, which celebrated dancing. In the UK, the punk movement was led (if only briefly) by the Sex Pistols, whose scandal-ridden success inspired the Clash, Elvis Costello, and the Police. In the US, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie had all been active before the Sex Pistols burst onto the scene and enjoyed varying degrees of success after, though the Cars were the first to score hit records and radio play in the wake of the punk tantrum. Because punk quickly developed a trouble-making image that scared off record labels and others inside the music industry, 'new wave' emerged as a safer alternative, substituting violent social misbehavior with a cool and calculated sense of irony. While punk and new wave had little in common socially with disco - indeed, it would be tough to find stranger bedfellows in the late I 970s - these two musical cultures were united in their rejection of hippie rock and most of what it stood for: both styles defined themselves in part by what they were not, and they definitely were not hippie rock.

The 'Hippie Aesthetic' As mentioned above, much rock music from the early and mid 1970s was driven by a collection of attitudes and practices that can be called the 'hippie aesthetic'. As we have seen in our brief survey of the I 966- I 980 period, the hippie aesthetic grew out of psychedelia and helps explains how many of the distinct styles that emerged in the 1970s share common musical and cultural values. We will now consider the components of this aesthetic attitude in greater detail, and these musical and aesthetic features will be divided into discussions of musical ambition, technology, virtuosity, lyrics, and concept albums. Because I consider progressive rock to exemplify these characteristics most strongly and consistently, I will make particular reference to progressive rock bands and their music in the discussion that follows.

Musical Ambition The first and most dominant characteristic of the hippie aesthetic is the tendency to imbue rock with a sense of seriousness of purpose. From a musical point of view, this often took the form of borrowing from styles that had a high degree of cultural prestige, such as classical music and jazz. Hippie rock also borrowed from folk and blues styles, but drawing on these styles gave the music a sense of earthy groundedness that can often balance the music's higher aspirations. Jazz is mostly invoked through extended soloing, and often soloing employing modal scales within sections in a single key. The uses of classical music can be divided into two types: those which evoke the 'great classical tradition' (mostly eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European instrumental music), and those that employ techniques and practices more often associated with twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde music. The use of classical music and techniques, drawn from the 'great classical tradition', can be found in the Beatles' music, starting with the use of the string quartet in 'Yesterday', for instance, and leading through 'Eleanor Rigby' to 'She's Leaving Home' .7 Beginning with the Nice, Keith Emerson The use of classical strings in the sense described here can be traced back at least to the music of.Terry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a songwriting team that also produced some ofrock's most important

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developed a reputation for adapting familiar classical pieces for rock band; he continued this practice with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, perhaps most famously with that band's adaptation of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The recorded sounds of symphonic strings and concert chorus as found on the Mellotron keyboard became central timbres in the music of King Crimson, Genesis, and Yes; the lush string sounds in King Crimson's 'Epitaph' or Genesis' 'Watcher of the Skies' provide representative examples. The use of harpsichord or classical guitar, perhaps featured most obviously in Yes' 'Madrigal', are clear references to classical music, as are the recorders that can be found in the music of Gentle Giant. In addition to appropriating the timbres and textures from classical music, progressive rock musicians also borrowed ideas of large-scale form, motivic presentation and development, and counterpoint and contrapuntal textures. Perhaps the most obvious use of traditional contrapuntal practices may be found in Gentle Giant's 'On Reflection', which is built around a traditional fugal exposition, presented initially in a four-part a cappella vocal texture, and later repeated using various instrumental combinations. 8 Avant-garde elements, drawn from the more provocative, experimental areas of classical music, also played a role in the hippie aesthetic. The use of aleatoric procedures can be found in much of the Beatles' music. In 'Tomorrow Never Knows', for instance, tape loops are mixed in real time, while in the two orchestral interludes in 'A Day in the Life', players were told to start by playing in their low register and move gradually higher at their own discretion, eventually locking into an E-major triad. Members of the Grateful Dead, a markedly improvisational band, 'performed' the mix of their 1968 Anthem ofthe Sun album at the mixing console, working with previously recorded music to create each of the sides of the record in real time. Pink Floyd has consistently worked with electronic sounds in their music, especially during the first few years of the band's history. Even a tremendously successful album such as Dark Side of the Moon contains such electronic and tape-produced timbres, as can be readily heard in 'On The Run' .9 While most rock musicians do not have traditional records. The 1959 Drifters track, 'There Goes My Baby', was considered progressive for its day in its use of orchestral instruments in a way that drew a certain amount of attention to these timbres. In a famous and oft-repeated story, Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler had doubts about the track because he thought it sounded like a radio stuck between a classical station and a rhythm and blues station. Leiber and Stoller's experimental attitude in the studio led directly to the Phil Spector Wall of Sound and the production experimentation of Brian Wilson, which encouraged the Beatles (with the help of George Martin) to experiment even more. For further discussion of the classical-music influences on progressive rock, see Mark Spicer, 'Large-Scale Strategy and Compositional Design in the Early Music of Genesis', in Expression in PopRock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett (New York: Garland, 2000), 77-111; Akitsugu Kawamoto, "'Can You Still Keep Your Balance?" Keith Emerson's Anxiety of Influence, Style Change, and the Road to Superstardom', Popular Music 2412 (2005): 223-44; Gregory Karl, 'King Crimson's Lark's Tongue in Aspic: A Case of Convergent Evolution', in Progressive Rock Reconsidered, ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 121-42; Allan Moore, 'Jethro Tull and the Case for Modernism in Mass Culture', in Analyzing Popular Music, ed. Allan Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158-72; and John Covach, 'Progressive Rock, "Close to the Edge", and the Boundaries of Style', in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme Boone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-31. For more on the avant-garde elements in Pink Floyd's music, see Nicholas Schaffner, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Dell, 1992) and John Cotner, 'Pink Floyd's "Careful With

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compositional training and do not notate their music as part of the composition process, Gentle Giant and Henry Cow are two exceptions, and Henry Cow's music might in some cases cross over the line between rock and modern classical music, making it more 'avant-garde chamber rock' than progressive rock in the sense that we have been using that term here.

Technology Ambitious rock made use of the most up-to-date technologies in its quest for greater sophistication, and the development of recording technology and advances in synthesizer technology were central to many hippie rockers. In the period starting roughly in the early I 960s and extending into the I 970s, recording technology developed from use of 2- and 3-track machines, to 8- and 16-track, and then to 24- and 48-track capabilities. Over this period, musicians increasingly used the recording studio as a kind of composer's sketchpad. Brian Wilson's mid-1960s studio experimentations- which included Pet Sounds and 'Good Vibrations' - produced music that was only possible in the studio. The Beatles' retreat from live performance into studio experimentation -and the release of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band- further accelerated a trend among rock musicians toward studio experimentation. By the early I 970s, short sections of music were typically built up in layers using multi-track recording techniques, with these sections edited together to create long- sometimes very long- album tracks. 'Strawberry Fields', for instance, is actually the product of two recorded versions in different keys that were spliced together using studio technology. Yes' 'Close to the Edge' was recorded in short sections and assembled into the final version without the band having performed this version before the editing was completed. 10 The first music synthesizers were large and by no means usable for live performance, housed mostly in university music departments and used by a new generation of composers who turned to electronic music in the decades following the Second World War. By the late I 960s, however, synthesizers had become more portable and began to be used in recording studios. Switched on Bach, a recording of J.S. Bach's music on the synthesizer by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos was probably the first well-known recording of synthesizer music. The Beatles used the synthesizer on their last studio album, Abbey Road, with George Harrison becoming an early enthusiastic supporter of the synthesizer. When Robert Moog introduced the Mini-Moog, a portable synthesizer that made the instrument practical for live on-stage performance, keyboardists such as Yes' Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson featured the synthesizer prominently in their shows and recordings, as did Genesis' Tony Banks, playing on an ARP synthesizer. 11 While the synthesizer was closely associated with progressive rock in the I 970s, a wide range of rock musicians made use of it, from Edgar Winter and Stevie That Axe, Eugene": Toward a Theory of Textural Rhythm in Early Progressive Rock', in Progressive Rock Reconsidered, 65-90. 1° For a comprehensive discussion of recording and its role in rock music, see Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001 ). 11 For a comprehensive historical account of the development of the synthesizer, see Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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Wonder to Joe Walsh and Steve Miller. The synthesizer was also picked up by jazz-rock fusion bands in the 1970s, with Return to Forever's Chick Corea, Weather Report's Joe Zawinul, the Mahavishnu Orchestra's Jan Hammer, and Herbie Hancock all using various Moogs and ARPs. Virtuosity

As the 1960s unfolded, many rock musicians increasingly strove to be the best players they could possibly be. The Beatles and Bob Dylan provided the model for musicians who wrote and performed their own music, always playing on their own records, but it was probably the friendly competition between guitarists Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s that established the idea that a rock musician could also be a virtuoso musician. And as late 1960s rock listeners turned more toward listening carefully to the music, it became possible for rock musicians to build a reputation based on their instrumental prowess. Rockers interested in developing their technical skills often turned to classical and jazz styles for models of instrumental virtuosity. Under the influence of John Coltrane, The Byrds' Roger McGuinn had quoted the jazz saxophonist's 'India' in the band's hit single 'Eight Miles High'. Hendrix and Clapton both improvised freely in live performance, blending blues elements with modal jazz. San Francisco bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were well known for their extended jams onstage - something the Beatles nor the Stones had never really done but that the more improvisatory bands embraced with great enthusiasm, as did their fans. Progressive rockers were also very influenced by jazz, but these musicians also imitated classical-music virtuosity. The classical guitar interludes of Steve Howe of Yes or Steve Hackett of Genesis seemed inspired by the playing of Andres Segovia and Julian Bream, while the grand piano stylings of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman left no doubt that they were drawing on classical practices and techniques, with Wakeman throwing some pipe organ into the mix. Following in the footsteps of bassist Paul McCartney and the Who's John Entwhisle, who had developed an approach to the electric bass that allowed it to play a more melodic role than it had before, Yes' Chris Squire, Genesis' Michael Rutherford, and Gentle Giant's Ray Shulman further raised the bar for technical command and made the bass into an equal partner with the lead guitar. Drummers Carl Palmer, Yes' Bill Bruford, and Genesis' Phil Collins were among the many who likewise raised the technical standard for percussionists, often adding orchestral percussion instruments to their increasingly large drum kits. 12 While the progressive rockers were those most associated with promoting virtuosity, a certain pride in one's level of technical achievement was a relatively consistent attitude among most rock musicians ofthe first half of the 1970s. Even ifthe music some played was 12 For a discussion of virtuosity in progressive rock, see Edward Macan's Rocking the Classics, especially pp. 46-51. See also my 'Jazz-Rock? Rock-Jazz? Stylistic Crossover in Late-1970s American Progressive Rock', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, 113-34. In his Chapter Two, Macan discusses the musical features of seventies progressive rock using a different grouping of features than I use, though Macan makes no claims beyond the stylistic boundaries of English progressive rock and so is making a different kind of argument than I am offering here. For a consideration of virtuosity in heavy metal, see Robert Walser, 'Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity', in his Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993 ), 57-107.

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less overtly ambitious and complicated than progressive rock, most players wanted to be respected as experienced professionals, and nothing would have been worse than to have been considered an amateur or hack. This would change drastically with the arrival of punk and new wave, which reacted strongly against this kind of professionalism. Fans too wanted to think of their favorite bands as skilled players, and many local musicians worked diligently in garages and basements to copy every lick and nuance of their favorite recording, fueling the sales of magazines and musical equipment that could help them realize that goal. Perhaps no element captures this aspect of the hippie aesthetic quite like the 'studio musician' -a player with excellent music-reading and improvisational skills who could walk into a recording session and nail his or her part quickly and efficiently. This level of highly skilled professionalism was widely respected and admired; Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had been session players before forming Led Zeppelin and Rick Wakeman had played many sessions before joining Yes. Steely Dan was known for their use of the top session players in New York and Los Angeles, as were Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. The virtuosity and professional conscientiousness of progressive rockers was thus in many ways only the most obvious instance of something that permeated much rock music in the 1970s.

Lyrics and 'big ideas' As rock became more ambitious - stylistically, technologically, and music-technically musicians and fans of the style were no longer satisfied with lyrics that focused on sentimental romantic themes. The naiVe love songs of rock's first decade began to be replaced by songs with increasingly serious-minded lyrics. With only a few exceptions, lyrics of most rock and roll from the 1950s and early 1960s had dealt with issues of teen life: romance, cars, dancing, parents, etc. 13 Some of Leiber and Stoller's songs for the Coasters engage issues of race and social concern, while others are ambitious in that they attempt to tell a story (borrowing from Broadway musicals). While 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow', a 1960 song penned and produced by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, engages issues ofteenage sexuality in a way that was daring in its day, and some of Chuck Berry's songs ('Memphis' especially) betray a new concern for interesting lyrics, most rock lyrics remained fairly tame, even if the performances are often much more provocative. 14 The change in pop lyrics can be traced to the emergence of Bob Dylan in the mid 1960s, and to Dylan's transformation of folk music into the singersongwriter style. Folk lyrics had often dealt with issues of social and communal concern, but Dylan began to craft lyrics with a more personal, poetic, and philosophical focus, turning the 13 The pop songs of the American Tin Pan Alley composers from the first half of the twentieth century could also be quite saccharine and innocuous, though there were also some extremely clever and innovative lyrics as well. Most of these songs never seriously engaged the kinds of issues and concerns we will consider with regard to hippie rock, however. For a comprehensive survey of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, see Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 14 The widespread practice in the 1950s of covering rhythm and blues hits for a pop audience while changing the sexually suggestive lyrics serves to reinforce the notion that there were limits that pop lyrics could probably not cross. Some lyrics did sneak through, however, such as Little Richard's 'Long Tall Sally' or 'Good Golly Miss Molly', and the 'one-eyed cat' in Bill Haley's cover of 'Shake, Rattle and Roll'.

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'we' of folk community-building (as his detractors would famously quip) into the 'me' of individual expression. If the Beatles influenced Dylan to turn to the electric guitar in 1965, Dylan certainly influenced the Beatles to get more serious about their lyrics and soon John Lennon was confessing his unhappiness in 'Help!' and Paul McCartney was contemplating alienation in 'Eleanor Rigby'. By the 1967 Summer of Love, rock lyrics frequently strove to be 'relevant', as 'She Loves You' became 'All You Need is Love'. In some progressive rock of the 1970s, lyrics deal with social, cultural, and political issues, offering a sometimes blistering critique of government, institutions, and social practices. Jethro Tull provide some of the most obvious examples in this regard: their 1971 album Aqualung offers a sustained attack on the church and its uncomprehending duplicity in the face of poverty and homelessness. Thick as a Brick from 1972 continues this critical attitude by focusing on provincial values and cultural practices in England. A gentler and perhaps more arcane critique of British culture can be found in Genesis' Selling England by the Pound, while 'The Musical Box' weaves a dark, mischievous, and surreal tale of Victorian perversity among the British aristocracy. Other progressive-rock lyrics deal with spirituality, though almost never from the point of view of institutional Christianity. Eastern philosophy and the 'wisdom of the ancients' are favorite themes, and here Yes' 'Close to the Edge' (influenced by Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha) and Tales From Topographic Oceans (influenced by Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi) might serve as representative examples, though Jethro Tull's A Passion Play deals with life after death and Genesis' 'Supper's Ready' contemplates the apocalypse. Other progressive-rock lyrics deal with fantasy and science fiction themes, often with social and cultural critiques gently concealed beneath the surface. Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery provide clear instances, the first dealing with a struggle between comic-book-style fantasy beasts, while the second flashes into a dark, computer-controlled future. Dylan made an art of what he called the 'finger wagging' song - a song that levels a direct and often unrelenting criticism on some target. This approach is picked up by the Beatles and the Kinks, among many others, and also by the Who's Pete Townshend, whose Tommy is an extended indictment of what he takes to be the superficiality of hippie culture. Ian Anderson's lyrics for Jethro Tull are probably the most consistent example of progressive-rock finger wagging, and can at times be quite aggressive and direct, as in 'My God'. Among other styles in 1970s rock that contained ambitious lyrics, the singer-songwriters probably provide the clearest parallels. The music of Paul Simon, James Taylor, Billy Joel, and Elton John, for instance, depend on the poetic power of the lyrics, which are often the focus of the song. And while these kinds of songs often deal with personal feelings and reflections, they can also engage cultural and philosophical issues, as in Neil Young's 'Needle and the Damage Done' or Harry Chapin's 'Cat's in the Cradle', for instance. The lyrics of rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger, or Alice Cooper and David Bowie, are often rich in imagery and ambitious in scope, further reinforcing the idea that the ambitiousness of progressive-rock lyrics is a feature of much other hippie rock.

Concept albums and conceptual music The tum toward serious-minded lyrics, combined with the growth of musical ambitiousness, led to the rise of the concept album in rock music. Many fans and critics think of the Beatles'

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Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the first important concept album in rock music. While John Lennon denied that any of his songs on that album were written with the Sgt. Pepper 'concept' in mind, it is nonetheless true that the album was understood to be a concept album, and soon many other bands and artists were imitating it. The most useful definition of the concept album views it as a collection of songs that somehow tell a story or at least address the same general topic or set of topics- the 'concept' of the album. In the case of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the unifying idea is that the Beatles portray the members of this fictional town band, and the album unfolds a make-believe show, beginning with an introductory song in which the audience is welcomed, and leading directly into the number by Billy Shears (Ringo). The concept breaks off at this point, though the introductory number returns at the end to introduce the final track, 'A Day in the Life'. Album packaging added a new dimension to concept albums, with cover art and illustrations playing a central role and sometimes providing information that makes the story or unifying themes clearer or more obvious. The elaborate packaging of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band served as a model for later albums such as Tommy and Thick as a Brick. The distinctive covers ofYes and Pink Floyd albums of the 1970s- designed by Roger Dean and Hipgnosis respectively- were central to the experience of the music they contained. Progressive rockers warmly embraced the concept album, so much so that a progressive rock album that is not a concept album is probably more the exception than the rule. Among the many that could be listed, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, Pink Floyd's Dark Side ofthe Moon, Rick Wakeman's The Six Wives ofHenry VIII, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus are classic examples. But progressive rockers were not the only ones producing concept albums. David Bowie, the Who, Alice Cooper, Meat Loaf, Queen, Heart, Todd Rundgren, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, George Clinton, the Eagles and many others released concept albums during the 1970s. In many ways, the concept album reinforced psychedelic practice, allowing music to act as a kind of 'trip', and so it is thus not surprising that so many groups whose musical roots were in 1960s rock found the concept album idea appealing. Some groups even used their live shows to further extend an album's concept, sometimes with props, lights, and images, but also at times by acting songs out in a theatrical manner. Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Alice Cooper were perhaps the best known for this, but it was Kiss that took rock theater to its most extravagant point by the end of the decade. Even for those 1970s bands and artists who did not release concept albums, the album remained an important aesthetic context for their music. In many ways, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band initiated the era of 'album-oriented rock', which celebrated the idea that the album as a whole is more important than any single song on it. Before the overwhelming success of Sgt. Pepper, singles were central to a band's commercial success; after Sgt. Pepper, it was the album that mattered most.

The Hippie Aesthetic and Rock's History We have now returned to the point from which this discussion began, and to my two central claims for interpreting rock's history: the first of these is that the hippie aesthetic helps us to understand rock music from 1966-1980 as a continuous body of music. From the psychedelic experimentalism and eclecticism of the late 1960s, a wide variety of styles emerged and developed throughout the 1970s, in many cases separating out and refining

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stylistic characteristics of psychedelic music that had previously coexisted but which now became markers of new and distinct styles within rock. This interpretation differs from most other accounts, which tend to separate late 1960s music off from 1970s rock, celebrating the former while remaining ambiguous at best about the latter. It is the hippie aesthetic that unifies this music, in terms of the attitudes of both musicians and listeners. It also helps us understand how punk, new wave, and disco challenged hippie rock at the end of the 1970s, and provides a context for understanding why rock fans and musicians reacted so strongly against these newer styles, which seemed to negate crucial elements ofthe hippie aesthetic. My second claim is more controversial: because progressive rock is that style that most thoroughly and completely embraces the hippie aesthetic, it deserves a central place in discussions of 1970s rock, and it certainly merits a far more central position than most critics and historians have been willing to grant it thus far. In many ways, progressive rock is the clearest heir of 1960s psychedelia, and it is thus crucial in tracing the impact of psychedelia on the music that followed it. Perhaps because it is so clearly a product of its time, progressive rock has resisted the kind of cultural recycling that other styles have experienced in the past couple of decades. Since the mid 1990s and fuelled in large part by the development of the Internet, an enthusiastic progressive rock underground scene has produced new bands, magazines, websites, and international festivals. Original 1970s bands such as Yes and Jethro Tull still tour, though they no longer play as many stadiums as they once did. Tribute bands abound worldwide, with Gabriel-era Genesis groups especially playing to packed houses across Europe and North America. Still, progressive rock remains a style too strongly marked by the hippie aesthetic to be appropriated for other uses. While progressive rock may have gone underground in the period after 1980, elements of the hippie aesthetic have re-emerged in often surprising ways. The clearest continuation of the hippie aesthetic can be found in 1980s heavy metal, where virtuosity, use of classical music, concept albums, and ambitious lyrics remained important. The ambitious nature of concept albums also returned in music videos by high-profile artists and bands such as Michael Jackson, the Eurythmics, and Madonna, where the concept of the album was replaced by the concept of the video. Serious minded and poetic lyrics remain a feature of much rock music since the 1970s, though less frequently addressing 'big' issues in direct ways, perhaps in an attempt to avoid being dubbed 'pretentious'. The individual elements of the hippie aesthetic are thus not restricted to music of the 1966-1980 period; indeed, certain of these elements can be found both before and after this era. It is rather the combination of these elements that defines the hippie aesthetic and allows us to posit a relatively unified stylistic period in rock's history- one with progressive rock at the center.

[5] Consuming Nature: The Grateful Dead's Performance of an AntiCommercial Counterculture NADYA ZIMMERMAN In 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, a book that was widely popular with the San Francisco counterculture of the late 1960s. A futuristic fantasy, the novel depicts a horrifying totalitarian world of twenty-four-hour surveillance, complete mechanization, test-tube babies, and enforced cultural conformity. Amid this narrative, Huxley offers advice on how to stop civilization's progress toward such a potential apocalypse-"[ do] anything not to consume, [go] Back to Nature." 1 Huxley's narrative enforces a dialectical relationship between consumerism and symbolic freedom in order to guarantee the success of Brave New World's thesis. The tangible prospect of a technology-driven, inhuman future can only be stopped by a retreat to the utopia offered by nature, and this retreat to nature can only be achieved by not consuming. Huxley's instruction-reject consumer culture by returning to natureis not necessarily reflexive: in other words, a rejection of consumer culture does not require a return to nature. While composers such as Stockhausen have relied on technology to define themselves as being at the forefront of an anticommercial avant-garde, musical technology in popular music is often associated with commercialism because of the music's consumer appeal. As a consumable product of culture rather than of nature, technology plays a complicated role for cultures invested in popular music. As Raymond Williams explains, "one of the most powerful uses of nature has been in [the] selective sense of goodness and innocence ... nature Nadya Zimmerman received a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Liberal Studies department at Antioch University. She is currently working on Beyond Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: Musical Personas of the San Francisco Counterculture (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

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is what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago-a hedgerow or a desert-it will usually be included as natural." 2 When the things that "man has not made" (or made "long enough ago") signify "goodness" and "innocence," then a technological culture, such as the late-1960s counterculture seeking to disengage from consumerism, plays a precarious game of construction. This matrix of elements-nature, technology, consumerism-was key to the late-1960s San Francisco counterculture. To refuse allegiance to materialist values and refuse participation in mass society did not automatically imply a rejection of consumer capitalism. Could one be unassailable by popular consumer culture while being no stranger to technology and consumption? Nature became a mediator of sorts, as the counterculture systematically obscured its very real reliance on technological advancements and capitalist structures of mainstream 1960s America via a complex and, often contradictory, engagement with them. While technology was ambiguously coded, depending on whether it was deemed a consumable commodity or "naturalized" by its context, nature, too, came in a variety of discursive forms, allowing the counterculture to interact with commercial culture and disguise its own consumerism. For the people who enjoyed the safe haven of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district before it became a media spectacle during the 1967 Summer of Love, Huxley's advice of "do anything not to consume, go back to nature" appeared to be an insoluble contradiction. Instead, the insular counterculture of 1966-67 constructed, identified with, and consumed a congeries of natural signifiers in its attempts to appear noncommercial. Regardless of political bias, historians of the 1960s almost always depict the era in terms of oppositional forces. Conservative columnist George Will juxtaposes protests of the 1960s performed "in bus terminals," "at lunch counters," and "in voter registration drives" with the "old system." Historian Todd Gitlin explains the "quest for personal freedom" as a means to face the "enemy" of "repression." Activist Abe Peck views the various sociopolitical movements as "rejecting both an imperial foreign policy and a conformist way of life." 3 Descriptions of the type cited above shape the field of 1960s historiography; not surprisingly, the counterculture is incorporated into these historical narratives, its putative "agenda" outlined in the same oppositional terms used to shape the 1960s as a whole. In his 1969 account of the counterculture, Theodore Roszak contended that protesting "the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and hard-core poverty" required "old-style politicking," whereas the counterculture's interests in "the psychology of alienation, oriental mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and communitarian experiments" stepped outside what he dubbed the technocracy. Roszak denied the kind of dialectical process (thesis I antithesis I synthesis) that most post-1960s historiography articulates: the

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counterculture "refuses" (rather than "opposes/' "resists," or "revolts against") the mainstream's "cold-blooded rape of our human sensibilities."4 The principal shapers of the San Francisco counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury district in the mid-1960s wanted to promote a notion of unified community out of heterogeneous references. Diverse countercultural figureheads (including acid guru Timothy Leary, writer and Acid Test originator Ken Kesey, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and psychologist/ spiritualist Alan Watts) gave credence to a countercultural worldview of stimulation in the moment, culled from a mix of sources. Juxtaposed with the sociopolitical motivations of young 1960s activists, this worldview might appear nai:ve; yet, like those in the antiwar movement and civil rights struggles, participants in the counterculture also had deepseated doubts about the "establishment." While the civil rights and free speech movements aimed to change specific aspects of society, the 1960s counterculture tended to negate what was perceived as mainstream. For Haight-Ashbury residents who wanted immediate gratification and transformative experiences in the 1960s, a chaotic mix of elements was available, making the counterculture vulnerable to media co-optation. Refusal of the technocracy and disengagement from the mainstream were transformed into a fixed countercultural sensibility while HaightAshbury became a consumer spectacle. The 1967 Summer of Love led to articles in Time, Newsweek, and Life, spreading a countercultural worldview while bringing visitors in on tour buses. Thousands of tourists and drifters came to experience the Haight-Ashbury district, but because they came as onlookers, they had no investment in the community that had been established. The countercultural world view became reified as an ideology and an easy life of transgression and indulgence became normalized. In 1965 Bob Dylan broke away from his acoustic past to "go electric" at the Newport Folk Festival. As is well known, Dylan's use of amplification and an electric guitar shocked listeners in part because folk-based protest music had been previously associated with the "naturalness" of acoustic sounds. 5 Dylan's break ushered in amplification and electronics as a mainstay of folk-rock groups and psychedelic rock bands across the country. And as the United States escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War, using technological weaponry on a massive scale against a largely agrarian and less elaborately armed guerrilla force, the aggressive amplified sound of the counterculture had a particular resonance with these increasingly destructive historical circumstances. But promoters, advertisers, and critics often downplayed the music's connection to technology, keeping the counterculture detached from what might be considered mainstream signifiers. Performances at Bill Graham's San Francisco Fillmore Auditorium, for example, featured bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson

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Airplane, well stocked with electric musical instruments and elaborate state-of-the-art amplification systems, playing against a backdrop of strobe lights, colored light shows, and enlarged photographic images displayed by multiple slide projectors. Despite the electronic mediation of such performances, many critics perceived, or at least depicted, a different, more bucolic scene. During his extended stay in the HaightAshbury district in 1967, Village Voice reporter Richard Goldstein offered the following description of the "San Francisco sound": The big surprise in this music has nothing to do with electronics or some zany new camp. Performers in this city have knocked all that civility away. They are down in the dark, grainy roots .... The sound of the Grateful Dead, or Moby Grape, or Country Joe and the Fish, is jug band scraping against jazz.... Their music, they insist, is a virgin forest, uncharted and filled with wildlife. This unwillingness to add technological effect is close to the spirit of folk music before Dylan electrified it. 6 In part, Goldstein's assessment is based on a comparison between the pop I experimental electronic music scenes in Los Angeles and on the East Coast and the stylistic eclecticism of the San Francisco sound. Goldstein accurately observes that "added technological effects," such as tape loops and electronically synthesized sounds, were rare in the counterculture's music. Yet to insist that the music's "surprise" attributes had "nothing to do with electronics" and then proceed to paraphrase approvingly the notion that the music was "uncharted virgin forest," seems critically suspect and ideologically nai:ve at best. Also incongruous is Goldstein's likening of the countercultural sound to "the spirit of folk music before Dylan electrified it," given that Dylan's electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was one of its pivotal precursors. Yet if technology, in this particular scenario, represents commercial artifice, then the technologically mediated music of the counterculture was in danger of being dismissed as fake, "unnatural" showmanship. Critics like Goldstein were in a position to rescue countercultural music from the appearance of a commercial commodity, disguising its connection to technology with naturalizing descriptive language. Ironically, the counterculture's allegiance to an anticommercial image-however manufactured-would prove to be one of its most marketable commodities, profitable for the record companies, advertisers, the underground press, and countercultural musicians. Major record-label distribution helped to spread this image and, consequently, reinforce its ideological implications across the country. But this took some maneuvering, especially on the part of some of the musicians. As Clive Davis, president of Arista Records, recalled at the time of the first Monterey Pop Festival in 1967: "the artists felt that it would look phony and be

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unrepresentative to their followers if there was any hint of interest in money or acquisition or competition." In turn, artists put on their own phony "rap" of disregard for profit. Davis goes on to remark that there were exceptions: "some groups, the Dead being one, were noneconomically motivated." 7 The band that Davis deemed as "noneconomically motivated" was the same one that enjoyed social and economic success for thirty years, while simultaneously being blessed with labels such as "true community musicians" and "the quintessential countercultural rock band." Like some other late-960s San Francisco rock bands, the Grateful Dead advertised an image of itself as a collection of anticommercial unprofessionals; people such as Davis were convinced by this image. At Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, beginning in 1965, the Trips Festival of 1966, San Francisco Mime Troupe shows, the Human Be-In in January 1967, their open-door ranch in Novato, and their shared home at 710 Ashbury Street in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury District, the band members became the core of San Francisco's countercultural community in the mid-1960s. The high-tech Grateful Dead, however, went far beyond their San Franciscan musical contemporaries in crafting a "green/' communal image. And perhaps they had to take extreme measures with their image in order to balance the extent to which they indulged in cutting-edge musical technology. They traded upon the ambiguous relationship between commercialism and technology, with elaborate natural referents as their bargaining chips. The band, for example, often gave free performances in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park on the edge of the Haight-Ashbury district. Centered in the middle of San Francisco's urban landscape, the park is a huge garden, a green space that can be accessed without leaving the city. For these performances, the Dead often collaborated with a group named the Diggers, who handed out free food and supplies. From late 1966 until mid-1968, the Diggers served as Haight-Ashbury's social workers, city planners, street entertainers, and welfare providers. Associating themselves by their name with the original seventeenth-century English farming radicals, the Haight-Ashbury Diggers orchestrated elaborate street happenings, produced and distributed hundreds of leaflets, and transformed the Haight-Ashbury district into a "free city" with several stores that gave away clothing, household items, and food. The contrast between the original Diggers and the Haight-Ashbury Diggers is notable. Neither planners nor builders, the seventeenth-century group was made up of farmers, radical in ideology but practical in their till-the-soit back-to-nature realization of ideas. While using the same name allowed the Haight-Ashbury group to be associated with a "back to the earth" philosophy, there wasn't anything particularly naturat such as farmers or farmland (neither of which existed within the San Francisco city borders), about the group. On a practicallevet the

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San Francisco Diggers attempted to make living in the Haight-Ashbury district free of charge for its residents, yet there were also ideological implications to their "free city" agenda. Dominick Cavallo observes that "the Digger belief that everything should be free was inseparable from a naive and rather traditional faith in the power of American abundance and technological ingenuity ... [They] assumed American enterprise and technology could create unlimited abundance and leisure for everyone."8 In reality, it wasn't nature that enabled the counterculture to "liberate" itself from capitalism's work-buy-sell agenda;" American abundance" was distributed to Haight-Ashbury residents for free by a nonfarming group in the middle of a highly commercial city that had been founded on violent and scarring resource extraction. The "anticommercialism" of the counterculture's "natural" associations had deep contradictions. That countercultural participants wore Native American attire, ruffled Edwardian clothing, and used Levi's jeans (all obtained for free at the Diggers' stores) as a way to reject the cookie-cutter fashions of the modern American middle class made them no less invested in the consumerism of a free, democratic, and capitalist America. The Diggers were interested in the countercultural community as a tabula rasa of American freedom, and the Grateful Dead, in many ways, provided the aesthetic backdrop to this stage of commercially liberated abundance. "In 1967, the Grateful Dead's equipment weighted thirteen hundred pounds and fit into [a] van." By May 18, 1968, at "the Santa Clara Fairgrounds show, it weighed around six thousand pounds and still fit in a van, a much larger one." 9 Clearly, the Dead had a fervent appetite for technology-an appetite constructively linked to their Digger-like notion of freedom and illustrated by the story of the Grateful Dead at the first Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. The band lobbied for the festival to be a nonprofit affair and agreed to play only if the proceeds went to a worthy cause. 10 On this score, festival coordinators were reassuring; however, during the festival itself, the band faced another profiteering twist. When it came to signing film and record releases, the Dead refused. Though they had stepped outside of the media loop, the Dead still made their position of noncommercialism known. They took CBS and the Fender Corporation-ostensibly the festival's corporate sponsors-to task. 11 CBS and Fender had lent a million dollars of equipment to the festival in return for free advertising. The Dead sent a telegram to the corporations and a copy to critic Ralph Gleason, who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. With Gleason's help, they advertised their intentions: on the last day in Monterey, the band would "liberate" some of the "corporate" equipment-in order to provide a week of free concerts to the people of San Francisco-and then return it when they were done. The Dead's fantasy scenario became a reality. On the last night of the festival,

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the equipment was left unguarded because members of the Dead's crew had given LSD to the security people and therefore were able to load out the equipment. The week of free performances that followed in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park was a huge success. The band built a makeshift stage, patched extension chords to a nearby house for electricity, borrowed a generator, coordinated with both the Diggers, who were dispensing food, and the Hell's Angels, who were guarding the equipment. When they were done, they telegraphed CBS and the Fender Corporation (which had become one in a corporate merger) and returned the equipment. Carol Brightman describes the whole incident as "a guerrilla action": it "served to polish the Dead's image as rock 'n' roll Robin Hoods, dedicated to the principle of free music-of liberating the surplus of the rich to blow the minds of the young." 12 In one sense, Brightman's analogy is right on the mark: Golden Gate Park as a makeover of Robin Hood's forest allowed the Dead to share nature freely to their listeners. Such incidents substantially reinforced the Dead's image as the people's band, while the natural setting simultaneously helped to downplay the band's consumption of the very corporate symbols they purportedly despised. While the successful, fun, communal performances in a beautiful outdoor milieu represented freedom and liberation, the corporations that produced, sold, and bought the technology became negatively branded as perpetrating consumer culture. The fact that the Dead were using that very same sophisticated musical technology to create their music received minimal critical attention. In one sense, the cultural signifiers of naturalness drew the electric guitar-centered music into the fold. As Philip Deloria remarks, appropriating natural signifiers allowed the counterculture to be distant from modernity-carrying the authority of the original America-yet reap its benefits. 13 A similar dance with mainstream commercial and technological culture characterized the Dead's own business dealings. The Grateful Dead decided to give each member of the band an equal voice in decision-making. As major record companies began to court various San Francisco bands in late 1966, the Dead held off from signing while demanding total control over their content and production, titles, and graphic designs. Warner Brothers finally agreed to meet the Dead's demands for unlimited studio time, complete publishing rights, and an unusual approach to royalties. Albums were filled with short songs that could easily fit the AM radio station format, then record companies, commercial radio, and the music industry increased their profits when royalties were based on the number of tracks per album. 14 The Grateful Dead, however, insisted that their royalties be based on the total amount of musical time per album side. In part, the Grateful Dead's negotiations to put artistic control in the hands of the musicians helped maintain their anticorporate, community-

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based image. Yet given that many of the Dead's songs included extended improvised sections, thus making them unsuitable for radio play, their negotiations were equally concerned with forming a new industry standard within which their music could make money. This double agenda also held true for live concerts. When the band performed in venues requiring ticket purchase, they assumed control of the concert arrangements. By offering a reduced single price for all tickets and first-come-first-serve seating, they welcomed the community and profited at the same time, often packing auditoriums to three times their designated capacity. By rejecting the industry standards of record companies, taking economic control of their performances, and staging incidents such as the "equipment liberation," the Grateful Dead enacted their aggressive noncommercialism. In this sense, they were revolutionaries in their attempt to fight corporate control. But the Dead's anticommercialism was made much easier because the band never had to forfeit their stock of musical technology in protest. In other words, what made the music business so commercial had far more to do with the corporate profiteering motive than with the actual technologies used to produce records and make sounds. Thus the Grateful Dead never did have to fight the commercialism of the music industry by rejecting production or instrumental technology; instead they showed their noncommercialism by doing what they wanted, giving away and indulging in "nature" for free, and not conforming to the industry's capitalist demands. This history continues to offer up a host of ironies. The ideological and moral implications of the Dead's "natural" image often conflicted with the ambiguously juxtaposed elements that went into its construction. Ambiguity is implicit, for example, in the basic identity suggested by the band's name. In the underground media, performance events, and liner notes, the name and album iconography garnered a far more complex web of associations than those evoked by the imagery of skeletons and death that adorns most of their albums. Gary Shank retells one popular association-the ancient folk legend of the "grateful dead man": We learn of a hero who finds the creditors are refusing to permit the burial of a corpse until the dead man's debts have been paid. The hero spends his last penny to ransom the dead man's body and to secure his burial. Later, in the course of his adventures, he is joined by a mysterious stranger who agrees to help him in all his endeavors. This stranger is the grateful dead man. The only condition which the grateful dead man makes when he agrees to help the hero is that all winnings which the latter makes shall be equally divided. 15 This legend suggests that the Grateful Dead's image was, in part, culled from myths of a distant egalitarian past-as if they were part of an imag-

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ined authentic folk world. The Grateful Dead pacified what had been a serious religious fascination with death in medieval times and transformed it into a light, even comical, take on death with the playful skeletons on their album covers and poster art that can also be associated with Mexican Day of the Dead festivities. 16 Umberto Eco suggests that certain modern American communal spaces, such as Disneyland and DisneyWorld, exude a "medieval consciousness"-that is, "a total lack of distinction between aesthetic objects and mechanical objects. All [is] ruled by a taste for gaudy color and a notion of light as a physical element of pleasure." 17 Indeed, the Grateful Dead's concerts in the late 1960s appeared to exhibit such a consciousness, with jugglers in velvety peaked caps, circles of drummers and guitarists, Coleman stoves for communal food, and bright, tie-dyed costumes. Such events allowed the populist aura of a time and space long ago to be made tangible to the counterculture. In Raymond Williams's terms, their neo-medievalism can be understood, in part, as a stand-in for nature. In the same way that Renaissance fairs, medieval sword-fight reenactments, and Dungeons and Dragons game groups provide an ideological, if temporary, haven from modern technological capitalism, the counterculture's neo-medievalism functioned as the antithesis to mechanical civilization. Ironically, the Dead's concerts more closely resembled an idealized capitalist marketplace-offering music, handmade jewelry, and attire to buy and consume. Such retreats to "nature" implicitly negotiate the relationships among American abundance, technological progress, and the environment. In the nineteenth century, America was fervently colonizing uncharted territory-manifest destiny linked moral and economic progress with Western expansion. In part, this progress was enabled by human control over nature and native people-namely, the transformation of wilderness and desert into cultivated farms, and then larger cities. At the continent's western edge lay San Francisco. The city's population increased from 1,000 in 1848 to 30,000 five years later, exemplifying the "success" of manifest destiny's agenda. 18 While individualism and Western expansion had, to a certain extent, been enabled by taming nature, the human development of this conquered Western wilderness seemed to mark the end of the line. The West was now being stifled by cities and other ever-increasing advancements of human civilization. While notions of American democratic and capitalistic progress have often been symbolized by a conquest narrative that has transformed nature from wilderness, to rural farm life, to urban landscape, how was the counterculture (and the Grateful Dead) to negotiate this narrative and still appear to celebrate nature's freedom? Two songs by the Grateful Dead, "Sugar Magnolia" and "The Eleven," illustrate how and why the counterculture employed stand-ins for nature

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in such democratic conquest narratives. The ways in which technology is marked as commercial or natural play an important part in the Grateful Dead's musical construction of an American counterculture. "Sugar Magnolia" was a mainstay in the Grateful Dead's concert repertoire. The song was considered in mainstream popular culture to be a characteristic example of the Grateful Dead's "countercultural" music, although its first appearance on vinyl was on the 1970 American Beauty album. "Sugar Magnolia" and the other nine songs on American Beauty are described in the album's liner notes as "blues, country, and folk-styled originals," intended to reflect the album's theme of American roots.l 9 The song tells the story of a man wooing his lover in an idyllic pastoral landscape. As advertised, "Sugar Magnolia" possesses many of the musical trappings of an early twentieth-century folk ballad-a strophic form, a comfortable 4/4 meter, clearly articulated lyrics, consistent dynamics, simple melodic vocabulary, a memorable refrain, conversational exchange between solo voice and group, and repeated harmonic structure. In addition, the song's timbral effects and instrumental riffs allude to country music, while the underlying harmonic structure derives from the blues. The narrative of "Sugar Magnolia" is relayed in the first person by a man expounding on his lover's many positive traits, and describing the activities and feelings he likes to share with her. When the song begins, the listener is not yet aware that "Magnolia" signifies anything but a flower. Two guitars and percussion play a five-bar instrumental introduction in the key of A. Broken into three short phrases of two measures, two measures, and one measure, each phrase emphasizes the song's harmonic and melodic grounding in a tonic/ dominant alteration. In a slightly laid-back tempo, the three phrases linger harmonically on V and then pull back to I with a twangy country music-inflected melodic line. The lyrics begin: "Sugar Magnolia, blossoms blooming I Head's all empty and I don't care." Like the" American roots" that are tidily encapsulated in the instrumental introduction, the lyrics speak to something rural, something distant from modern civilization. Nature is unencumbered, as the blossoms freely bloom and the mind is left unrestricted by rational thought. The music reinforces the imagery of the lyrics: the vocal line, harmonized in thirds with flute chirps in the background, exemplifies musical characteristics that have become iconic of nature. The instrumental introduction and first line situate the listener in the natural world; the next line begins to fill out the details of the setting: "Saw my baby down by the river I Knew she'd have to come up soon for air." When the narrator sees his "baby down by the river," the harmony drops "down" to a C-sharp minor chord and "comes up for air" with a pastoral IV-I cadence. The musical setting of these first two lines returns

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throughout the song and serves as the A part of the song's form. Based on the blues, the overall form follows the pattern AAB AAAB AA. After the first two lines, A returns again: "Sweet blossom come on, under the willow I we can have high times if you'll abide I We can discover the wonders of nature I rolling in the rushes down by the riverside." This second stanza allows the story's idyllic scene to become clearer, while simultaneously conflating images that subtly, even underhandedly, tell another story. On the one hand, the repetition of A, the ongoing gentle folk-like vocal production, and the alteration between harmonized and solo vocal line make the setting serene, comfortable, and familiar. A euphemism for sex ("we can discover the wonders of nature" by "rolling in the rushes"), for example, sounds like frolicking fun in this pastoral, folk-like milieu. On the other hand, the easy flow of music allows nature and woman to become one and the same. The magnolia blossom of the first line is transformed into the narrator's lover: like the river, the willow, and the rushes, the woman is simply another untainted object of the natural landscape. Folk music-be it rural white country, urban folk music, or African American blues-plays an important role in shaping the representation of America in "Sugar Magnolia. One of the most enduring representations of "the folk" was shaped in relation to the radical Left of 1930s America: liberal political factions searched for a new set of values that had roots in precapitalist and anticapitalist sources. While some found these values in an affirmation of individualistic ideals, others turned to a socialist model that celebrated the seemingly cohesive life of an idealized small folk community. This communal context offered something comforting in relation to the increasing atomization of American society and often incorporated music into its collective "progressive" causes. 20 While the music of the 1930s radical Left was an integral part of union meetings, political rallies, and workers' strikes, its proletarian function has since been romanticized and has come to represent something untainted by commerce. Robert Cantwell argues that it is this "untainted" authenticity that contributed to the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. 21 Folk music's honesty of expression seemed the ideal alternative to a polished superficial culture of commodities, and those who listened to old-timey folk music could feel they were supporting an anticonsumerist agenda. Allusions to folk musics and folk myths proved to be a crucial resource for the counterculture's self-image. As in the music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the early 1960s folk revivalists, folk-like "simplicity" in countercultural music offered listeners an aural antithesis to the gimmickry of show business. Yet in contrast to their folk predecessors and contemporaries, countercultural bands included folk musics among many other musical styles-in so doing, they were freed from the social and cultural

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constraints of a single musical label, while appearing to have the power to tap the wells of an unmediated American spirit. Cantwell suggests that bands such as the Grateful Dead operated "in a cultural field that could still objectify the American identity ... a symbolic model of the American community visibly and audibly purified of all the bureaucratic, authoritarian, corporate, and commercial elements in American life, and yet somehow linked to the historical mythology that these institutions continued to advance as our founding narrative." 22 That "Sugar Magnolia" appropriates the folk in order to appear preindustrial, rural, and old-timey American must, to a certain extent, be a fabrication. The values of freedom and individualism that characterize a long-lost pastoral age are, in large part, the same values that fuel America's market-driven "democracy" today. A similar set of contradictions is present in the parallel between nature and woman. A utilitarian approach to the environment (in the form of cities, houses, technology, and industrialized agriculture) has often been marked as masculine, while the earth itself, and its preservation, has been coded as feminine. If one available model of American community was, in Cavallo's words, "family life in a rural town," then the masculine counterculture, in a sense, had to "domesticate" and "feminize" itself to fit the model.2 3 Aniko Bodroghkozy remarks that this transformation "involved focusing on the 'hippie chick.' Domesticating the counterculture might be an easier proposition if it could first be feminized." 24 If technology and environmental destruction symbolize urban man, his antithesis is the natural woman who preserves nature, refrains from violence, and produces life. Hence, to evoke nature as woman was to appear, at least on the surface, to be antimasculine, antimodern, and, in this case, antitechnology. While songs such as "Sugar Magnolia" offered the feminized aesthetic qualities that appeared to be missing in an increasingly utilitarian environment, nature was still accessed by things "man-made." The lyrics and musical narrative in "Sugar Magnolia" illustrate this point. The opening verses offer the listener a ringside seat to a man's courting ritual; he sees Magnolia from afar as part of nature, and wants to become one with her under the willows. The anticipation of this ritual is represented formally by A and A, then the third verse fits the standard blues form-the cathartic resolution of B. "She's got everything delightful I she's got everything I need I Takes the wheel when I'm seeing double I Pays my ticket when I speed." The blues form and vocal production enable the third verse to push the musical story forward. If, in the eyes of the male narrator, the woman represents nature, then woman is "everything" that he "needs." The next cycle through the AAB blues form begins: she "waits backstage while I sing to you I She can dance a Cajun rhythm I Jump like a

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Willys in four-wheel drive I She's a summer lover in spring, fall, and winter I She can make happy any man alive." "Sugar Magnolia" thus re-inscribes a masculine, utilitarian approach to nature. While the song uses folk, blues, and country to represent the naturalness of "America's roots," these sounds also constitute an unwavering musical disguise. Within this constant medium, the story is relayed through the man's perspective. In two respects, then, nature serves man. First, the musical setting allows the song to be situated in what Paul Gilroy has named the mythologized, "unchanging same" worlds of blues and folk. 25 In so doing, nature is manipulated to authenticate man as natural. Second, because we never hear Magnolia's own voice, she is constructed solely as man wants her to be in a nature-serves-man, utilitarian approach. If "Magnolia" (the woman) is a stand-in for nature, she is not only being explored by technology, she becomes the technology that serves man: "She can ... jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive." Magnolia is transformed into a truck, giving the man a "good ride." "Sugar Magnolia" feminizes the American pastoral and then betrays it. The eroticizing of technology (like the masculine, hormonal thrill of destruction using weapons of war) is an exaggeratedly masculinist way to use the feminine. Two-and-a-half minutes into "Sugar Magnolia," the vocal line leads into what the listener expects to be the concluding verse to the song: "Sometimes when the cuckoo's crying I When the moon is halfway down" is sung by a solo voice over a dominant harmony. Instead of a conclusive consequent phrase sung by the group over the tonic A, the song suddenly modulates up a whole step to B: the antecedent phrase that was seemingly headed toward resolution becomes a tool for modulation by sequence. "Sometimes when the night is dying" follows, using the same dominant harmonic structure and melodic pattern as the previous line, and again sung by a solo voice. As antecedent phrase in A major leads to antecedent phrase in B major, the "natural" course of musical events (antecedent to consequent, solo to group) is subverted. Man, not nature, is in control, as the group finally gives resolution with the consequent phrase, "I take me out and I wander aroooooound, I wander 'round"-appropriating nature's wandering freedom as his own. 26 If "Sugar Magnolia" represents a preindustrial, folk-like fantasy of nature that occurred early in the Grateful Dead's musical repertoire, the band "progressed" and conquered new ground using its modern technological tools, venturing into a postapocalyptic, chaotic wilderness that could be tamed. The Dead's 1968 album, Anthem of the Sun, for example, breaks new ground by featuring an entire side that is essentially electronic music. 27 Likewise, "The Eleven," from the band's 1969 Live/Dead album, ventures into uncharted territory in its array of eclectic features. 28 The track's heterogeneous mixture uses a circuitous form that eludes the

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listener as to the song's beginning and end, episodes of intricate metrical counterpoint, unpredictable harmonic motion, wildly juxtaposed melodic layers, and a narrative ripe with hallucinogenic imagery and allusions to the Bible. The title of "The Eleven" derives from the song's use of the unusual eleven-beat meter: each measure is broken into a fast grouping of 3-33-2. At the beginning of the song, however, the eleven-beat structure is hidden. For the first three minutes, metrical chaos unfolds, slipping in and out of 4/4 time. While this improvisatory whirlwind of cycling polyrhythms offers no well-defined melodic characters, it is not cacophonous or atonal. As with "Sugar Magnolia," this opening entertains bluesbased conventions that had become characteristic of the Grateful Dead's sound. The rhythm guitar and bass each play pentatonically derived motives, while the drum kit repeats cycles of rhythmic patterns. Like some traditional blues musicians who drop beats and shorten measures, the patterns in this opening similarly stretch metric boundaries. Here the patterns are shaped by additive processes: each of the three instruments adds notes to its particular motive to create an unpredictable new meter. Unlike a blues band, however, the three instruments develop their motives and patterns independently, withholding any possible collective goal toward which they might be building. In this sense, the opening musical depiction of vastness and chaotic space leaves no firm ground on which to stand. As if to test the listener's ability to discover order, we hear the lead guitar teasingly emerge and recede with clear melodic passages in the key of B. These blues-based riffs provide momentary focus, but their forceful attempts to push out into the open are repeatedly subsumed by the surrounding metrical and timbral instability. While this opening sounds nothing like signature Dead songs such as "Truckin"' or "Friend of the Devil," Brightman notes that "the sudden eruption of harmony in the midst of chaos [was] a leitmotif of the Grateful Dead's music." This "leitmotif" was so important to the band's relationship with their audience, she argues, that "when it was missing from a set or failed to incite wonder, the performance fell flat. [In these cases] there were no sudden flashes of insight into ... the cosmos-which might be memorialized in the line of a favorite song but originated in these moments."29 If the opening of "The Eleven" is engaged with a "leitmotif" that enables "insight into the cosmos," it stands in stark contrast to the comfortable, rural setting of "Sugar Magnolia." For the countercultural participant, it more likely resembled aspects of "free jazz" that were conspicuously broadcast on the same FM radio stations as San Francisco rock music. In the 1960s improvisational rock and experimental jazz were genres linked by critics, promoters, musicians, and the media as symbiotic in

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their chaotic nature. In 1966 Newsweek described the music of the San Francisco bands as having "the spark and spontaneity of a free-for-all jam session: Unlike most rock 'n' rollers, ... [these bands] improvise freely." Ralph Gleason, the jazz and rock critic who helped the Dead orchestrate their post-Monterey Pop "equipment liberation," remarked that the Dead was "really a jazz band." In 1967 critic Richard Goldstein wrote in the New York Times that fans heard jazz as rock and rock as jazz particularly when the music was full of sound meshes and improvisation. Finally, Bill Graham, the impresario at Haight-Ashbury's Fillmore Auditorium beginning in 1966, explained: "When we began ... we could prepare a bill like a well-rounded meal. Along with the rock headliner, we'd put a side order of blues or jazz on the menu-a B. B. King or Roland Kirk or Howlin' Wolf. Or we'd co-bill the Grateful Dead with Miles Davis. It was a righteous thing to do." 30 Not surprisingly, the Dead's bassist, Phil Lesh, and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia claimed that the music of jazz artists such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra fundamentally influenced their approach to musical experimentation. While folk music and descriptions of the outdoors served as explicit natural references, signifiers of late 1960s experimental jazz revealed the Grateful Dead's more covert engagement with nature. Albums such as Sun Ra's Janus and Coltrane's Stellar Regions and Ascension contributed to a conception of outer space as a territory waiting to be experienced by human beings, resonating with the counterculture's spirit of individualistic freedom. Sun Ra, for example, positioned himself as an Afro-alien, coming from space to reclaim the earth that had been taken from the African peoples. The counterculture, by appropriation, could similarly assume "space" (and then the earth) as a stand-in for nature. Of course, space could only be accessed with the latest technology: and whereas Sun Ra's technology-a rocket ship-was a means to reclaim a cultural space, the counterculture's technology was a masculinist thrust into uncharted natural territory. Could this sublime, uncharted chaos be tamed? Could the order of life once again be created out of the Primordial Ooze? The story of "The Eleven" is no foreigner to myths of origination. Intimations of a solid melodic character emerge from the chaotic opening, only to fall back in. 31 At last a melody emerges out of the fray, pieced together from its previous attempts. Soon the other instruments find a similar sense of order in their own patterns-an order that will ultimately unite all the instruments to produce a coherent narrative. The lead guitar wavers in and out of a 4/4 ostinato pattern until, at three minutes and twenty seconds, Jerry Garcia effortlessly transforms the same 4/4 ostinato into the song's eleven-beat riff. This rhythmic metamorphosis enables a harmonic modulation from B down to A. If, for the moment, we understand the main melodic protagonist as

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representative of do-it-yourself individualism, its grounding in an irregular eleven-beat marks it, at the same time, as modern. Phil Lesh, who studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in 1965, touted the band's experimental sound as "Dragon music-esoteric, asymmetrical music that could only be intellectualized by a few and then most inaccurately. It was truly cliche-free, uncontrived music, even beyond the free-form structures of Miles and Coltrane." 32 "The Eleven" certainly possesses some of the qualities that Lesh ascribes to it. Without a recognizable form, standard meter, or the distinct tonal narrative common to most rock and roll songs-and indeed, most of their own songs, it defies a fixed categorization as blues, jazz, or rock. But Lesh makes a leap by putting the Dead in outer (musical) space, distancing them from any cultural influences and dismissing the possibility of anyone understanding their sound. Perhaps he was trying to craft an image of unmediated inspiration-the band as a medium through which "cosmic" insights flowed. At three minutes and fifty-five seconds, a key change in the song is solidified by rhythmic-harmonic unification in the instruments and a sustained tonic A in the guitar. The eleven-beat pattern is reinforced by a repeated harmonic progression (1-IV-V-IV) that brings out the 3-3-3-2 grouping. Within a few seconds, the eleven-beat feels comfortable as a groove: it has become naturalized and now allows room for the lead guitar to improvise a melody over the repeating chord pattern and drum rhythm. After the improvisatory baton is passed to the most contemporary piece of technological musical equipment in the band-the electronic synthesizer-the overall density begins to decrease in preparation for the upcoming, yet unexpected, song lyrics at five minutes and forty-seven seconds. The lyrics seem to flow naturally in the eleven-beat meter, defying a melodic sense of anticipation and resolution. The sung section of "The Eleven" miraculously appears and then disappears. The narrative is condensed into less than one minute of a nearly ten-minute song, appearing like an inspired instant of mythical revelation-the transformation of biblical prophecy into a psychedelic experience. The single minute of vocals begins as a conversation between a main harmonized vocal line and a solo background voice. The main vocal line begins "no more time to tell I This is the season of what." With "no more" falling on upbeats 10 and 11, the emphasis of the line falls on the downbeat of 1-"time" is the focus. This introductory line is sung syllabically on the tonic and harmonized at the third. In response, the solo background vocal enters with "eight-sided whispering hallelujah hat rack" at the fifth, thus dispersing the degrees of the tonic chord between voices. The call-and-response scenario has been established, yet when the main harmonized vocal line comes back in to respond, it overlaps two

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beats of the background vocal line on "hat rack." This eager anticipation emphasizes the import of its line-" now is the time of returning I with our thought jewels polished and gleaming" (emphasis added). While the background vocal line is playful with its jumbled mix of objects ("eightsided hat rack") and mischievous emotions ("whispering," "hallelujah"), the main vocal line presents the advice to grasp the moment ("now") in order to discover lost wisdom ("thought jewels.") This lesson, however, is hard won. The background vocal waits until the main vocal has finished and sings playfully once again-" six proud walkers on the jingle bell rainbow." But the main vocal insists on being heard, this time overlapping with the last three beats of the background vocal line-" it's the time past believing I The child has relinquished the rein." The main vocal usurps the playfulness of the background vocal: the two lines begin to meld together, losing their call-and-response quality. Whereas the tonic, third, and fifth of the chord were separated temporally in different vocal lines, they begin to converge into a full chord as the voices sing together. The main vocal sings "now is the test of the boomerang," holding "now" for six beats to emphasize the moment. If the "boomerang" signifies throwing caution to the wind and faith in the object's return, the background vocal appears eager to pass the test, and overlaps with the main vocal. He sings "four girls waiting in a foreign dominion," and continues: "Tossed in the night of redeeming." The line is sung concurrently with "riding in the whalebelly I Fade away to moonlight I Sink beneath the waters to the coral sands below." As the vocals finish at six minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the binary, back-and-forth experience of conversation has been transformed into a collective experience of other realms: "foreign dominion," "whalebelly," "coral sands beneath the waters"-these nature-coded signifiers are so fantastical that their "redeeming" capacity seems only accessible in some kind of altered state. While redemption is typically associated with Christian deliverance from sin, "to redeem," in a secular sense, means to "make amends" or "restore oneself." Whether through a religious or LSD-inspired revelation, "redemption" in this context implies some kind of bid for personal transformation. By conflating natural, psychedelic, and religious imagery, this bid for redemption becomes a tangible possibility. While Huxley was writing Brave New World, he experimented under a psychiatrist's supervision with the hallucinogenic drug mescalin. 33 Realizing the potential for alternative and enhanced realities, he continued his hallucinogenic experimentations and eventually relayed his experiences in the famous book The Doors of Perception. 34 Comparing it to mystical revelation, Huxley argued that the experience of hallucinogenic drugs pushes back the screen that the mind erects when in an everyday state and allows new perceptions to flood in.

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Huxley's experience of "going back to nature" by consuming drugs was not uncommon. Psychiatrists funded by governmental agencies had been experimenting with these drugs in labs, on people, and on themselves since the first half of the twentieth century. In scientific circles mescalin and LSD were used to further research into the popular field of psychoanalysis. 35 In psychoanalytic terms, scientists hypothesized that LSD created a sense of oneness with nature, allowing the user to let go of the trappings of the ego. By the late 1960s Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), and Allen Ginsberg became crusaders for the positive effects of LSD, touting it as a way to get back to nature and escape the materialism of modern society. 36 Songs such as "The Eleven" rely on this mythologized yet tangible connection among nature, LSD, and spiritual/ revelatory insight. LSD seemed to offer personal meetings with the transformative experiences that nature promised. If "Sugar Magnolia" exemplified how the "rural" model of nature is accessed by eroticized technology, the sublime, chaotic model of nature is similarly made attainable by things manmade. LSD was one of the most manufactured drugs available to the counterculture: unlike marijuana, or even cocaine, LSD was solely a product of the laboratory. 37 Such songs contributed to a countercultural self-image that appeared nonmainstream, natural, open-minded, spiritually elevated, and unmediated by commercialism; yet they also revealed how the counterculture ambiguously juxtaposed threads of mainstream consumer culture that would make the counterculture vulnerable to media co-optation, and lead to its ultimate disintegration. The goal-less-ness of Eastern spirituality was embraced by popular leaders such as Ginsberg and Leary, while understanding the ways it manifested in highly structured Eastern cultures was conveniently overlooked. This ignorance made nongoal-oriented philosophies appear oppositional when embraced within a dialectical Western culture. And while such philosophies augmented the counterculture's aura of detachment from the mainstream, this same aura, further glorified by LSD, drew thousands of tourists and hustlers to the Haight. LSD offered the possibility of heightened consciousness that, in traditions such as Buddhism, would take years of spiritual development to achieve. The difference, of course, was that LSD could not offer any consciousness as a permanent state of being, but only for the duration of the drug trip. The end of "The Eleven" leads immediately into a strong unified eleven-beat phrase in all the instruments. Over the same I-IV-V-IV harmonic progression played previously, the lead guitar repeats a measure-long melodic motive above the collective texture, emphasizing the rhythmic ostinato of 3-3-3-2. The meter and key are now decipherable; the instruments dig into the 3-3-3-2 rhythm as if in a trance, repeating the same progression and melodic motif for over a minute-and-a-half. This

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hypnotic, almost minimalistic, episode diffuses any expectation of tonal or melodic closure, as if stuck repeating a closed groove on an LP. Finally the eleven-beat instrumental trance becomes obscured and the lead guitar slips into a flurry of improvisation. The song descends into a chaotic mixture of melodic and rhythmic motives; there is no conclusive gesture to indicate where "The Eleven" ends and the next track begins. The brief vocal section of "The Eleven" leads intriguingly into such an emphatic and extended episode of repetition, only finally to recapitulate the chaotic nature of the opening. Conventionally, a recapitulation marks the end of a piece's journey by returning to the secure home that was established in the beginning. In this case, however, a return to the chaotic vastness of the beginning poses a logistical problem in that a return to the opening instability dissolves the eleven-beat melodic subject that was formed over the course of the song. Yet the dissolution that occurs through recapitulation does not necessarily need to be all about a failure of identity. Instead, it marks the primordial void as a safe haven of origins, a world unmediated by modern civilization. While the lyrics in part evoked the revelatory hallucinogenic experience, the repetitious eleven-beat episode drove the point home. Once that point is made, the original, chaotic space is ready to be "redeemed" in a final return to the void. I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.

-Don Henley, "The Boys of Summer"

As Mitchell Morris discusses in his study of the music of John Luther Adams, many American groups have identified with natural signifiers, allowing for a "counter-myth" to the atomization of modern civilization. 38 For the Grateful Dead, this was an involved construction project: songs like "Sugar Magnolia" and "The Eleven" make nature's pastoral and revelatory qualities available through a slight-of-hand that minimized the import of the very mechanisms of its production. The counterculture constructed and consumed "the natural" as uncontaminated, unmanufactured, and unmediated even as it acquiesced in, rather than actively rebelled against, its indulgence in the modern commercial world. Certainly the Dead and the counterculture were detached from mainstream commodity consumer culture; yet this detachment was not grounded in any political critique. Ultimately it was about style, about the semblance of being spiritually elevated and not wanting to appear to be caught in such mundane things as consumerism. If Brightman is correct in her assessment that the Grateful Dead's "deep-seated suspicions of the corporate world" were ultimately rooted in the band's "horror of 'selling out,"' perhaps constructing a "natural" image, music, and community around them could quell these suspicions. 39

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The band encouraged concertgoers to tape-record their performances. An integral feature of any Dead show included the vision of dozens of tape-recorders held high in the air by the audience, recording their concerts. Because this "free" activity was not commercially motivated, the tape-recorders (bought by affluent countercultural participants) in a sense became naturalized. The Dead's concerts might very well have been communal folk festivals, but they were experienced within the unexamined cocoon of technology and consumerism. Ultimately, we might understand the culture represented by the Grateful Dead and its music as an attempt to rediscover an American frontier. In late 1967, as the Haight-Ashbury district became a media spectacle and people came to experience the very frontier that had been advertised across the country in the counterculture's music, the Diggers and many countercultural bands fled the scene. Faced with the possibility of confronting what they, in part, had wrought, the Grateful Dead also retreated, spending more time at their rural Marin County ranch. Brightman describes "the Novato countryside that once seemed so wild" as it appears thirty years later: "The house that harbored Hell's Angels, visiting Beats and Pranksters, along with London rockers and freshfaced kids from the Northwest, has been swallowed up in the suburban sprawl of northern Marin. The VW vans, Beetles, and occasional Ferrari have turned into Hondas, BMWs, and armored Humvees. The faith healers have become naturopaths, aromatherapists, and lawyers. Many of the musicians, however-the Dead, above all-remain musicians." 40 Brightman poignantly articulates what twenty-first-century Marin has come to symbolize. But her absolution of the Dead raises the question of how the ethics of people's actions relate to their historical consequences. While she does not hold the Grateful Dead (and countercultural musicians) accountable for the way their environment has been transformed over the past three decades, perhaps we should not be so forgiving. The Grateful Dead taught their listeners that it is acceptable to indulge in technology and abundance to access nature, and the community that has developed on the Dead's stomping grounds seems to have taken that lesson to heart. Even though Marin may be a beautiful, natural haven of spiritually minded people, their lifestyle and ability to advocate for environmental preservation are made possible by American capitalism and consumerism. Perhaps it is incumbent upon those of us who benefit from technology to reexamine how history has taught us to use it. NOTES 1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Perennial Library, 1932), 33. 2. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 223. The emphasis is included in Williams's text.

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3. George F. Will, foreword to Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 7-8; Todd Gitlin, preface to The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), xii-xxiii, and Gitlin, afterword to Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 283-97; Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), xiv. 4. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), xii-5, 47. 5. In her astute biography of the Grateful Dead, Carol Brightman notes that Dylan had "plugged in" at another public venue two years before the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, receiving similar criticism from folk diehards. Of particular significance is Jerry Garcia's reaction: "When Bob Dylan first plugged his guitar into an amplifier at the Monterey Folk Festival in the summer of 1963 ... Jerry and Sara [Garcia's friend] walked out. They were 'stern traditionalists' who eschewed 'modernization and wanted to imitate and preserve the old forms,' Sara recalls." See Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure (New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1998), 62. 6. Richard Goldstein, Reporting the Counterculture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 56. 7. Clive Davis, quoted in Peck, Uncovering the Sixties, 170. 8. Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 123. 9. Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 92. 10. The Grateful Dead suggested that the Diggers be the "worthy cause." When the Diggers heard of this possibility, they refused in advance, saying they would not accept money from an event that had charged admission and turned away people without tickets. 11. The story of the Grateful Dead and the equipment on loan to the Monterey Pop Festival from CBS and Fender Corporations is recounted in Brightman's Sweet Chaos. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Philip Deloria, "Counterculture Indians and the New Age," in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 162. 14. This issue was addressed in the popular music press at the time. See, for example, Harvey Pekar, "From Rock to ???," Down Beat 35, no. 9 (May 2, 1968). Pekar notes how experimental popular music artists felt limited by the three-minute dance song and, consequently, welcomed innovations in recording technology to accommodate their "new" musical mentality. 15. Gary Shank and Eric J. Simon, "The Grammar of the Grateful Dead," in Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know, ed. Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello (Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2000), 55. 16. Bakhtin argues that the Medieval carnival gave shape to a unique sociological experience: it suspended "the hierarchical background and the extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order," liberating people to experience "purely human relations." See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 17. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1990), 82. 18. Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 134-35, 141-42. 19. Liner notes to American Beauty, Warner Bros. Records 1893, 1970. 20. For an insightful and extensive discussion of the connections between 1930s' radical communities and their cultural practices, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). 21. Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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22. Ibid., 149-50. 23. Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 88. 24. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 89. Bodroghkozy demonstrates that domesticating the counterculture was not a simple task. Countercultural women were expected to be both innocent and highly sexualized, rebellious yet also submissive to a patriarchal ideology, sex-starved while performing the roles of mother and homemaker in the nuclear family. 25. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 101. 26. At this point, "Sugar Magnolia" has paradoxically ended and not ended. The rendition of "Sugar Magnolia" included on the American Beauty album has a one-second discobreak pause after "round," an upbeat drum-roll sequence, and then fifteen more seconds of song in the key of B. 27. Anthem of the Sun, Warner Bros. Records 1749, 1968. 28. Live/Dead, Warner Bros. Records XXXX, 1969. 29. Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 51. 30. "The Nitty-Gritty Sound," Newsweek, Dec. 19, 1966, 102; cited in Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 204; Gendron, Between Montmartre, 207; Richard Goldstein, "Real Jazz Should Blow the Mind," New York Times,Aug. 20,1967, 13; Bill Graham, Exposure magazine, May 1988; quoted in Gayle Lemke, Bill Graham Presents the Art of the Fillmore: The Poster Series 1966-1971 (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999), 61. 31. The openings of "The Eleven" and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony share similarities: the song begins before any musical subject has formed an identity, and when that subject (described by the "self-assertive" lead guitar) does emerge, it collapses repeatedly back into the void. In her reading of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Susan McClary suggests that the movement "seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity: we witness the emergence of the initial theme and its key out of a womb like void, and we hear it collapse back twice more into that void. It is only by virtue of the subject's constant violent self-assertion that the void can be kept at bay." Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 128. 32. Hank Harrison, The Dead Book: A Social History of the Haight-Ashbury Experience (San Francisco: The Archives Press, 1973), 171. 33. For biographical information about Huxley's use of mescaline and hallucinogens, see Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002). For further critique of the relation between Huxley's hallucinogen use and the shaping of countercultural spirituality, see John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 25-27. 34. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, and Heaven and Hell (1956; New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 35. See Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Lee and Shlain write that in the 1940s, the CIA experimented with various drugs, including marijuana, for the purposes of interrogation. By the 1950s LSD was included on the test list, used in what the CIA called "behavior control endeavors." A handful of laboratories, including their resident scientists and psychiatrists, were linked to this governmental research. In 1953 Allen Dulles, the newly appointed CIA director, authorized Operation MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind-control program that used, among other things, hallucinogens in an effort to fight the Cold War. The doctors involved discovered additional possibilities in hallucinogens. From test results, they hypothesized that LSD could be a means to peace and spiritual enlightenment. 36. The counterculture indulged fantasies about "natural" Native American halluci-

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nogenic drugs and their potential for the escape from modern materialistic America for which Alpert, Ginsberg, and Leary advocated. Of course, drugs such as peyote were used by Native Americans in rituals that were part of their life-long dedication to spiritual development. Nonetheless, the counterculture celebrated anthropologist Carlos Castaneda's first book, among others, almost as if it were a study guide to taking Native American hallucinogens. See Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 37. In this sense, the counterculture's ability to tap into the revelations of nature and the cosmos was made possible by Dow Chemical, Bell Laboratories, Monsanto, and the CIA. 38. See Mitchell Morris, "Ecotopian Sounds; or the Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism," in Crosscurrents and Counterpoints: Offerings in Honor of Berngt Hambrv'' (Paytress 82). 15 Stylistic references are not always so direct, however. Comparing the chorus riffs for the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" (1964) and Boston's "More Than A Feeling" (1976), for example, one can determine that the songs have a reasonably similar rhythm (especially the eighth rest on beat 3). The riffs are less similar harmonically, however; "Louie Louie" features a mixolydian 16 I-IV-v-IV progression, whereas the progression of"More Than a Feeling" is I-IV-vi-V. Melodically the two riffs are actually quite different, owing to differences in instrumentation; the electric piano used for "Louie Louie" is idiomatic for smoother voice leading between chords, whereas the guitar technique for "More Than a Feeling" is the barre chord, shifting harmonic blocks. Yet Dave Marsh wrote of these two songs that "[Boston guitarist Tom] Scholz encoded 'Louie' into 'More Than a Feeling' so organically that perhaps only fellow guitarists realized what he'd done" (155). The reference again depends on listener competencies; the necessary listener competencies would be those of"fellow guitarists" with an extensive knowledge of garage-rock riffs. A more intriguing descendant of "Louie Louie"-via "More Than A Feeling"-is the case of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (1991). Marsh's discussion of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" connects the song with "Louie Louie" via Cobain's garbled lyric delivery (204-07). Marsh appears to deny any other connection with "Louie Louie," even claiming "grunge bands performed nothing as retro as 'Louie Louie,' and their smeary sound made no accommodation to stoptime rhythms" (204). However, Marsh fails to observe that the rhythm of the "Louie" guitar riff is indeed found in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (it is actually a second-generation reference, mediated via "More Than A Feeling"). Furthermore, in an interview with Rolling Stone's David Fricke, Nirvana's guitarist! songwriter Kurt Cobain made the riffs genealogy explicit: I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies ....We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. "Teen Spirit" was such a cliched riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or "Louie Louie." When I came up with the guitar part, Krist [Novoselic] looked at me and said, "That il; so ridiculous." r made the band play it for an hour and a half. (George-Warren 65)

What "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "More Than A Feeling" share harmonically with "Louie Louie" is the question of how to bring a I-IV progression to

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closure. "Louie Louie" (I-IV-v-N) simply describes an arc, up to the minor v chord and back toN (inC major, the progression is C-F-g-F). "More Than A Feeling" (I-IV-vi-V) takes the dosing two chords of "Louie Louie" and raises them a step (C-F-a-G). "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (i-iv-III-V1 in minor) takes the opening I-IV progression from "Louie Louie" (and "More Than A Feeling") and repeats it in sequential fashion up a third, thereby fragmenting the original. (Radiohead's "Just" (1995) in turn, opens with a reference to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-the I~ ~III- II-IV riff takes two minor-third progressions and subjects them to a sequential repetition.) Conclusion: Playing with riffs, playing with signs In the early 1980s, the album Miniatures: A Sequence of Fifty-One Tiny Masterpieces was released. The album was the brainchild of keyboardist Morgan Fisher, who had played with Mott the Hoople in the 1970s. Fisher invited a number of musicians to contribute pieces, with the sole stipulation that they needed to be no longer than one minute in duration. Andy Partridge, of the band XTC, contributed a twenty-two second track entitled "The History of Rock 'n' Roll." Theodore Gracyk describes "The History of Rock 'n' Roll" as ''the most succinct demonstration" of timbre's "central role in rock music" (66). As he describes the song: In a mock lecture lasting twenty-two seconds, Andy Partridge summarizes four decades of rock. He simply names successive decades, illustrating each with one characteristic sound. For the fifties, an Elvis-like voice hiccups before swooping upward; the sound is heavily echoed. We are in Sun studios. The sixties are a frenetic lead guitar run through a Rotovibe pedal; the sound is a bit muddy and heavily equalized, dampening the higher frequencies. It could be the solo from a Cream single. For the seventies, two fat, sustained, and reverberating power chords on a guitar recall the sound of Mick Ronson on David Bowie's "Suffragette City" (1972). The eighties are a squeal of synthesized sound; they could be the synthesizer parts on Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual (1983). (66-67)

Gracyk notes that "these sounds serve as such telling markers for their respective decades only because they appeared when they did as recorded music" (67). It also formalizes a new self-conscious, explicitly historicized awareness of the signifYing potential of these sounds. Whereas previous artists such as David Bowie drew upon previous styles in a nostalgic fashion, Partridge presents these sounds in chronological order, introduced in the detached manner of an academic lesson.

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It was also in the 1980s that artists began to self-consciously layer their timbral and stylistic references together, allowing a web of meanings to emerge. Marshall McLuhan anticipated this technique in 1967, when he wrote, "when information is brushed against information ... the results are startling and effective" (McLuhan and Fiore 76-78). Certainly when signs are juxtaposed upon other signs in popular music, the message becomes at once richer and more elusive. In some instances a song is enlivened by the semantic "tug of war" between two or more dialectically opposed signs. For an early example, we can look again to David Bowie and his song "Sound and Vision" (Low, 1977). The song begins with a dialectical tension, summarized by the pu11 for attention between the heavily compressed snare drum-and-white-noise synthesizer "rhythm section" and the bass guitar's Bo Diddley rhythm. As soon as the listener is able to reconcile this opposition of"mechanistic" electronics 17 with the "humanistic" grind of the Bo Diddley rhythm-and-blues pattern, a third element is introduced. This new sound-an overlapping descending string-synthesizer scale in high register-is a reference to the cascade of easy-listening strings Mantovani made famous in "Charmaine" (1951). As the 1990s drew the twentieth century to a close, fin-de-siecle anxiety manifested itself especially in the tension between "human" and "mechanical" sound. The disconcerting robovoice of Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" is but one instance of technological dread that permeates the OK Computer album (1997). A more complex example-one that has layers of dialectical tensions similar to Bowie's "Sound and Vision"-is Portishead's "Wandering Star" (Dummy, 1994). Patrick Dailly writes, "most of the time, the backings are self-consciously mechanical. No attempt is made to disguise the synthetic quality of the music. In fact quite the reverse, because within the context of the music it is absolutely essential that these are man-made artefacts [sic], industrial products. Against this deliberately mechanistic backcloth, Beth Gibbon's voice sounds vulnerable; something soft and human in an unyielding environment" (Dailly, "Potrishead: 'Undenied"'). In addition to the tension of human voice and mechanistic backdrop, however, Dailly also notes the added surprise of the ''blues" harmonica fill [first heard at 0:57] that is thrown in at just the right places to catch the listener by surprise.

l 7The German group Kraftwerk, on albums such as Radio-Acrivity (1975) and Trans-Europe Express (1977), was a widely documented influence on Bowie during this period.

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The harmonica incursion is especial1y surprising because the fill sounds so carefree in the midst of a particularly bleak song. Dailly describes it as a jolly little harmonica fill which could have originated in blue-grass or an uptempo blues. The fill utterly contrasts with its immediate sound environment, and punctures any certainties we may have been developing about it. This fill suggests different ambient conditions: it comes from a different culture. It was originally recorded in a different place at a different time. Simply the fleeting reference to it reminds us that other possibilities exist out there. As if to stop us feeling confident and secure about where we are here and now, we are reminded of other worlds. (ibid.)

Another particularly subtle tension in "Wandering Star" is played out in its twelve-second introduction, which reveals the prevailing four-chord sequence. This introduction-played as chords on a Hammond organ in low register-is made up of two samples (careful listening will reveal a gap in ambient noise between the measures). The first sample is the chord heard in the first and third measures of the introduction; the second sample is the chord heard in the second and fourth measures. The tension here results from the fourth measure being transposed a step down from the second, which slows down the tempo of the sample by about four percent. This miniscule fluctuation-every fourth measure--causes a extremely slight temporal tension, with the sampled drum-kit loop, perhaps contributing to the song's "live" feel even as we know the accompaniment is sampled. An example of cumulative meaning created by the layering of signs is "Little Fluffy Clouds" by techno artists The Orb (1991). A snippet of an interview with Rickie Lee Jones, during which she recounts her memories of the Arizona sunsets of her childhood, is combined with a harmonica sample and a guitar arpeggiation from Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint (played by Pat Metheny). The harmonica and the recorded hum of airplanes or distant trucks provide sonic and kinetic anaphones 18 for "wide open spaces," reinforcing Jones's account; synthesizer arpeggiations also serve to give her words a psychedelic, "spacey" context. Listeners who recognize the harmonica as coming from Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in the West will automatically associate the Morricone title with both the distance of memory ("once upon a time ... ") and the location (" ... in the west") of Jones's recollections. An English-accented speaker can also ceca-

18The term "anaphone" was introduced by Philip Tagg. For a detailed account of anaphones in musical signification, see Taw, Introductory Notes, 25-28.

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sionally be heard referring to "layering different sounds on top of each other," reinforcing the choice of Reich's Electric Counterpoint for the guitar sample..:.._for mixing and layering of sound is indeed a kind of electric counterpoint (HolmHudson 1997, 18-19). (The Reich sample, it turns out, is an especially important one, dictating the key and chord progression ofthe song.) Any one of theSe samples would carry its own meaning, but combined into one texture the sig:r;iification is compounded; a listener who can identify the samples then recognizes the self-conscious intent with which the samples reinforce each other. A similar richness of meaning, if perhaps more parodic, emerges from the web ofreferents in Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." In addition to the previously mentioned stylistic references to "More Than a Feeling" and "Louie Louie," the introduction [0:09-0:24] and choruses also make playful references to James Brown's "Funky Drummer," the ubiquitous sampling anthem of the 1990s. Here, the distinctive pattern is played at a considerably faster speed and with a much heavier sound. The whitifying ofJames Brown's funk and the sullying of Boston's antiseptically clean guitar sound in the decidedly un-funky and unclean context of grunge is perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of postmodernism in rock. The stylistic field is wide open and there are infinite opportunities to play with the notion of play. The names of the artists may be changed, but Lilian Roxon's vision of a "future rock"-with unlikely collaborations between artists who need not meet-has come to fruition. It can be heard in the irony of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; in Beck's fusion of hip-hop, folk, and Sly Stone funk; and in Bowie's appropriations of Mantovani, Judy Garland, Eddie Cochran and Kraftwerk. It is not true that there is "no future," as Johnny Rotten put it. The future is now. And then. An exhaustive survey of stylistic references in contemporary rock music is of course beyond the scope of this article. Similarly, the work of assigning specific labels to particular rock elements-in the same way that Agawu, Ratner, and others have labeled classical gestures as representing "the heroic," "the tragic," or "the learned style"-remains to be undertaken. Nevertheless, I hope that the taxonomy of references proposed here, with the examples that have been discussed, may be used to develop such a stylistic lexicon. At the very least it may also help us to understand and thoroughly document how the popular music industry continually repackages old ideas into more "fashionable" packages (as was rather cynically noted by Theodor Adorno in the 1940s). It may also throw new light on

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the age-old debate about what-if anything-music communicates. Finally, with enough historical distance between the analyst and the music, it may help to provide some important clues about what popular-music artists thought of their own recorded history (and, perhaps, what they thought about their own legacy).

WORKS CITED Agawu, Kofi. Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. "Copyright Law and the Ethics of Sampling, part 3." Downloaded from the World Wide Web on September 7, 2001, at http://www.low-life.fsnet.eo.uk/ copyright/part3.htm. Cutler, Chris. "Plunderphonia." Musicworks60 (1994), 6-19. Dailly, Patrick. "Portishead; 'Undenied,' Go Beat 539 435 2." Downloaded from the World Wide Web on 29 October 2001 at http://wwvl.patrickdailly.f9.eo.ukJ UNDENIED.htm. Eisen, Jonathan, ed. The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1969. Fricke, David. "Kurt Cobain: The Rolling Stone Interview." In Holly GeorgeWarren, ed., Cobain. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994, 62-67. Gracyk, Theodore. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Hatten, Robert. lvfusical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. The Postmodern Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s. New York: Twayne/Simon & Schuster, 1996. Holm-Hudson, Kevin. "John Oswald's Rubaiyat and the Politics of Recombinant Do-Re-Mi." Popular Music and Society 20, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 19-36. - - - . "Sampling and John Oswald's Plunderphonics: Quotation and Context." Leonardo Music]ournal7 (1997), 17-25. "Legacy-Legacy examples." Downloaded from the World Wide Web on September 7, 2001, at http://www.funky-stuff.com/jamesbrown/Legacy/LegacyExample.htm.

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Logan, Nick, and Woffinden, Bob. Harmony Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock. New York: Harmony Books, 1977. Marsh, Dave. Louie Louie. New York: Hyperion, 1993. McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam, 1967. Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990. Monelle, Raymond. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. "The Official Roxy Music Tour 2001-Re-Make/Re-Model," downloaded from the World Wide Web on 1 November 2001 at http://www.manzanera.com/ RoxyArchive/RoxyMusicTour2001/Re-makeRe-model.htm. Paytress, Mark The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. New York: Schirmer, 1998. Ratner, Leonard G. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980. Roxon, Lillian. Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia. New York Grosset and Dunlap, 1969. Schaefer, John. New Sounds: A Listener's Guide to New Music. New York Harper &Row, 1987. Schwartz, Elliott. Electronic Music: A Listener's Guide. New York: Praeger, 1973. Smith, Christopher. "Broadway the Hard Way: Techniques of Allusion in Music by Frank Zappa." College Music Symposium 35 (1995), 35-60. Spicer, Mark. "Looking Through a Glass Onion: Intertextuality in the Late Songs of The Beatles." Paper presented at Drake University Conference on Popular Music and-Culture, Des Moines, IA, March 29, 1996. Tagg, Philip. "Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice." Popular Music2 (1982), 37-67. ---.Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music, v. 3.2 (2000). Downloaded from the World Wide Web on 16 March, 2001, at wv.w.theblackbook.net/ acad/tagg/teaching/analys/semiotug.pdf. Tarasti, Eero. A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

[7] IN DIE: THE INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF A POPULAR MUSIC GENRE

David Hesmondhalgh Abstract This article is concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punk's institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the 'mainstream' of British pop. Case studies of two important 'independents', Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aesthetic and institutional politics of these record companies are analysed in order to explore two related questions. First, what forces lead 'alternative' independent record companies towards practices of professionalization and of partnership/ collaboration with major corporations? Second, what arc the institutional and political-aesthetic consequences of such professionalization and partnership? In response to the first question, the article argues that pressures towards professionalization and partnership should be understood not only as an abandonment of previously held idealistic positions (a 'sell-out') and that deals with major record companies are not necessarily, in themselves, a source of aesthetic compromise. On the second question, it argues that collaboration with major record companies entails a relinquishing of autonomy for alternative independent record companies; but perspectives which ascribe negative aesthetic consequences directly to such problematic institutional arrangements may well be flawed.

Keywords aesthetics; institutions; music industry; independent record companies

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which, in the 1990s, has considerably outgrown its original audience among students and (lower) middle-class youth. It was at first a British phenomenon, and is often subsumed under the category 'alternative rock' in the United States and elsewhere. The mid-1980s' coining and adoption of the term, an abbreviation of 'independent' (as in independent record company) was highly significant: no music genre had ever before taken its name from the form of industrial organization behind it. For indie proclaimed itself to be superior to other genres not only because it was more relevant or authentic to the youth who produced and consumed it (which was what rock had claimed) but also because it was based on new relationships between creativity and commerce. The discourses of fans, musicians and journalists during the countercultural heyday of rock and soul in the 1960s and 1970s saw 'independents', small record companies with no ties to vertically integrated corporations, as preferable to the large corporations because they were less bureaucratic and supposedly more in touch with the rapid turnover of styles and sounds characteristic of popular music at its best. Such companies were often, in fact, even more exploitative of their musicians than were the major corporations (Shaw, 1978), but punk activists took the idea of independence and politicized it more rigorously (see Laing, 1985; Hesmondhalgh, 1997). Post-punk companies, often started by musicians or by record shop owners, saw independents as a means of reconciling the commercial nature of pop with the goal of artistic autonomy for musicians. Creative autonomy from commercial restraint is a theme which has often been used to mystify artistic production by making the isolated genius the hero of cultural myth. Indic, however, emerged from a hardheaded network of post-punk companies which made significant challenges to the commercial organization of cultural production favoured by the major record companies (Hesmondhalgh, 1997). Given the long-standing, if muted, concern in cultural studies and the political economy of communication with efTorts to transform the nature of cultural production, the lack of attention paid to this network of alternative production is remarkable. Its penetration went far beyond that of the 'small media' institutions often surveyed as examples of alternatives in academic work on the cultural industries (e.g. Herman and McChesney, 1997: 189-205). Such alternative media activism is usually concerned with the provision of small-scale alternatives 'outside' commercial popular culture, as it were. My concern here, though, is primarily with the historical trajectory of indie as a case study of what happens to oppositional moments 'within' popular culture. I focus on two important British independent companies, Creation and One Little Indian, to explore two related questions. First, what forces lie hehind the move cif such alternative independents towards pn:Jessionalization, and towards partnership/ collaboration with institutions which these companies had previously defined themselves strongly and explicitly against? In the case of One Little Indian, such collaboration took the form of partnership with an entrepreneur who had no background in the punk NDIE IS A POPULAR MUSIC GENRE

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ethics and aesthetics of the company and, later, with the Dutch-based multinational corporation, PolyGram. In the case of Creation, it took the form of a particularly controversial sale of a stake in the company to Sony. I want to suggest that the motives involved in such professionalization and partnership are more complex than is implied in two discourses which have been prevalent in the indie sector as a means of explaining these processes: 'sell-out', which assumes that independents abandon previously held political and aesthetic commitments for financial gain; and 'burn-out', which is slightly more generous to independents and which assumes that institutional alterity can only be maintained for a short period before human and financial resources run dry. 1 The two companies make for an interesting comparison, because both came to be part of a boom in the popularity of indie in the 1990s via partnership with entrepreneurial and corporate capital, but they began from political and aesthetic positions which were markedly different from each other. One Little Indian provides the opportunity to examine the legacy of the most politically active role of punk, inspired by anarchism, rather than by the socialist politics prevalent in other companies such as Rough Trade. Creation Records, by contrast, throughout most of its history, showed little or no interest in political engagement, until its well-publicized links in 1996-97 with Tony Blair's Labour Party- and such links with a formal political party would have been scorned by the anarchists at One Little Indian. Creation was, instead, a company built very much around a set of aesthetic concerns: in particular, a reverence for a certain 'classic' pop I rock canon; and this fact is significant for my account, as will become apparent below. The second question is: in terms if institutional and aesthetic politics, what losses and gains are involved in the move towards such prrifessionalization and corporate partnership/collaboration? This type of question is at the heart of much debate about attempts to achieve difference in contemporary popular culture. Again, I am interested in complicating a discourse common within some sections of indie culture itself (especially its more politicized wing) which sees aesthetics as an almost inevitable outcome of certain institutional and political positions, whereby maintaining an institutional separation from corporations, or a place on the margins, is felt to guarantee aesthetic diversity and stimulation. As we shall see, this position was held by some former associates of One Little Indian. In fact, I want to suggest that the very basis of this second question is somewhat flawed, in that it assumes that institutional positions have traceable aesthetic outcomes. But I also want to criticize an aesthetic position which is characteristic of a much less politicized type of indie discourse (though, of course, aesthetic positions are always, if indirectly, political positions) and which is to be found at work at Creation Records. I would describe this aesthetic position as classicist and as aestheticist. Before discussing each of the companies in turn in the main body of this article, I outline the way in which indie, as a genre, grew out of punk and post-punk and how it developed in the 1990s.

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The post-punk battle against the music industry and the coming of in die The successes of the post-punk independents in the 1980s can be summarized in four categories (see also Hesmondhalgh, 1997).

2

3

4

They set up an alternative network of distribution which enabled not only the musicians signed to their labels, but also a string of other companies and musicians across the country, to reach a much wider public than would have otherwise been possible. This significantly counteracted the processes of concentration and oligopolization which had been characteristic of the recording industry, and of the cultural industries in general, for much of the century. Many people, who may not otherwise have had the opportunity to do so, were able to undertake paid creative work. The arrival of relatively cheap technology, in the form of reduced studio costs and less expensive musical instruments, can only be partly credited for this. A significant factor was that those who were drawn to punk argued for the active appropriation of these opportunities. This institutional intervention was achieved through a more reflexive understanding of the dynamics of the record industry than had existed up to that point. The commitment to independent production and distribution transcended romantic notions of musical creativity. Rather than naively contrasting the spontaneous art of independents with a corrupting and predatory commercial sector, some of the post-punk companies recognized that in a popular-cultural medium, independent ownership of production and distribution was the most effective route towards democratization of the industry. These post-punk independents proclaimed that at the heart of the politics of cultural production was the issue of how music came to its audiences, whereas rock discourse had tended to mystify and/ or ignore this process (see Bloomfield, 1991). Independent networks of production and distribution were extended beyond Britain and into Europe and the United States. Again, this was based on an awareness of the new conditions facing the music industry, as well as a pragmatic desire to expand audiences through exports. Although the postpunk project eventually burnt out, these international networks still exist today. An aesthetic based on mobilization and access was developed. This encouraged the unskilled and untrained to take the means of musical production into their own hands. By extension, there was also an emphasis on political activism in certain quarters. Not only was Rock Against Racism able to base its campaigns around punk's anti-nationalism, but socialists and anarchists were able to build post-punk institutions with a political edge. The sexual politics of punk were complex and contradictory, but women took new roles

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in music and the commercial organization of recording, and expressed new and suppressed themes and sounds. But by 1986, post-punk's status as the most prestigious branch of alternative music in Britain was under threat. At the same time, the term 'indie' was becoming widely used to describe a new phase in the cultural politics of alternative pop I rock in Britain. Rather than the melange of experimental influences covered by the umbrella term 'post-punk', 'indie' described a narrower set of sounds and looks. The 'whiteness' of the genre was the subject of much music press comment in the mid -19 80s. 2 While many musicians, fans and journalists had increasing! y turned to pop and black musical traditions, such as electro and hip hop, as fresh sources of inspiration in the early 1980s, indie was constructing a canon of white, underground rock references. The mainstream pop charts were dominated by funk figures and rhythms, but indie records turned to 'jangly' guitars, an emphasis on clever and/ or sensitive lyrics inherited from the singer I songwriter tradition in rock and pop, and minimal focus on rhythm track. 3 Dance rhythms were, on the whole, resisted (and the exceptions tended to be the most popular bands in the independent sector, such as New Order and Depeche Mode). In terms of presentation, indie often prided itself on its care over design (23 Envelope's work for the label4AD and the work of Peter Saville for Factory being the most prominent examples) but set itself against the concentration on 'image' in the pop mainstream: important indie bands, such as the Smiths, refused to put their pictures on record sleeves. There was a resistance to using promotional videos. And the stage presentation of bands involved dressing down, a minimum display of musical prowess, and a deliberate muting of charisma. All this represented an opposition to what Simon Reynolds called 'health and efficiency': the perceived stress in dominant forms of culture on the body, and on aspirations to professional success (Reynolds, 1988). As with so many oppositional genres in popular music, then, indie was contradictory: its counter-hegemonic aims could only be maintained, it seems, by erecting exclusionary barriers around the culture. Indie faced problems of popularity which had been gradually emerging during the post-punk era of alternative pop/rock. There was a widening gulf between, on the one hand, a stabilizing pop mainstream oriented towards video promotion, and synergies with visual mass media, 4 and on the other, a post-punk independent sector which set itself determinedly against these commercial methods. This gap was manifested in the fact that the records in the independent charts were beginning to make less and less impression on the pop charts. As the New Musical Express (NME), one of the music press bastions of the independent ethos in the UK, put it at the time: '[In the last twelve months] the indie alternative, taken as a whole, has seemed as far removed from the centre of the pop action as at any time in the last decade' (Kelly, 1987). Media outlets for indie were struggling too: although many local radio

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stations still had their own specialist indie show, it was becoming more and more difficult for post-punk independents to gain exposure for their sounds. BBC Radio One no longer provided much coverage of sounds from independent companies and, where it did, audiences were falling. 5 And, in 1987, the circulation of the NME itself had fallen below 100,000 for the first time in its thirty-year history (BPI Statistical Handbook 1993: 46). Although the post-punk distribution network, the Cartel, was increasingly able to provide impressive support for the star names which sustained the indie scene in the late 1980s, the retreat of indie as a genre into a market niche meant that the independent networks were hit badly by the economic recession of 1988-92. Few star bands emerged to inherit the mantle of the Smiths, New Order and the like. There was a widespread sense that the punk legacy had run its course. More and more people who had been previously drawn to independent rock/ pop were turning to dance music and/ or the harder sounds of American bands such as Husker Du and the Pixies. There was a revival of general and music media interest in the sector when, in 1989, a number of British bands fused features of dance music with rock (in a subgenre which was briefly known as 'baggy', and which was associated with indie bands which had discovered posthouse club culture, such as The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses). But the early 1990s' bankruptcies of two key post-punk institutions, Factory Records and Rough Trade, seemed only to confirm notions of a 'crisis' in the indie world (see Maconie, 1992). Yet by 1995, a version of indie had come to occupy the centre ground of British pop music in the shape of bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp, all of which had aesthetic roots in the post-punk rock tradition. This neo-indie triumph, labelled 'Britpop' in the music and news media in 1995-96, also had its institutional foundations in post-punk: many of the key bands were on, or had been on, labels that were fostered by the 1980s independent networks. In the meantime, however, much had changed. Post-punk independence had maintained its distance from major capital by forming alternative networks of distribution, marketing and manufacture, internationally as well as nationally. The 'Britpop' explosion emerged from companies which had survived the bankruptcies of the early 1990s to form much closer ties with the corporations. 6 One Little Indian and Creation were, in different ways, examples of such companies.

One Little Indian and the professionalization of the anarchists For the post-punk vanguard (much of it based around Rough Trade), punk had provided an opportunity to experiment with the form of the pop song. For others, though, it was the authentic music of working-class youth; its fast, furious noise was felt to encode the anger of the dispossessed and disempowered. A

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series of groups claimed the mantle of 'true' punk from the Sex Pistols and The Clash, the core punk bands who signed to major companies. Some of these acts descended into outright racism and fascism in the form of the Oil movement, propagated by Sounds journalist Garry Bushell (who later became the television columnist of the authoritarian-populist Sun newspaper). Other descendants of what Jon Savage (1991: 583) calls the 'social realist cadre' of punk, such as Sham 69 (on the semi-independent Chrysalis Records) reached the pop charts with a football terrace aesthetic of working-class unity, expressed in soccer-style chanted choruses. But a small group of anarchist bands, centred on the activities of a group and label called Crass, achieved considerable success with a series of strongly political records and events in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and did so via independent production and distribution. Crass was formed in 1978, and was centred around a collective based at a rented farmhouse in Epping, to the north-east of London. The band's first record was released on the Walthamstow shop label Small Wonder, but it formed its own Crass Label in 1979. Between 1978 and 1983 (when it disbanded), Crass was an almost permanent presence in the UK independent charts. Its music was basic and, compared with the experimentalism of many post-punk acts, aesthetically unadventurous. Marching drums and distorted guitar carried the rhythm. Listeners' attention was directed to the angry lyrics, which were often about sexual oppression and the danger of ecological disaster. The music, then, served as something of a vehicle for the politics. Unlike earlier forms of directly political music, however (such as the folk/ protest movement of the early 1960s in the US), Crass chose to work across a range of techniques. Cover art, designed by G., of tl1e Crass collective, was particularly striking. The 1979 album Stations of the Crass features a booklet detailing the crimes of organized religion (and, in this respect, the band was working in a long tradition of anarchist anti-clericalism). Crass extended its activities beyond recording and playing live gigs to carrying out situationist-style actions. At the time of the Royal wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, for instance, Crass arranged with a teenage romance magazine called Loving a deal whereby readers of the magazine could send off for a special single to commemorate the event. Crass, which called itself 'Creative Recording And Special Services' for the purposes of the action, sent out anarchist material with the singles it dispatched to the (mainly) teenage girls. The single itself was a parody of romantic conceptions of love. Crass then contacted tabloid newspapers to draw attention to the outrage that an anarchist band had pulled such a cruel trick on young readers- especially as the material sent related to the Penis Envy album out at the time. 7 Crass was more explicitly and actively political than most of the Rough Trade bands and staff; and, as the above story indicates, feminism was central to its work. 8 Nevertheless, the band relied on an 'outside' cultural entrepreneur to facilitate its early recordings: there was no pure, original moment where anarcho-punk was 'untainted' by entrepreneurialism. John Lauder, a computer

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engineer, had built his own recording studio, Southern, in the garage of his house in Wood Green, North London. His wife Sue attended Waltham stow College with members of Crass, and they arranged to record their first single there, with Lauder engineering. This was the beginning of a long relationship, though not one based directly on a political alliance. Lauder himself may have been sympathetic to anarchism, but his own beliefs were mainly religious: he was a practising scientologist. But a string of anarchist-inspired bands (including Dirt, the Omega Tribe and, most notably, Conflict) recorded at the studios and had their records issued on the Crass label, and on its offshoot, Corpus Christi. Distribution of the early Crass records was through the key post-punk shop/record company Rough Trade (see Hesmondhalgh, 1997) but Crass had little connection with the Rough Trade set-up, which was on the other side of London. Rough Trade's politics were more socialist, and according to Tim Kelly, who was unusual in that he worked in both places, musicians and staff at Rough Trade tended to be more interested in popular music history than the Crass anarchists (interview, 23 August 1994). By 1981, on the basis of the Crass label's continued success and high sales (Crass's 1979 album Stations ofthe Crass sold 250,000 copies, according to the band's Penny Rimbaud), Lauder was able to set up independent distribution from Southern Studios. They quickly gained the contract to distribute another key anarchist label, Alternative Tentacles, which had been set up by Jello Biafra of the US West Coast anarcho-punk band, The Dead Kennedys, in association with British manager Bill Gilliam. An alternative, anarchist network was being formed. Today, although Lauder no longer has a stake in the company, Southern Distribution, now called SRD, is one of the UK's leading independent distributors, with over a hundred labels contracted to it for distribution and export. But this is only one example of an institution formed from an explicitly political, amateur set of practices in the early 1980s around Crass. The best-known instance of this anarchist heritage is One Little Indian itself, which was a direct progeny of Crass, formed by members of the anarcho-punk band Flux of Pink Indians in 1985 (and preceded by another small label, Spiderleg). After Crass played its last gig in 1984 and started to wind down its label (and other) activities, many Crass acts ended up on One Little Indian, including Annie Anxiety, the Very Things and Kukl, an Icelandic band which was later to become The Sugarcubes, One Little Indian's most successful early act. In the early days of One Little Indian, the principal staff were Derek Birkett, the bass player with Flux of Pink Indians, who financed the company with a loan from his father; Tim Kelly, then also of Flux of Pink Indians; Mark Edmondson, who had lived at the Crass commune for a while, and who worked at Southern distribution when it started up;and Lauren Bromley, who was in charge of internationallicensing, and who had worked at CBS Records. All, apart from Bromley, were amateurs who were learning their trade as they went along. Their story

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indicates some of the problems associated with professionalization and growth in cultural institutions founded on an amateur ethos (see also Hesmondhalgh, 1997). The music industry is a high-pressure business, but there are few opportunities for a professional training, which might provide assistance in coping with this pressure. In both major and independent companies there is a stressful continuum between leisure time and work. Evenings are often spent attending live concerts in order to stay aware of new developments and to maintain contacts. In independent record companies there are additional burdens. The people working together are often friends, and relationships are put under great strain by new and unexpected roles. Another problem is that of negotiating between the constant threat of bankruptcy and a strong resistance to 'selling-out' to majors, or even to 'straight' companies (those supposedly motivated neither by love of music, nor by politics). As Mark Edmondson put it, You get so many hangers-on. The night before gigs, you'd get people ringing you up at home saying can you put us on the guest list for the Sugarcubes, can you do this? You'd get Australian Vogue ringing up saying can we have the lead singer on our front cover, blah, blah, blah. I thought, 'this is getting fucking out of hand' .... You'd get these real bloody sharks that you'd have to deal with from commercial companies, tour managers, the whole bloody caboodle .... They're just horrible people, you haven't got anything in common with them at all, they don't like the same music as you, they're not coming from the same area at all. (Interview, 10 December 1993) Of course, some aspects of these remarks are complaints which could be made by any overworked, disgruntled former employee (though Edmondson remained on very good terms with Birkett). But some of the distinctive features of work in independent cultural production emerge here: the disillusion caused by the lost hope that it might be possible to work with people of similar tastes and, by extension, people of similar political inclinations; and the frustration that the breakdown of distinctions between public and private life, work and leisure could be so invasive and unpleasurable. Even those who choose to continue to work in the record industry often express similar sentiments informally. Such pressures drive many independent record company musicians and staff out of the industry altogether, and such cultural factors should not be ignored in examining why so many independent companies fold. for many anarcho-punks, combining political beliefs directly opposed to the accumulation of wealth and status, with a job involving frequent contact with conspicuous wealth and consumption, proved too much, and they left the industry. But some of the anarchists stayed on, and ventured further into the professional world which some of their colleagues chose to evade.

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One Little Indian was as musician-centred as the other post-punk independents. In a 1988 interview with Tim Kelly, a journalist asked if One Little Indian was ever 'skint'. Kelly replied: Yeah, sometimes. Especially when bands spend six days in a good studio doing one single. And we always do a good sleeve. It costs a lot of money. We've got to sell a lot of records to make it all back. But the better we make the record, we think, we've got a better chance than if we start cutting corners. (Quoted in Gittins, 1988: 42) Whereas the early anarcho-punk scene had paid great attention to good packaging and to selling records cheaply to fans, this was supported by remarkable sales. But with the decline of the alternative scene, including the specialist independent shops, money was not so readily available. Birkett complained in another interview (Gibson, 1988), from the same PR drive, that the first Flux of Pink Indians single on Crass sold more than 30,000, but that releases on One Little Indian struggled to sell anything like this amount. At Rough Trade a successful distribution operation had subsidized the label until it managed to develop its own stars. One Little Indian had to turn elsewhere for financing. In 1988, Birkett sold 60 per cent of One Little Indian to a Battersea businessman, Brian Bonner, who ran a pressing plant and video distribution company called Mayking. 9 The intervention of Bonner did not escape the vigilant attention of some within the independent 'scene' for whom Bonner represented a very different ethos from the company's anarcho-punk origins. Former Crass members, still in contact with One Little Indian throughout this period, told me that they did not trust Bonner's involvement. Brenda Kelly was in contact with the company through her work as editor of The Catalogue, and later as producer of Snub TV (1989-90), one of the few television fora for independent rock and pop in the 1980s. As she puts it, When it was bought by Mayking, it moved into Mayking's premises in Battersea and things changed a bit. It got complicated because it had a more ambivalent independent status. He [Bonner] is more like an investment banker than an A&R idealist, or someone from that old school of independence. (Interview, 30 April 1996) For indie idealists, then, Bonner represents a more 'traditional' entrepreneurthat is, one who is considered to be motivated as much by commerce as by music or politics. According to Jenny Lewis, editor of the indie trade magazine The Independent Catalogue from 1992 to 1994 (interview, 14 June 1994) the sale to Mayking by Birkett was seen by many on the independent 'scene' as a precedent

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for One Little Indian's move, in the 1990s, towards becoming an international player via its licensing deals with PolyGram. In the late 1980s, One Little Indian's star act was the Sugarcubes. The group's success in 1987 was almost certainly a factor behind Bonner's interest in buying the company the following year; and the need to give them the push they 'deserved' was definitely behind the company's need to find more capital, according to Mark Edmondson (interview, 10 December 1993). That the musiciancentredness of One Little Indian inspired some loyalty in its musicians is demonstrated by the fact that the Sugarcubes' lead singer, Bjork, chose to remain with the company for the launch of her solo career in 1993. By then, though, she and One Little Indian had the finance and distribution muscle of PolyGram behind them. The ambivalence about success experienced by many of the professionalized amateurs around the anarcho-punk scene is cleverly represented on the cover of Bjork's first One Little Indian album, Debut, which consists of a simple monochrome image of Bjork, hands held to her lips. That this is a parody of vulnerability is confirmed by her direct stare to camera, and the presence of a plastic tear under each eye. The title Debut adds to the tease: this is her first solo album, but Bjork is an experienced player: no ingenue debutante. The sleeve design is by Paul White of the Me Company. White was an early associate of Derek Birkett, and was responsible for the design of many early One Little Indian albums. White, Birkett and Bjork are part of a network of musicians, record company employees and attached specialists who share a past commitment to anarchist ideals, including small-scale amateur recording activity. A purist view, with which many of these insiders began, and to which some of those who 'dropped out' from record label activity subscribed, would hold that such professionalization represents a dilution of earlier, amateur ideals. 10 The core of punk's democratization efforts were decentralization and access based on subprofessional activity; entry into a more established, parallel industry involves compromise, through contact with the 'bloody sharks' referred to by Mark Edmondson. Such purism often sees the process of professionalization as a sellout: the abandonment of idealism for financial reward. In order, though, for Derek Birkett (now the main owner-manager) to achieve for his key acts the international success of which he felt they were capable, he felt obliged to turn to a variety of capital sources. Was this a 'sellout' in the widely used phrase from indie discourse which I discussed above? The term 'sell-out' masks not only a potential range of motivations behind collaboration with other sources of capital, but also the achievements which such collaboration sometimes allows. It could be argued, for example, that One Little Indian and Southern- the legacies of Crass- permit a space in the music industry for those uncomfortable with the slick world of the corporations and with the more entrepreneurial independents, by forming a protective shield, whereby corporate finance and corporate culture are kept at 'arm's length' distance from musicians and staff who share tastes and political backgrounds. A purist position

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which sees professionalization as 'co-optation' implies a way of living which is difficult for many people to sustain: a constant existence on an impoverished margin. The choice to set up more permanent positions and careers, while despised by many enthusiasts, is often based on a genuinely idealistic commitment to fostering talent, and to providing an alternative. This purist position often has a corollary view of aesthetic processes which sees them as closely tied to institutional ones; perhaps exaggeratedly so. Bjork's Debut was widely acclaimed for its innovative soundscape (created by producer Nellee Hooper) and for its celebration of a positive identity for women in the 1990s (e.g. Price, 1993). The ex-members of Crass were, however, critical of Debut for its softer, 'highly produced' sound, and attributed this to the increasing encroachment of PolyGram and Mayking into the work of One Little Indian. According to this view, institutional and aesthetic politics are closely related. The concern with a smoother, richer sound which can be detected in the solo work of Bjork and in other acts on the label was misguided. The lo-fi punk sound was not only more exciting, it allowed mass participation by putting an emphasis on de-skilling. I assess this position, and attempt to look in more depth at the motivations behind independent professionalization and growth at the end of this article.

Creation, internationalization and classic pop dreams

'I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee' (The Pooh Sticks, 1987) 'At the present time I myself am quite simply without peers. Self Publicist? Yeah! You'd better believe it' (Alan McGee, 1984) Like all sectors of media production, the independent music world is replete with gossip and speculation about the main 'personalities' in the field. Many of those who are subjected to such attention are of course musicians, but just as significant- and often more durable- are the label owner-managers. The head of Creation Records, Alan McGee, is probably the best known of the British small record company bosses of the 1980s and 1990s. 11 His label, founded in 1983, is the flagship company of British indie pop I rock and has the most prestigious, and therefore potentially most valuable, back catalogue of all the post-punk labels. But even if, as media coverage often suggests, Creation is a company in McGee's image, 12 the development of the label, and its enormous success since its takeover by Sony in 1992, reflect wider issues about the politics of independent rock culture. When McGee sold a controlling stake of his company to Sony

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in 1992, this was interpreted by many advocates of independence as a third symbol of the end of the punk era, after the bankruptcies of Rough Trade and factory in 1991: a sign of the times, but also a 'sell-out', a reversal of its earlier policy. But I want to argue that the sale of Creation should be viewed not as an abandonment of a post-punk goal of providing an institutional alternative to corporate rock and pop, but as a logical culmination of the company's desire to develop a new generation of classic pop stars in an era of increasing internationalization in the recording industry. For, in spite of some stylistic changes at the label, the classical nature of the company's rock/pop aesthetics and its focus on such aesthetics rather than on institutional politics have been very striking. Acts on the label have generally been in the mould established by rock and roll in the late 19 50s, and continued by British beat bands in the early 1960s: bands consisting of four or five young men playing guitars and drums. The company is named after a 1960s British cult psychedelic band. Many of Creation's records, particularly in the 1980s, showed the influence of 1960s pop/rock instrumentation, in particular the Hammond organ and the 'jangly' guitar sound first used by George Harrison but developed by the Byrds' Roger McGuinn (see MacDonald, 199 5 : 8 5). Constant reference points for musicians and company stafi are a lineage of classic British bands, such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Jam. Will Straw (1991: 377-8) has noted 'the enshrining of specific forms of connoisseurship as central to an involvement in alternative rock culture' from the mid-1980s on in the USA and Canada. 13 Straw suggests that the interest within post-punk culture in the history of'rock-based forms of recorded music' points to a much stronger link between post-punk and older, rock institutions than is generally recognized. The basis of the continuity between rock and post-punk alternative culture was, for Straw, their shared origin in a 'largely white bohemia'. Straw suggests that alternative rock culture is sexually as well as ethnically insular: collecting and studying old rock bands is a rite of passage for young men entering the 'scene'. The continuity between rock and post-punk alternative music culture which Straw identifies is observable in the UK too, and he is certainly right to draw attention to masculinity as a crucial area for understanding alternative or independent rock. Creation exemplifies such links. It is true that there was a period during which the work of Creation suggested a complicated mix of rockist nostalgia and post-punk experimentalism and a set of competing discourses about sexuality. The deliberately 'formless' studio experiments of My Bloody Valentine are far removed from the traditional rock song (based around the orgasmic guitar solo), as Reynolds and Press ( 199 5: 220) point out. 14 And Primal Scream's 1991 album Screamadelica was the most successful attempt to fuse dance rhythms with a rock sensibility during the dance boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s. 15 In fact, though, Screamadelica serves as a homage to the country bluesinflected work of the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s and Creation's project was

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always to create new superstars in this mould. The promotion of new star careers would necessarily involve considerable recording budgets and marketing costs, and these could not be sustained by a label low on business acumen and high on ambition. So a commitment to a certain notion of rock/ pop meaning was vital in determining institutional policy (and the same was true at other post-punk labels negotiating the contradictions of their own cultural politics). Creation had been quite successful in producing a series of indie stars (The House of Love, Primal Scream) as part of the independent networks in the late 1980s. What were they to gain from ties with the majors? Dick Green has stressed the particular importance of being able to coordinate international promotion (Music Week, 1994). From 1984 to 1990, Creation was licensed through the system of international affiliates which Rough Trade had successfully set up during the 1980s, such as RTD (Rough Trade Germany) and RTBV (The Netherlands). According to Green, it was difficult to promote bands adequately under this piecemeal arrangement because release dates for records could not be made to coincide with promotional tours. The Sony deal, according to Green, allowed 'unification' in Europe and the rest of the world outside of the US, where Creation had a deal with SBK, part of EMI (Music Week, 1994: 7). National pop stardom was not enough. The logic of the music industry as a cultural system is towards internationalization, because of the economies which accrue to very big, as opposed to moderate, sales: the costs of development, marketing and recording are high; marginal costs for reproducing each copy are very small. But such economics are not enough in themselves to explain what happened in indie in the late 1980s. Creation's goal was to produce international stars, not merely in order to make money, but because the classic pop dream involves going global, in the mould of the BeaLles' conquesl of Lhe global pop markeL in the 1960s. In olher words, the aesthetics at work in the company helped to determine institutional policy. As Alan McGee recognized in interviews, the price paid for the financial and coordination support of Sony was that Creation would have to 'deliver' internationally successful product: 'What's in it for Sony is these bands' record sales worldwide. They see me as a guy who can come up with alternative product and maybe give them two or three superstars' (quoted in Cameron, 1994: 20). By 1996, Creation had its first superstars- a band from Manchester called Oasis. In May 1994 I drove with Creation Records staff to a pub in Chelmsford, Essex to see Oasis play a gig to promote the release of its first single. About 200 people attended, in the wake of some limited, but very positive, music-press coverage. In early 1996 the same band, Oasis, was selling out two nights at a 100,000 capacity outdoor venue in the English Midlands, and had sustained a six-week run in the American top five with its second album. This was an unprecedented achievement for a British indie band. It consolidated the reputation of Creation Records as a key label in British rock history. It also affirmed, for many in the independent sector, the view that close deals with majors are the only way to achieve mass populariLy.

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Oasis was marketed from the start of its deal with Sony as an authentic British rock act for the global, or at least the US, market. An important context for understanding the purchase of Creation by Sony and the consequent success of Oasis is the changing status of' alternative rock' in the USA in the early 1990s. American post-punk was, in the mid-1980s, still largely confined to an underground network of college radio stations, independent record companies and specialist retail shops (Wright, 1986). But, from the mid-1980s, MTV was increasingly able to provide a massive-scale promotional forum for alternative rock to audiences beyond the core constituency of college radio listeners, and the major cities in the United States began to develop their own alternative rock stations (Goodwin, 1993; Straw, 1993). Leading alternative bands were signed by majors during the late 1980s, 16 and the style achieved spectacular cross-over success in 1991, when Nirvana reached the top of the American album charts with its album Nevermind. During the 'grunge' period initiated by the popularity of Nirvana and other bands, alternative rock was able to draw upon heavy metal and hard rock audiences who had previously resisted the style. British independent labels, however, were on the whole unable to capitalize on the possibility of selling 'alternative' acts in the USA. This was for two reasons. First, any labels, such as Rough Trade, who chose to work with their American equivalents, faced almost insurmountable problems in the American market: the absence of manufacturing and distribution possibilities, and the fragmentation of a huge market into regional divisions, with few national media outlets to bind them together (Wright, 1986). This was why many independent British labels chose to work with a major in the one-off case of the US, while using independent affiliates for all other territories in the world. But, second, even where British independents formed alliances with American majors, forms of British rock/pop labellable as 'alternative' were very difficult to sell in the late 1980s. Indie was not only resistant to the dance base of mainstream pop music; it also purported to be thoroughly antagonistic to the imagery and sounds of traditional rock culture (Reynolds, 1988). Very few bands from independent British labels achieved success in the USA, even within the alternative niche. When British bands turned towards dance fusions in the light of the publicity blaze around Manchester dance-rock fusions in 1989, the gulf between the European taste for dance music culture and the American preference for harder rock styles meant that bands like the Happy Mondays, on Factory, who were expected to do well when they toured the US in 1990, failed. Creation was strongly linked with the kind of alternative music that the Americans did not take to: their leading band, Primal Scream, had a dance sOLmd at the time, and became associated with the androgynous, neo-psychedelic 'shoegazing' style through the signing and development of bands such as Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. 17 Following the sale of its stock to Sony, however, Creation changed its strategy. In 1994, in a special Music Week advertising supplement, Alan McGee declared his intention of returning to rock roots: "'We're getting back to

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basics", says Alan McGee .... McGee's current watchword is "authenticity" which he claims is to the Nineties what "marketing" was to the Eighties' (Music Week, 1994: 3). 'Back to Basics' was a term which had been used frequently in 1993-94 by John Major, the Conservative Prime Minister, to signal a return to 'traditional' morality. So, to some extent, McGee and the Creation copywriter have their tongues in their cheeks. It is clear too that the authenticity which McGee invokes is a self-conscious one. Nevertheless, if we look at the records being issued at this time on Creation, and at the promotional and marketing tactics adopted by the company in order to sell them, a conservative traditionalism is apparent. Primal Scream made an album (Give Out But Don't Give Up, 1994) explicitly based on the values of certain subgenres of Anglo-American rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The album was recorded in Memphis, and featured a confederate flag on its cover. The iconography and the sounds referred listeners back to the hedonistic, unreconstructed version of masculinity in southern rock (the Allman Brothers) and the Rolling Stones' British country-boogie on albums such as Exile on Main Street (1972). 18 The album was greeted with some derision by the British music press for its nostalgic classicism. Oasis, however, was successfully marketed as sufficiently innovative in its reinvention of the rock tradition to be worthy of credibility. In 1991, Simon Frith commented that the case of the Stone Roses, who had not achieved the attention in the United States that they had gained in the UK, suggested the limits of a British belief in a traditional rock career model, whereby local cult success leads on to the American market, and to international fame (1991: 268). Frith has pointed out elsewhere that the model of rock success, which sees a band building a fan base by playing live, before getting signed up by record companies, true of bands as varied as the Beatles and the Grateful Dead in the 1960s, no longer holds. This is the case with Oasis: the band played a gig at a venue in Glasgow, which they knew Alan McGee would be likely to attend. The aim was to get a recording contract and then to build up a following- among journalists as much as fans. Management, band and record company coordinate marketing very carefully in advance. The marketing campaign for Oasis, however, suggests that some aspects of such traditional rock strategies are still operable for British independents in the 1990s. Breaking the band in Britain relied on the carefully controlled cultivation of a very small number of key journalists, who were introduced to the band (and partied with them) as they rehearsed, and played their first gigs in late 1993. 19 A reputation was built up via playing carefully selected live dates, and the issue of artificially rare 'white label' promotional records. Reports of the band's wild behaviour on tour and the fights between the two brothers at the core of the band drew on images from the classic masculinist rock tradition. (Sec, for example, the coverage of Oasis being thrown off a ferry due to a spot of bother in I Iarris, 1994.) American coverage duplicated the angles encouraged in the British media, and looked back to the

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notorious exploits of British acts such as Led Zeppelin, the Who and Herman's Hermits on the road in the 1960s and 1970s. Dick Green commented: 'To sell records, America needs to be taken into account. ... Oasis are our one big hope to change this whole situation [the poor sales of UK acts]. They're a very direct rock & roll band' (quoted in Sinclair, 199 5 : 2 4). The vast status of achieving success in America reflects in part that country's history as the origin of contemporary rock-based popular music; and the association of popular culture itself with American-ness. Success in the USA is the ultimate index of making it (e.g. Shelley, 1995). European success, by comparison, is sneered at, even though the size of the European market for recorded music was, by 1988, greater than that of the US. 20 The observation that a band is 'Big in Germany' is often used as a put-down of an act's limited appeal. During 1994 and 1995, as a series of indie bands broke through to the high reaches of the British charts, the music press and national newspapers were full of speculation about the fate of the 'Britpop' wave of talent in the US. 21 Because of the success of Oasis (and of other bands, such as the Boo Radleys, in the UK), of all the postpunk independent labels of the 1980s, Creation achieved most commercial success in the 1990s (though cuts in staff during 1998 suggest that the label is by no means invincible). But they have achieved their success via partnership with corporate capital; and, in order to 'deliver' their superstars, through a return to rock ideologies of authenticity and masculinity which many other independents had previously sought to challenge. This move at Creation cannot, however, be blamed simply on the intervention of Sony. Creation had always positioned itself in opposition to the more idealistic post-punk independents. A piece Alan McGee wrote for the Rough Trade magazine The Catalogue in 1984, for example, mocked the older generation of indies, and set out his view of rock aesthetics: 'Tune in, drop out or are you all simply too old? ... Timeless Classic Records Is Our Vision .... Remember great rock 'n' roll has very little to do with honesty. Liberalism does not appear on our pedigree' (McGee, 1984: 17). This suggests an adherence to an entrepreneurial notion of independence, as opposed to the emphasis on democratization at the other independents. Given that the same conceptions of musical quality are prevalent within many branches of the major companies, the move towards a buy-out could easily be reconciled with the company's former beliefs. The promotional strategies behind Oasis as a 'back to basics' rock and roll band are consistent with many aspects of the company's approach to rock aesthetics in the years before the Sony takeover. The debate which took place in the music press in 1992 over the nature and status of the independent charts (the lists of the biggest-selling independently distributed records) further reveals a division of perspectives within the sector. The discussion concerned the fundamental principle established by the post-punk independents - the crucial role of independent distribution. The independent charts had, since the beginning of the 1980s, provided an important promotional

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forum for the products of independent distribution companies. But when indie became established as a genre, a musical sound as well as, or perhaps instead of, a sign of a political stance towards the music business, many industry insiders began to argue that the independent charts should be based on musical style, rather than on the basis of whether the distributor had ties to a major corporation (the definition of 'independent'). These issues first came to the fore in 1985-86, when Music Week started to publish independent charts defined on the basis of sound, rather than economic status. 22 The independent labels reacted angrily, and the issue helped lead to the launch of a new trade association for independents, Umbrella, in January 1986. Music Week reverted to a chart based on independent distribution, but the matter became current again in the 1990s for two main reasons. Hrst, the dance genre (mainly pop versions of it, especially those created by Pete Waterman's PWL label) was beginning to dominate the independent charts, so some labels dealing with in die rock/ pop started to argue for a generic chart, in order that their music could be publicized more effectively, without the confusion caused by the mixing of styles in the distribution-based chart. Second, the rise of 'pseudo-independent' labels such as Hut (part of EMil Virgin) and Dedicated (part of BMG) was felt by many to be taking advantage of the independent charts: they were funded and owned by major labels, but used independent distribution to reach that chart. This led to a feeling that independent distribution was no longer a reliable index of difference from, and opposition to, the majors, and that the criterion of distribution might just as well be abandoned. It was the old guard of the post-punk independents that argued for the importance of independent distribution. The younger, newer labels favoured genre-based charts. 23 Significantly, Alan McGee took their side against the views of label bosses like Daniel Miller of Mute in arguing for the introduction of genre charts. 24 This was typical of McGee's pragmatism. Reflecting on the history of Creation in 1994, McGee presented the defeats of the independent ethos as inevitable: 'There's only two things that happen with independent labels,' he commented, 'you either get bought out or die. And that's it. There is no middle ground' (quoted in Cameron, 1994: 20). It was this pragmatism which helped to put Creation at the centre of the 'Britpop' boom of 1995-96. By early 1996, Holsten Pils was running a marketing campaign based around indie quizzes; and BBC Radio One, which in the UK dominates pop taste even more than does MTV in other territories, featured a series of young, emerging rock bands as its daytime staple. A direct legacy of the post-punk and indie sound and look had become central to British pop music. The meaning of this aesthetic had changed radically by this point, however, and had lost much of its oppositional edge. Indie was a term now generally used to describe a set of sounds and an attitude, rather than an aesthetic and institutional position. Indie was able to accommodate women musicians who were able to explore gendered experience in a sometimes powerful (P. J. Harvey) and often witty way (Elastica, Sleeper), but much of the genre had become associated with a backlash against feminism, in the form of new men's magazines which celebrated

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an unreconstructed version of young masculinity, a hegemonic sexual politics which went almost unchallenged. The 'whiteness' of the genre became even more pronounced; there was scarcely a black musician to be seen in the pages of the music press, except where jungle and trip-hop made appearances. The rockist aesthetic challenged by post-punk had made a comeback. Creation's success with Oasis was very influential in this process. And the narrow nationalism of the term 'Britpop' hardly needs comment (though the Irish roots of the two brothers, Noel and Liarn Gallagher, at d1e centre of Oasis, make the relationship of Creation's leading band to the phenomenon quite complex). 25

Forces towards partnership One Little Indian's story is one of a move away from a punk ethos and aesthetic towards an attempt to intervene in the pop market, to challenge the 'mainstream' on its own terms. Creation, however, began from a very different political and aesthetic position, which revolved around the excitement and unpretentiousness of a certain classic pop sound, a hip pop canon. Returning to the questions with which I began, how, then, can we assess the development of these two labels as an example of the trajectory of an oppositional moment within popular culture? First of all, what forces lay behind the move towards partnership with the major corporations on the part of the indie sector? The discourses of 'sell-out' and 'burn-out' mentioned earlier are too simplistic to capture the difficulty of these issues. There is more at stake in these decisions than the desire to make money, or to give up the struggle for an easier route, as both the case studies show. A more complex account of the motivations behind growth, and ambitions towards popular success for artists can be found in Georgina Born's analysis of the subjectivities of cultural producers (1993a: 236-8). Born stresses the very different psychic drives involved in the desire for mass popularity, and the desire for 'alterity' (working outside dominant systems). In an attempt to avoid the moralism of an avant-garde position often associated with Adorno, she writes about the ambivalence of'the global strategy'. There is the utopian pleasure of overcoming boundaries and reconciling difference; but there is also the darker side of the need for 'omnipotence, of banishing difference' (1993a: 236). Born stresses that these issues relate not only to the strategies of cultural producers, but to the pleasures derived by consumers from 'culturally imagined communities'. Popularity, in this model, is not a 'sell-out' but derives from fundamental but contradictory human drives. Alterity too has its positive and negative aspects: the exploration of the 'exotic or complex, as opposed to the banal', but also the denigration of the ordinary, and the idealization of the different. Thinking through these psychic divisions is a useful tool for prising open the difficulties faced by post-punk in reconciling conflicting aims towards being different but also being popular. It may be that these are cleavages which will face

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any popular-cultural movement which hopes to challenge hegemonic systems. Perhaps it is only possible to reconcile them temporarily, as the initial impulses which allow for coalitions around democratizing aims fragment with time. How cultural producers deal with these contradictions is enormously a±Tected by wider economic and organizational factors. The companies were constantly forced into certain practices in order to give 'their' music the promotional push they felt it deserved. In other words, discursive, psychological and aesthetic factors were applied in circumstances delineated by the economic logics of the cultural industries. Particularly important were the need to deal with risk by creating star names who would 'guarantee' future sales; the need for promotion, distribution and marketing; and potential access to the much larger audiences afforded by internationalization. It is understandable that musicians and record companies should want their music to matter, to be consumed and battled over on the largest stages. The motivations behind collaboration, behind the goal of wider pop success at a national and international level go beyond the base desire for financial comfort and the competitive desire to beat all rivals. The desire to stay on the margins, so apparent in 1980s indie, can sometimes reflect a contempt for popular culture. At the same time, to dismiss vernacular notions such as 'sell-out' as simplistic is overly haughty. Such ideas can serve positive political ends by providing a rallying cry for alterity and difference.

Institutional and aesthetic 'consequences' What were the consequences of professionalization and of partnership with the majors? Is it possible to speak of' losses' and 'gains' in terms of institutional and aesthetic politics? I argued, in discussing One Little Indian, that such companies can form a protective layer between, on the one hand, the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds and, on the other, musicians and other record company sta±I who want to be involved in the production of music, but who feel uncomfortable with the prevailing culture of the music business. And Born's discussion, referred to above, highlights the problems of taking the other route, of aspiring towards marginality, of seeking refuge in the comforts of obscurity. I think it is easier to talk of 'consequences' of such processes of professionalization and partnership in terms of institutional politics than in terms of aesthetic outcomes. In coming to work with the major corporations, One Little Indian and Creation were reflecting the failure of the post-punk challenge to the structure of the music industry. In an era of pragmatic acceptance of collaboration with major capital, there is a need to (re)develop a case against the majors which docs not rely on a simplistic romanticism. At the core of the post-punk independent ethos was an important argument about autonomy. Pinancial investment on the part of major corporations entails potential control. In general,

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major companies monitor their partners in the independent sector closely. Many independents with ties to bigger companies claim that they work autonomously; but it is worth referring to a distinction which Graham Murdock (1982: 122-3) borrows from the sociology of economics, between allocative and operational control. Allocative control consists of formulating overall policy and strategy; decisions on whether to expand, and at what rate; financing issues; and control over the distribution of profits. Operational control, however, works at a lower level and is confined to decisions about the effective use of resources already allocated and the implications of policies already decided upon at the allocative level. This does not mean that operational controllers have no creative elbow-room or effective choices to make .... Nevertheless, their range of options is still limited by the goals of the organisations they work for and by the level of resources they have been allocated. (Murdock, 1982: 122-3) Murdock is referring primarily to the tension between newspaper proprietors and the editors beneath them, but I think the distinction is useful for post-Fordist networks of small and large record companies too (see Hesmondhalgh, 1996). The small company in partnership with a larger firm is in this position, i.e. of having decisions about finances and overall strategy ultimately made for them depending on which level of partnership they undertake (see Hesmondhalgh, 1996: 4 74). There will inevitably be pressure to adapt to 'the goals of the major organisation they work for', as Murdock puts it. Such partnerships, it should be noted, are potentially of enormous financial benefit to major corporations. A senior executive at one major record company told me that his firm would be aiming at gaining 80 per cent of their revenues from distribution, and only 10 per cent from bands signed directly to the company. 26 Independent companies which sign partnership deals are not only prone to takeover bids at a later stage; they also feed the relentless drive for profit which is the legal requirement of any corporation. These arrangements have been called 'symbiotic' (e.g. Frith, 1988) but the greater power is with the majors. Many of the Britpop bands which achieved success in the 1995-97 period were on labels with close ties to the majors. Unlike Creation and One Little Indian, many of these companies entered into close alliance with major companies from their very inception. They were often production companies set up in order to push one band in particular. Brett Anderson of leading indie act Suede told Billboard in 1993 that 'The independent music industry is the only place that allows bands to develop. We don't intend to betray it and run off to some multinational corporation' (Billboard, 1993: 75). But Suede is signed toN ude Records, which is co-run by Suede's manager Saul Galpern, and which was tied, like Creation, to Sony's Licensed Repertoire Division (since renamed). Ash, whose debut album reached the number one position in the British album charts in May 1996,

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is on the Infectious label, which was set up by a former RCA A&R (Artist and Repertoire) director as his own 'independent' label, with a financing deal from his former employers, BMG. 1990s indie, then, marked a new era of major/independent collaboration. Another sign of the decline of the punk ethos as it transmuted into indie was the erosion of the 'micro-independent' sector. While dozens of very small record companies continue to spring up across Britain, they have much less access to a wider public sphere than previously (although John Peel's I3I3C show continues to promote them, and their products can still be found in a shrinking network of shops and fanzines). Now bands working in the indie genre aim to sign to 'pseudo-independent' companies in order to get public attention in the indie sector, before crossing over into the pop mainstream. These labels and the various marketing specialists they use are concentrated in a scene based around Camden Town, North London: If it sometimes seems to you, gentle readers, that the entire music business -performance, rehearsal, marketing, promotion, partying and relaxation -is currently taking place exclusively within a couple of square miles north of Euston [a major train station in North London] . well, you're almost completely right, as it happens. (Parkes, 1995: 29) The decentralizing impulse of punk/post-punk had gone from indie and it migrated, in complicated ways, to dance music culture (see Hesmondhalgh, 1998). But what of the musical culture associated with these institutional changes? To what extent is it possible to draw links between such institutional changes and the aesthetic-political nature of the texts and performances produced? Can we speak of aesthetic 'consequences'? I suggested above, in closing my discussion of Creation, that the story of indie as a whole is one of a move towards conformism and conservatism. On the surface, I might appear to be indulging here in a fairly traditional form of radical left commentary on the dynamics of popular culture, one which mourns the decline of an oppositional impulse precisely at the point at which it reaches beyond its original niche audience. But, in my view, it is not the fact of cross-over itself which limits the potential of 1990s indie. Rather, the political-aesthetic problem is one of a prevailing nostalgic classicism at large in indie culture (and One Little Indian's Bjork represents an exception to that). Such pastiche in the 1980s was a quiet challenge to the notions of authenticity on which much mainstream rock rested because it suggested the value of a return to hidden parts of the canon more concerned with a fey, pop sensibility. Indie's celebration of obscurity and failure was intended as a gesture of contempt for those who revelled in a notion of success founded on competitive individualism. But by the 1990s, the use of older sounds had become emptied of political

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meaning and was increasingly accompanied by a rockist self-indulgence, a flamboyant display of arrogance and wealth more or less undistinguishable from that which punk had so despised twenty years earlier. This is not to deny that some bands, some records, some moments, went beyond such conservatism and conformism. Oasis was widely criticized for its imitation of other bands and other songs, but its records were made emotionally complex by a mixture of ebullient optimism and aching yearning. Pulp's Jarvis Cocker brought to the mass pop audience uncomfortable narratives of sexual dysfunction and class anger. Nevertheless, 1990s indie as a whole was marked by nostalgia, political conformity, aesthetic traditionalism, a notion of personal and professional success indistinguishable from the aspirational consumerism of much of the rest of British society and a lack of interest in changing the social relations of production. Whatever the limits and contradictions of late 1980s indie, it at least offered a critique. Even if I am right in characterizing 1990s indie in this way, however, it is still difficult to describe these features as the political-aesthetic consequences of major/independent collaboration, as the outcome of a set of institutional politics. As we have seen above, Creation's distinctive aesthetic position preceded the Sony takeover by many years. It was aestheticist in that it placed much more emphasis on what was produced, than on the social relations behind the commodity. It was classicist in that it adhered to a traditional rock notion of what constituted quality and success. The company's concern with a particular model of global pop success as the goal of musical activity helped to form its institutional politics: a pragmatic acceptance of the need for partnership with major capital. In other words its aesthetic position helped to form its institutional politics, rather than the other way round. This reverses the way in which often-noted moves from a (contradictory) oppositional politics towards something more conformist and conservative are explained 'within' popular culture. It is too simplistic to see the conservatism of 1990s indie as deriving solely from its institutional base in networks of collaboration with the major companies. This does not mean, of course, that aesthetics are autonomous of social forces as a whole; but we do need to be cautious in assuming that oppositional or conformist institutional politics lead to correspondingly oppositional or conformist textual forms ( cf. Born, 199 3 b: 2 80). I also want to question another vernacular view which sees too close a link between institutional and aesthetic politics, a position represented in the attitude of Crass, reported above, to the solo work of Bjork. According to this perspective, any move towards stylistic pluralism might be seen as evidence of institutional co-optation and compromise. The logical outcome of such a view is the advocacy of an aesthetic position which only values simplicity, on the grounds that it encourages widespread participation through de-skilling. There are echoes here of the ethos of collective participation in folk revivalism. Though very different from Creation's position, this too represents a nostalgic aesthetic, which implicitly argues for a return to a fantasized version of pre-modern social relations of production. One Little Indian had the courage to go beyond its punk

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roots to explore and create a richer soundscape. This involved professionalization, with its higher production costs and the use of corporate capital in order to market its products internationally. The price of such moves, though, is the abandonment of the autonomy sought by punk. Indie, then, represents the end of the post-punk vision of transforming the social relations of musical production via the medium of the small record company. I have argued elsewhere (Hesmondhalgh, 1997: 271-2) that post-punk independence foundered on punk's own ambivalence about popularity. It proved impossible to reconcile being 'outside' the music industry with producing a new mainstream, because the terms of that new attempt were dictated by the capitalist economics which make the majors dominant. Indie represents the pragmatic 1990s response to that dilemma: a tendency towards classical pop aesthetics, and 'arm's length' institutional ties with the corporations. But to point to the failure of indie (amidst its many pleasures) is not to argue for a return to a punk vision of an alternative cultural praxis. Times have changed: a different era calls for a different cultural politics, but hopefully one which will take into account the lessons of earlier failures.

Notes

2

3

4

5 6

For an academic treatment of this discourse, see, for example, Stephen Lee, who argues that 'Wax Trax's move toward the major labels represented in the employees' minds the only possible alternative to them' (Lee, 1995: 24). Reynolds (1986) for example, remarks that indie-pop had 'abandoned R&B roots for albino sources like The Velvet Underground, Television, Sixties psychedelia, rockabilly, folk'. There were debates in the music press during 1986 over whether The Smiths' single 'Panic' (Rough Trade, 1986) with its refrain 'Hang the D J', was a racist attack on black music (sec Rogan, 1992: 255-6). In the radio documentary, 'Creation Rebels' (BBC Radio One, broadcast 19 February 1995) one musician recounts how label boss Alan McGee would always turn down the bass to a minimum whenever he played any new tracks by the band. On this stabilization, see Straw (1991, 1993), Frith (1988) and Goodwin (1993), all of whom place video in the context of wider industrial and cultural change. For prognoses of exposure problems for the independent sector, see Crampton ( 1985) and Diggit ( 1985). The growth of such alliances between majors and independents in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s led various commentators to question traditional models of independent cultural production. On this phenomenon in the recording industry, see Vignolle (1980), Frith (1988), Negus (1992); and for a different viewpoint, Hesmondhalgh (1996), where I survey a wider literature on such links.

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8 9 10

11

12 13

14

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Details from an interview with Penny Rimbaud, G. and Steve Ignorant (3 March 1994). The fieldwork interviews cited here were carried out between 1993 and 1996 as part ofresearchfunded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). This article was submitted to Cultural Studies in July 1997 and resubmitted with minor revisions in July 1998. My thanks to all interviewees, especially Mark Edmondson; to Jo Forshaw for her generous help with contacts; and to Jason Toynbee for helpful comments on this material at a crucial time. McKay ( 1996: 73-101) has traced the hippie roots of Crass, and has analysed the feminist and situationist elements in their politics. In 1997 Mayking went into receivership and Birkett bought back his 60 per cent stake from Bonner. For an early example of this purism, see Crass's 'Punk is Dead', from The FeedinB cif the Five Thousand (Small Wonder, 1978), which attacked other punk bands for 'selling out'. The other most notable British owner-managers of the 1980s and 1990s were: Daniel Miller at Mute; Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD; Martin Mills at Beggars Banquet; Tony Wilson at Factory; Geoff Travis at Rough Trade; and Pete Waterman at PWL. For example, Melody Maker (1994); and 'Creation Rebels', BBC Radio One, broadcast 19 February 1995. 'Alternative rock' is the term which has generally been used in the United States for what in Britain was known as indie or 'independent' rock or pop. Lately, the term in die has become more widely used in the US. As with all genre terms, boundaries are always in dispute and there is no court to act as final arbiter of what constitutes indie and alternative rock/pop and what does not. The £250,000 recording budget of My Bloody Valentine's 1992 album Loveless is often blamed for McGee and partner Dick Green's decision to sell49 per cent of Creation to Sony in that year (e.g. Melody Maker, 1994). I mean 'successful' here in the sense of gaining prestige. The album won the Mercury Music Prize in 1992, and was album of the year in the New Musical Express in 1991 . Corbett (1994: 48-9) tells the story of the transition of REM from independent act to major label signing (in 1988) as an example of the increasing entanglement of alternative ('local mode') and major ('systemic mode') commodities. Other major signings at about this time were Sonic Youth (from SST to Geffen) and Husker Du (from SST to Warners). Of the British post-punk independents, 4AD managed to achieve most success in the American market, and they did so by signing American bands (The Pixies, Belly and the Breeders) and then licensing them back to American divisions of the majors. See Reynolds and Press (1995: 52-3) for an analysis of the misogyny underlying the Rolling Stones' work of this period. Such rockist misogyny placed the Stones outside the 1980s indie canon, which was strongly influenced by feminism.

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19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26

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Information about the Oasis marketing campaign is drawn from interviews with Jonny Hopkins of Creation, and my fieldwork in 1994. According to IFPI figures cited by Negus ( 1993: 298), the income generated from sales of recorded music in the EC (31 per cent of global total) exceeded the equivalent figure in North America (30 per cent) for the first time in 1988. For example, the front page headline in Melody Maker on 9 December 1995 read: 'Britpop in the USA. Blur, Oasis: Will They Make It In America?' Tony Wilson, heacl of Factory, arguecl for a clefinition of inclepenclence as 'that very simple ancl accurate clescription- recorcls which are clistributecl by inclepenclent distribution' (Music Week, 1986: 6). In doing so he was taking an idealistic position, opposed to that of Alan McGee. See the debate organized by the New Musical Express between Martin Mills (Beggars Banquet), Andy Ross (Food), Keith Cullen (Setanta) and leading indie DJ Steve Lamacq (then of the NME): transcribed as Maconie (1992). Only Mills, representing the post-punk generation, favoured charts based on independent distribution. 'The idea of what indie was and what indie is now is completely redundant. The idea of 40-year-old guys sitting round in a restaurant in \Vest Kensington dictating who is and who isn't in the indie chart, I find utterly ludicrous' (Alan McGee, quoted in New Musical Express (1992)). For a brilliant analysis of the politics of'Britpop' and Oasis's complicated position within it, see Savage ( 1997). The other 10 per cent came from licensing deals. I was told I could quote these figures, but that I should not mention the executive's name.

References Billboard (1993) 'Suede', 13 February: 75.

Bloomfield, Terry ( 1991) 'It's sooner than you think, or where are we in the history of rock music?', New Left Review, 190: 59-81. Born, Georgina (1993a) 'Against negation, for a politics of cultural production', Screen, 34(3): 223-42. - - (1993b) 'Afterword: music policy, aesthetic and social difference', in Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd and Graeme Turner (eels) Rock and Popular Music, London and New York: Routledge. BPI Statistical Handbook (1993) London: British Phonographic Institute. Cameron, Keith (1994) 'Doing it for the quids', New Musical Express, 19 February: 20-2. Corbett, John (1994) Extended Play, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Crampton, Luke (1985) 'An independent view', The Catalogue, April: 14. Diggit, Will U. (1985) 'Numb 1 for music' [sic], The Catalogue, July: 15. Frith, Simon ( 1988) 'Video pop: picking up the pieces', in Simon Frith ( ed.) Facing the Music, New York: Pantheon.

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- - (1991) 'Anglo-America and its discontents', Cultural Studies, 5(3): 263-9. Gibson, Robin (1988) 'On the warpath', Sounds, 3 December: 19. Gittins, Ian (1988) 'Acts of aggression', Melody Maker, 3 December: 42-3. Goodwin, Andrew (1993) Dancing in tbe Distraction Factory, London: Routledge. Gray, Herman (1988) Producing jazz, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Harris, John (1994) 'The Bruise Brothers', New Musical Express, 23 April: 10,11,49. Herman, Edward and McChesney, Robert ( 1997) Tbe Global Media, London: Cassell. Hesmondhalgh, David (1996) 'flexibility, post-fordism and the music industries', Media, Culture and Society, 15(3): 469-88. - - (1997) 'Post-punk's attempt to democratise the music industry: the success and failure of rough trade', Popular Music, 16(3): 255-74. - - (1998) 'The British dance music industry: a case study in independent cultural production', British journal if Sociology, 49(2): 234-51. Kelly, Danny (1987) 'From C86 to Catch 22', New Musical Express, 11 April: 29. Laing, Dave (1985) One Cbord Wonders, Buckingham: Open University Press. Lee, Stephen (1995) 'Re-examining the concept of the 'independent' record company: the case of 'wax trax!' records', Popular Music, 14(1 ): 13-31. MacDonald, Ian (1995) Revolution in tbe Head, London: Pimlico. Maconie, Stuart ( 1992) 'State of indie pundits', New Musical Express, 25 July: 10-12. McGee, Alan (1984) 'Label spotlight: Creation Records', Tbe Catalogue, November-December: 17. McKay, George ( 1996) Senseless Acts if Beauty, London: Verso. Melody Maker (1994) 'The story of Creation', 15 January: 36-8. Murdock, Graham (1982) 'Large corporations and the control of the communications industries', in Michael Gurevitch et al. (eds) Culture, Society and tbe Media, London: Methuen. Music Week (1986) 'Indie Wilson lays down the lore', 15 November: 4, 6. - - (1994) 'Creation 10: a souvenir supplement to celebrate ten years of Creation Records', 19 March. Negus, Keith (1992) Producing Pop, London: Edward Arnold. - - (1993) 'Global harmonies and local discords: transnational policies and practices in the European recording industry', European journal if Communication, 8(3): 295-316. New Musical Express ( 1992) 'Indie majors split on chart', 25 July: 3. Parkes, Taylor ( 1995) 'It's a NW 1-derfullife', Melody Maker, 17 June: 29-32. Price, Simon (1993) 'Ooh, la, la, la', Melody Maker, 15 May: 8-9. Reynolds, Simon (1986) 'Younger than yesterday', Melody Maker, 28 June: 32-3. - - ( 1988) 'Against health and efficiency', in Angela McRobbie (erl.) Zoot Suits and Second Hand Dresses, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Reynolds, Simon ami Press, Joy (1995) Tbe Sex Revolts, London: Serpent's Tail. Rogan, Johnny (1992) Morrissey and Marr: Tbe Severed Alliance, London: Omnibus. Savage, Jon (1991) England's Dreaming, London: Faber and Faber. - - (1997) 'The Boys' Club', Tbe Guardian (Friday Review section), 4 July: 2-4. Shaw, Arnold (1978) Honkers and Sbouters, New York: Collier.

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Shelley, Jim (1995) 'Rock and a hard place', The Guardian (Weekend Section), 22 April: 24--31. Sinclair, David ( 1995) 'The British aren't coming', Rolling Stone, 9 March: 23-4. Straw, Will ( 1991) 'Systems of articulation, logics of change: communities and scenes in popular music', Cultural Studies, 5(3): 368-88. - - (1993) 'Popular music and postmodernism in the 1980s', in Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Vignolle, Jean-Paul ( 1980) 'Mixing genres and reaching the public: the production of popular music', Social Science lr:formation, 19: 79-1 05. Wright, Peter (1986) 'The American way', The Catalogue, July: 25.

Selective discography Bjork, Debut, One Little Indian, 1993. Crass, The Feeding of the Five Thousand, Small Wonder, 1978. --Stations ofthe Crass, Crass Records, 1979. --Penis Envy, Crass Records, 1981 . My Bloody Valentine, Loveless, Creation, 1991. Nirvana, Nevermind, Geffen, 1991. The Pooh Sticks, Alan McGee, Fierce EP, 1988. Primal Scream, Scremadelica, Creation, 1991 . Primal Scream Give Out But Don't Give Up, Creation 1994.

[8] WHEN WOMEN PLAY THE BASS Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music MARY ANN CLAWSON Wesleyan University

Drawing on interviews with WlJmen and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of "womanly" affinity. The entrance ofwomen into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site ofartistic production, yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division lif labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies.

Maybe I think about this more than a normal person does. But maybe not, because a LOf of people ask me why there are so many girls who play bass in bands.

Donna Dresch (I 995)

By 1989, when Donna Dresch of Team Dresch, and former bassist for Dinosaur Jr., Fifth Column, and Screaming Trees, posed this question, many observers of the punk and postpunk scenes had begun to identify the electric bass as the "women's instrument" in what is today known as alternative rock. 1 Accounts of women in popular music have tended to be dominated by a focus on well-known individual performers that has been more effective in constructing a heritage of important women musicians than it has in the equally important task of illuminating the social dynamics of gendered music making and the sources of feminine disadvantage. In contrast, Dresch's question is a distinctively sociological one, pointing to the fact that the movement of women pioneers into the male-dominated rock band has been accompanied by their disproportionate concentration in a particular instrumental specialty. My consideration of the bass is part of a study of rock music as a gendered work activity, focused on women and men who play instruments. The decision to concenAUTHOR'S NOTE: An earlier version ofthis article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, August 9-13, 1997. I want to thank Anna Leferfor research assistance; Dan Clawson, Elaine Hall, Beth Schneider; and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments; and my musician-informants for their thoughtful responses. REPRINT REQUESTS: Mary Ann Clawson, Sociology Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown,

CT06459.

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trate on instrumental musicians was motivated by the view that ensemble instrument playing is the musical activity from which women have been most fully excluded, in contrast to singing, where women have achieved significant recognition in both the classical and pop music worlds (Green 1997, 33). Such exclusion limits women's access to the fullest range of musical creativity; moreover, the differentiation of vocal and instrumental music both echoes and reinforces an opposition of feminine and masculine that has been characteristic of Western culture. 2 This study of the disproportionate location of women as bassists in the world of alternative rock examines both the structural allocation of positions and their retrospective legitimation in an ongoing, though often mutating, gender division of labor. Following Reskin and Roos (1990), I present women's concentration in a particular instrumental specialty as the product of its lesser attractiveness to men coupled with its increased accessibility and continued appeal for women. But I modify their analysis by arguing that, at least in the case of alternative rock, women moved into new positions not only because of the ordinary job queuing process but also because political and cultural imperatives generated a specific demand for women musicians. This demand was then met in precisely the form that job queuing theory would predict, via the incorporation of women as bassists. Second, I look at explanations offered by musicians themselves, especially bassists, and find that while both men and women respondents advance structural explanations for women's disproportionate representation, the women often offered an additional reason, claiming for themselves a distinctively feminine gift for bass playing. This raises questions about the implications of women's use of naturalizing explanations to legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production. Ultimately, both structural and interpretive approaches point to the same issue: whether the movement of women into the structure of the previously all-male band via the bass serves to challenge existing gender arrangements and assumptions or merely to reconfigure them.

EMERGENCE OF THE WOMAN BASS PLAYER Because of the traditional association of women with singing, their opportunities and achievements have been disproportionately concentrated in musical forms that highlight individual vocal performance (Clawson 1993; Green 1997). Genres such as pop, with its focus on the vocalist backed by anonymous studio musicians, and contemporary folk, featuring the self-accompanied singer-songwriter, have served as the principle sites for the development of women's artistry. Thus, pop stars such as Madonna and Janet Jackson and singer-songwriters such as Tracy Chapman and Tori Amos remain the best-known women performers. Indeed, women are disproportionately represented as solo vocal artists (Alanis Morissette, Natalie Merchant) even in Billboard's heavily band-dominated "Modern Rock" charts. 3

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In contrast to either pop or folk, rock music, including alternative, identifies the entire band as its ideal creative and performing unit. 4 Conceived above all as a group, the electronically amplified guitar band, with its core of one or more guitars, electric bass, and drums, has been the center of rock music as understood by its largely white audiences since the mid-1960s (Bennett 1980; Finnegan 1989). Because instrument playing is so strongly linked to notions of rock creativity, the traditional restriction of women to the role of vocalist, while found in most American pop genres, is especially disempowering in rock music. Assessment of the status of women should therefore include examination of their work as instrumentalists, with special attention to the opportunity structures and cultural assumptions that have limited the development of their full creative potential within this artistic realm. Until the 1970s, when punk and New Wave emerged in Britain and the United States, few rock bands included women members, and even fewer featured women in any role other than that of vocalist. Rolling Stone's 1987 critics' poll of "The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years" may serve as one indicator of this phenomenon. Women appeared in fewer than one-fourth (22.9 percent) of the 611isted bands and solo acts, and these 14 women represented 5.5 percent of the total number of participating musicians. Of these, 9 were principally known as singers, while only 5 performed solely in an instrumental capacity. Analysis of this compilation of popular and critically esteemed albums of 1967-1987 indicates that there were few women performers during this period, even fewer women instrumentalists, and no particular association of women with bass playing, as only one woman bassist, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, was included (Rolling Stone 1987, 46-173). The punk era of the mid- to late 1970s has often been identified as a moment of opportunity for women, and in Britain, this led to the formation of bands that were all, or predominantly, women (the Slits, the Raincoats, the Au Pairs), as well as the emergence of visually and behaviorally transgressive vocalists such as Poly Styrene and Siouxsie Sioux (Gaar 1992, 241-45; McDonnell1997, 430). Many have argued that the ideology of punk "offered women a specific realm in which to create their own opportunities" and a specific incitement to do so (Gaar 1992, 272). This is often attributed to punk's musical return to the three-chord basics of early rock and roll, the do-it-yourself rejection of virtuosity that beckoned anyone and everyone to pick up a guitar. But punk created cultural as well as practical openings. For a music predicated on the spirit of transgression, the very presence of women-and especially of women who violated mainstream norms of feminine appearance and selfpresentation-could be a major means of disrupting the cultural status quo. In the United States, however, women's participation in punk and successor genres differed somewhat from the British model. It was more concentrated in the 1980s, involved different modes of self-presentation for women-a "one-of-theboys" look as opposed to the more assertively bizarre look of British punk-and tended to take the form of women's minority membership in predominantly male bands (O'Brien 1995, 171-72). "Somehow in punk rock," commented Kim

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Gordon, bassist of Sonic Youth, "girls started playing bass" (Kelly 1997, 250). Or, as Kim Deal, bassist for the Pixies, joked, "Now you're not even a cool band unless you have a girl bass player-named Kim" (Arnold and Dahl 1997, 437). The prominence of women bass players like Weymouth, Gordon, and Deal has evoked both pride in their accomplishments and skepticism about what it portended. "There were a few females sprinkled through alternative's wonder years, but their roles were usually consigned to that of the Female Bass Player," and "any successful alternative act was predominantly male-led" (Dunn 1997, 517). The past I 0 years have seen the emergence of the rriot grrl movement of the Pacific Northwest and the success of women-led guitar bands such as Hole, Veruca Salt, and Elastica (Dunn 1997; Gottlieb and Wald 1994; Wald 1998). But the prominence of such groups tends to be episodic in contrast to the all-male bands that dominate Billboard's "Modern Rock" charts year after year (Billboard 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996). In 1996, for example, Billboard's year-end compilation of the most popular "Modern Rock" tracks listed 28 bands and 6 solo artists. While solo acts were evenly divided between women and men, the composition of the 28 bands was strikingly skewed: 3 were fronted by women lead singers (two of whom played guitar), and 1 band, Smashing Pumpkins, included a woman bassist who was the only nonsinging woman artist on the chart. The remaining 24 bands contained only men (Billboard 1996). Despite the intermittent prominence of majority-women bands such as Belly and the Breeders, both of whom appeared on the 1993 year-end compilation, alternative continues to be a male-dominated musical genre, with the bass remaining a principle site for women's still limited access (Billboard 1993).

METHODS This study focuses on women and men musicians who were identified through their participation in an annual regional band competition, the WBCN Rumble. The choice of the Rumble was intended to address a problem that has been analytically limiting for the study of women in pop music: a disproportionate focus on wellknown performers and a reliance on evidence that is anecdotal rather than systematic and socially situated. Thus, the sample I sought had to meet several criteria. First, it had to be grounded in a discrete and delimited population of musicians whose composition was defined independently of my study. It should include at least some musicians who were relatively experienced and committed but not so celebrated as to be unavailable for interviews. Finally, the study should be located in and representative of an important local music scene, one with enough performance venues and a big enough audience to support a wide range of musicians. Boston is such a locale: "For the past thirty years, it has ... maintained a thriving underground music culture.... Its tight circle of clubs has ... nurtured numerous budding musicians, and some have transcended local popularity to become full-fledged stars" (Simon 1994, 18). A large population of students and recent graduates supports an active club scene and provides the audiences for both homegrown musi-

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cians and those who migrate to take advantage of Boston's "musical support system" and character as a "hip little scene" and a "reasonable place to live and do music" (Robicheau 1994, 45; Simon 1994, 35, 37). In addition, Boston offered the presence of the Rumble, which could be used to define a discrete population of musicians. Held every year since 1979, the Rumble is one of the best-known and most highly institutionalized band competitions in the United States. Each year, 24 bands compete, selected from hundreds of tapes submitted to the radio station. Their live performances are then judged by panels of journalists, radio programmers, and recording company employees during the three-week-long competition. Use of the Rumble allowed me to identify bands that were not yet commercially successful but were active performers within this major and influential regional music market. Given the multiplicity of commercial environments and pop music genres in a very decentered entertainment world, no sample can be definitive, but the Rumble provided a systematic selection of working musicians, women and men, operating within the same set of commercial and artistic structures. As noted, the study targets instrumentalists who may or may not sing as well. I obtained responses from 77 percent of the women (19 of 22) who played instruments in 1990 or 1991 Rumble bands and from an approximately equal number of male respondents drawn from the 168 male participants. Phone interviews with 29 respondents lasted between 45 and 90 minutes and contained a mix of closed and open-ended questions. A minority of participants ( 14) preferred to respond through a mail survey that replicated the phone interview as closely as possible. A majority of 43 respondents was in their late 20s and early 30s at the time they were contacted, with a median age of26 for men and 29 for women. All were white, in accord with rock's character as a predominantly white pop genre, and most came from middle-class backgrounds and had attended college for one or more years. 5 The Rumble typically sought a mix of bands, with "established names going up against bands few people outside the selection committee had heard" (Lozaw 1991, 12). Despite the fact that many ofthese bands were well known locally, and that at least a quarter had toured extensively in the United States and parts of Europe, none of those interviewed supported themselves through performing and recording. Music at this level often combines penury with modest renown; it is entirely possible to have a single that reaches No. 1 on BBC-1, as one of my respondents did, while supporting one's self by working as a catering waiter at a local university. 6 Respondents worked at a variety of day jobs; they were teachers and receptionists, managers and haircutters, warehouse workers and bicycle-messengers. Nonetheless, respondents commonly identified music as their principle work activity, the focus of long-term ambition and artistic aspiration. The majority did not, of course, achieve their musical goals, but in the three to four years following their Rumble appearances, three of the bands were signed to major label contracts, and one of the sample became a well-known solo performer. The interviews asked for a history of musical involvement, with special attention to how and when respondents learned to play and joined bands, their changing

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musical tastes, their acquisition of skills, and their involvement in various groups over time. They were also asked about their experiences playing as or with women musicians and their views about the advantages and obstacles faced by women. Within this context, a request to explain the growing number of women bassists proved especially stimulating to some respondents, especially those who themselves played bass. Examination of Rumble participants supports the perception that women instrumentalists were disproportionately represented as bass players. The I9 women respondents were members of II bands. In these bands, the concentration of women as bassists is clear. Seven of the 11 (63 percent) had women bassists, while 3 bands (27 percent) included I or more female electric guitarist, and 2 (17 percent) had a woman drummer. In no majority-male band did a woman play either the electric guitar or the drums, but women did play bass in 4 of these 7 predominantly male bands. Many of the Rumble respondents, both men and women, were aware of, and spontaneously mentioned, this trend. "Most women," noted Sean Gordon, "if they play anything, play bass. In a four- to five-piece band, that's one slot a woman could play." 7 Bassist Ellen Berkshire agreed that it was common to see bands "where everyone in the band is a guy except for the girl bass player." And Rae Ann Carson, another woman bassist, commented on men's greater openness: "I notice it is accepted now-men are inclined to assume you could be good at it. They don't assume I will stink." As a result, Tim Newman argued, the record industry's traditional acceptance of women as singers had widened: "Now ... they are bass players" as well. At the present time, most bass players are still men simply because most bands remain singlesex masculine groups. But comments like these suggest that the bass is in the process of becoming identified as the women's instrument within the alternative rock band.

INTERPRETING FEMINIZATION: "GUITARISTS HAVE POWER" The movement of women into the occupation of rock musician, and their increasing location within a particular instrumental specialty, may be seen as a specification ofReskin and Roos's (1990) queuing theory of occupational sex segregation. They argue that women are most likely to make inroads into occupations that experience a shortage of "suitable" male workers. In this account, shortages of men, which then create opportunities for women, are not caused by a simple expansion of demand but by changes in the work process (e.g., deskilling, technological reorganization) or by declines in available rewards, such as lesser earnings, lower prestige, or fewer possibilities for upward mobility. Rather than pushing men out, women gain access to jobs that men have already begun to abandon. Such jobs

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retain their attractiveness to women in comparison to available employment within feminized sectors of the labor market. The entrance of women into a previously male-dominated occupation often produces ghettoization, the emergence of predominantly female specialties rather than a distribution of women throughout the occupation. For example, women real estate agents are concentrated in residential sales, while men continue to dominate commercial sales, and the growing numbers of women bakers work in retail outlets baking partially prepared products obtained from wholesale bakeries where men are the primary workers. "In none of the occupations we studied were the sexes so genuinely integrated that men and women performed the same jobs, in the same settings, and at the same levels in the organizational hierarchy" (Reskin and Roos 1990, 306). Rather, white men's privileged position enabled them to monopolize the most prized jobs, leaving women and minority group men to occupy less advantageous places. Many of the musicians questioned advanced a similar, institutionally based analysis. They emphasized the role of skill requirements, supply and demand, and/or men's efforts to monopolize highly valued activities. Because it combines lower entry-level skill requirements with greater demand, the bass, in their view, offered the most opportunities for band participation. Skill Acquisition

Skill requirements for the bass player were consistently seen as less rigorous. At least one male guitarist expressed a view of the bass as "the easiest to play well," an instrument that unequivocally demands a lower level of skill (Barrett, man guitarist). Bass players themselves often bristled at such characterizations but could not deny that "it's very easy to start off on, because it has four strings instead of six, and you play one string at a time" (Garrett, man bassist). Instead, they distinguished between adequacy and excellence. "It's very quick, you can quickly sound OK.... But it takes a really long time to be really good-it's difficult" (Johnson, woman bassist). "The bass is deceiving because it's easy to be OK, but very hard to take it further. That's what I love-it seems simple, but there's so much more to it" (Garrett). "People often say-oh it's the easiest. It isn't the easiest to play correctly and imaginatively" (Rinaldi, woman bassist). Everyone who discussed it not only agreed that the bass is perceived as the rock instrument that can be learned most quickly but assumed that ease of learning would be especially important for women. That is, they assumed that women, more than men, would be drawn to an instrument with lower skill requirements and/or a faster learning curve. This, in turn, was based on the belief that women commonly begin playing rock instruments and join bands at a considerably later age than do men, a belief confirmed by my research. Women respondents in the Rumble sample reported beginning to play their rock instruments at the median age of 19, followed by participation in a first band at the

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median age of 21. This was in marked contrast to male respondents, who began to play at 13 and joined first bands at the median age of 15.3. Thus, fully 87.5 percent of the men had joined their first bands before high school graduation. In contrast, only 26 percent of the women in the study had played in a band prior to high school graduation. One-quarter joined bands during college, a time when social life is more gender integrated. Most strikingly, about half (47 percent) did not begin to play in a band until past college age. For these young women, rock musicianship was more frequently a phenomenon of young adulthood than a product of early adolescence. 8 Aspiring women rock musicians are thus often denied the years of teenage apprenticeship and skill acquisition experienced by male counterparts. Given this, the appeal of the bass as a quickly learned instrument is understandable. Sarah Johnson, a woman bassist, made explicit reference to this dynamic: "You can quickly sound OK," she noted, "so women who didn't have guitars given to them at 12, are impatient and wanted to be in a band, to not be laughed at, can learn in six months." "There are lots of women in the particular genre of postpunk," noted Jenny Spelling, an accomplished woman bassist. "They start playing bass because it's easy to play as a beginning instrument. You can get away with playing without having to learn much ... but many are developing far beyond that." Ellen Berkshire, another women bassist, agreed. "I think for women starting out, maybe they think it is going to be easier and so they can learn faster so they can be in the band quicker." Demand, Value, and Power

If the bass is easily and quickly learned then the pool of bass players available to bands should be large. Paradoxically, this is not the case; bass players are often in relatively short supply. Thus, the bass is seen as an instrument that offers opportunities for women because of its high-demand status as well as its ease of learning. "As a singer in bands," Jenny Spelling commented, "I noticed it was very difficult to get bass players-so it was a smart choice." "Because everyone wanted to be the guitar player," recalled Luke Jenson, "the day I got my bass, I was in two bands." And Rae Ann Carson noted that "there are always ads for bass players. It seemed like a good idea because you can always get work." These perceptions are confirmed by analysis of classified ads in the Boston Phoenix, the location of help wanted notices in the Boston music market. Out of 251 ads for guitarists, bassists, and drummers appearing in November 1991, 39.8 percent ( 100) were for bassists and 38 percent (96) were for drummers, while only 21.9 percent (55) of the bands sought guitarists. Even these figures distort relative demand in that most rock bands have two guitarists but only one bassist and one drummer. Demand for guitar players should therefore be almost twice that for bassists or drummers were demand to be proportional to their numbers in the typical band.

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Why should something that is so "easy to play" be so much in demand? Queuing theory explains this paradox by emphasizing that the availability of an occupation to women is contingent on men's rejection of it. Lower skill requirements produce opportunities for women only when coupled with low prestige and consequent masculine disinterest. This analysis is consistent with the case of the rock band. In the hierarchy of rock, the guitar has always garnered the most prestige, seen as not only the most technically demanding instrument but that most associated with song writing in a musical genre where the ability to create original material is a defining characteristic of the complete artist (Bennett 1980). Drums, on the other hand, express the loudness and power that is central to rock music and to an occupation of sonic space coded masculine (Whitson 1992). In contrast, the bass has been seen as the resort offailed guitar players. "It's common that when you're not a good guitar player," commented Tim Newman, "you start playing bass. Few people approach it as an instrument to be learned." Committed bassists disparage this approach. Bass is just a really different instrument than a guitar. One of my pet peeves is guitar players who play bass like they play guitar. Bass has a real specific function in music. And I really understand what that is. (Berkshire, woman bassist)

Yet they acknowledge that "in American rock music ... the guitar is the star. People play the bass because someone 's already playing guitar. They don't think of it as a different instrument with its own challenges" (Karen Zablocki, woman bassist). The star status of the guitar is conflated with its gendered character. If the rock band is, as a unit, a masculinizing institution, then its most visible and flamboyant instrument, the electric guitar, is understood as the masculine instrument par excellence, while the bass is the instrument men are least motivated to monopolize for themselves. Reskin and Roos (1990) thus offer a convincing explanation of why bass would be the instrument most accessible to women as they begin their entrance into this male-dominated world. But their analysis provides less help in explaining the specific timing of women's entrance in the 1970s and 1980s as opposed to earlier decades. It is possible that during those years there was a change in the status of the bass and a consequent decline in its attractiveness to men, but no evidence points to such a transformation. A more likely explanation, I would argue, lies in an external factor, a change in social and cultural expectations that may have sparked and altered women's aspirations while creating a specific audience demand for women musicians. This emphasis on changing attitudes departs somewhat from Reskin and Roos's claim that, contrary to "prevailing wisdom, ... changing attitudes were unimportant compared with labor shortages or economic pressures" (1990, 304). Yet, my respondents point to the significance of audience preference. When asked whether there were any advantages enjoyed by women musicians, the vast majority of the respondents, both men and women, agreed that the presence

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of women in a band attracted attention that could be advantageous. This was of course a double-edged sword, as the attention women received was often dismissive and patronizing. Nonetheless, many women noted the interest of club bookers in engaging bands with women. "You have an advantage in getting shows and write-ups" (Zablocki). "Bookers like the idea: Clubs call back and ask-are you an all-girl band?" (Rinaldi). "Being a novelty is an advantage for females. Audiences enjoy seeing women" (Johnson). Men agreed. "lfl were starting over," commented one man, "I'd be Machiavellian" and "get a woman" because "in underground, at least one female member is a plus" (Jenson, man bass player). This continuing novelty status is but further confirmation of rock's character as an obviously displayed bastion of male exclusivity. In a society in which public tolerance for overt gender discrimination has declined drastically and in which women comprise well over one-third of new physicians and attorneys, 9 their still modest presence in rock music has become increasingly noticeable. This may be consistent with, and even desirable for, the public image of a genre like heavy metal that is founded on a more explicit masculine camaraderie (Walser 1993; Weinstein 1991). But it is highly inconsistent with the cultural allegiances of alternative performers and fans who typically understand themselves as individualistic and oppositional, unconstrained by convention or tradition, and contemptuous of the macho posturing of heavy metal and mainstream rock. "lndie's [independent rock's] bohemian world view, influenced by feminism ... made them suspicious of arena rock stars' lion-maned manliness" and prone to express "the doubts of young middle-class men about the power they inherited" (Powers 1998, 46). Instead, a more complex bargain evolved. The "unspoken agreement between 'alternative' boys and girls," one observer has argued, was a "contract [that] provided female adoration, compliance, and handholding in exchange for the curbing of overt male sexism" (Sutton 1997, 528). The phenomenon of the woman bassist may be seen as an outgrowth of that agreement. For aspiring, and often late-starting, women musicians, the bass offered relatively quick and easy entrance into a world that had largely excluded them; for men, both performers and audiences, acceptance of women as bassists provided confirmation of a broad-minded, oppositional identity within a framework that reorganized, rather than totally abandoned, masculine predominance. Comments of women respondents reveal their belief in the persistence of such a masculine power dynamic. "Especially men seem to prefer guitar, and play the bass only if they have to. It's rare they will allow women to play the guitar" (Zablocki). "They say-you can be in the band. We'll let you be a singer or a bass player" (Cowan, woman guitarist). "The joke-is that what the men are allowing women to do now?-is true in a way. Men are inclined to assume you could be good at it. ... Also it's the thing they don't want to do" (Carson, woman bassist). These characterizations of men allowing, giving women permission, imply a power analysis in which men control access to the most valued instruments, leaving the lower-status bass more available to those marginalized by either gender or skill level (or both). Here, they virtually replicate the argument proposed by Reskin and

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Roos (1990). Yet, this structural analysis coexists, often in the minds of the same individuals, with a more essentialist discourse. The same women who delineate their location in a male-dominated power structure simultaneously espouse a contradictory theory of "natural" affinity, depicting the bass as a "womanly" instrument at which women excel because of deeply rooted personality traits and physical gifts.

INTERPRETING FEMINIZATION: "BUT BASSISTS HAVE RHYTHM'' Explanations of occupational segregation by gender fall into two general categories: perspectives that see gender differentiation as produced by social organization, especially organization that works to protect group advantage, and perspectives that see women and men gravitating toward those tasks that "nature" or early socialization has best equipped them to perform. Both perspectives come into play as my respondents seek to explain the growing identification of the bass as a women's instrument. It has been widely documented that the definition of occupations for women as gender appropriate tends to follow rather than precede their feminization. Reskin and Roos (1990) portray the gender stereotyping of jobs as largely the work of employers, who engage in selective invocation of stereotypes subsequent to their introduction of women into new occupational niches, while Hall (1993) suggests that jobs may retain their gendered character even after they have lost their traditionally single-sex composition. Leidner (1991 ), on the other hand, emphasizes the interpretive efforts of workers themselves but once again looks primarily at their attempts to make sense of an already existing sexual division of labor imposed by employers. Finally, both Williams (1989, 1995) and Leidner (1991) argue that understanding their work as gender appropriate is more significant for men than for women; thus, men in traditionally feminine occupations assert their gender identities more vigorously than do women in predominantly masculine jobs. As they attempt to make sense of an ongoing transition, the musicians under consideration here respond in contradictory ways. On one hand, their comments confirm the finding that recomposition of an activity tends to produce its redefinition as appropriately masculine or feminine; in this case, the bass is scrutinized for its feminine affinities. But their response varies from Leidner's (1991) and Williams's (1989, 1995) findings in that here it is women and not men who most strenuously assert the gender-appropriate character of their work and theorize bass playing's distinctively feminine characteristics to do so. It is by no means obvious why the bass should be seen as a feminine instrument other than the fact that it is increasingly played by women. Indeed, if placed within the cultural sphere of orchestra and band instruments, the bass would be defined as masculine. Within that world, "There is a widespread notion that the larger the instrument is, and the deeper its sound, the more masculine it is-and, as a corol-

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lary, the fewer women who play it" (Dahl 1984, 36; see also Green 1997, 58). Accordingly, studies of how band and orchestra instruments are chosen find both parents and children preferring the smaller, higher-pitched flute, clarinet, and violin for girls, with the drums, trombone, French hom, acoustic bass, and tuba identified as especially appropriate for boys (Dahl1984, 35-36). Instruments are imbued with gender connotations grounded in broader conceptions of gender difference. In the case of instruments, these relate especially to the assumed polarities of masculine and feminine bodies-large versus small, low pitched versus high, strong versus weak. As an instrument, the electric bass violates these assumptions. Its tonal range is low. It is substantially heavier than the guitar, and its strings are thicker and less flexible, demanding greater strength but less dexterity. Jenny Spelling, a woman who had begun playing bass somewhat earlier than the other respondents, made reference to these characteristics in describing her own introduction to the instrument. "I was told by a male bass player that women couldn't play the bass-it is big and heavy and women's hands are smaller." Yet, fewer than 10 years after Jenny took up her bass, musicians, both women and men, were able to disregard its heft and tone and offer explanations of why the bass is appropriately a woman's instrument. These explanations took two forms. One, advanced by both women and men, characterized bass playing as a form of emotion work at which women excel; a second, proposed only by women, invoked essentialist notions of women's physicality to assert their propensity for rhythm. The "Supportive" Bass: Bass Playing as Emotion Work

Echoing the views of social theorists from Parsons to Gilligan, several respondents offered a model of masculine and feminine affinities to argue that women are especially suited to playing bass by virtue of their "supportive nature" (Jenson) and more selfless, collective orientation. Such views tended to valorize the contribution of the bassist by placing it in opposition to the more self-aggrandizing tendencies of the guitarist. Guitarists are characterized as "flamboyant" and "show-off," motivated by a desire for individual display. "I think a lot of men who play guitar feel like they have to prove something. I think that bass players don't ever have to prove anything" (Berkshire). The excellent guitarist is defined by an ability to command the instrument, in an almost parodic masculine metaphor. "I haven't seen a good one [woman guitarist] yet. I've seen very proficient women guitar players, but they haven't impressed me. They haven't taken command of the instrument in the way I'd like to see," commented Tim Newman, a male guitarist who played in a band with a woman bassist. The imperative of command is often expressed through an obsession with technique and with competition over technique. "The technical thing is important to men-to be good, to have chops" (Berkshire). Ellen Berkshire noted that in the music store where she worked, guitar players would "sit around all day and talk about other guitar players, whereas I've never seen drummers or bass players sitting

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around talking about other bass players like it's a competitive thing." Guitarists are driven "to be louder and faster and more notes than anyone else." In contrast to this, bass players are said to contribute by virtue of their allegiance to the group. Bass players have to be content to sit back and really motivate everyone and kick everyone in the butt because that's what bass does in music. The truly great bass players and even just really good ones, they have to understand that. (Berkshire) This is then seen as a function for which women are especially suited. Women's growing association with the bass, comments Luke Jenson, may be linked to "the supportive nature of the female character" (Barrett, also). Rae Ann Carson, a woman bassist, agreed with this characterization. Women have more of a group thing. They're not afraid to play one note through the song if the song requires it. They won't say-it's boring, I won't do it. I have seen men do that-doing what will make them look good over what will make the song sound good. In these accounts, there is a division oflabor within the band that coincides with supposed oppositions of masculine and feminine personality. These comments are not especially flattering to men; if anything, they assert a notion of womanly virtue and moraJ/emotional superiority. But the critique of masculine prerogative rests on a framework of assumed gender polarities in which relatively fixed gender attributes are used to explain the contributions and motivations of men and women.

The Primal Bass: ''She's Got Rhythm'' An equally polarized (and in this case, highly naturalistic) thinking was displayed by those musicians, all women, who argued that women excel at the bass because they "have a better sense of rhythm than men" (Johnson). This superior timekeeping ability was linked in tum to women's supposed affinity for dancing. "Bass is the groove behind the song.... Women like to dance, women are naturally good at the groove" (Spelling, woman bassist). "Women are better dancers-they have a better sense of rhythm" (Johnson). The sense of rhythm produces an ability to keep time, which is based on "feel." "Women," argues Ellen Berkshire, are really really excellent at keeping time. What bass does is it keeps time, but it also really gives popular music of any kind a certain tempo and a certain pace and a certain feel. Actually,feel is a really good word. And I think women have an incredible natural feel for that type of function in music. Such naturalizing claims are retrospectively made and should not be seen as an inevitable interpretation of the bass as an instrument or of timekeeping as an activity. Indeed, the malleability of these definitions is clearly demonstrated by the con-

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trast with electronic dance music, where "men's domination over the electronic beats of dance music" is often attributed to women's supposed lack of rhythmic sense (McDonnell 1998). Thus, neither of the two male bassists who discussed this issue spoke of his instrument's earthy or sensual qualities or defined a superior sense of rhythm as the key to his success. And one woman, Janet Rinaldi, characterized timekeeping as cerebral rather than visceral. "I've always liked rhythm-I liked to analyze what propelled a song along." Yet, she was the only woman to take this position. More consistently, women claimed for themselves a "feel" that was linked to women's physicality, their closer connection to the body or to the earth. The guitar, one woman commented, is "more intellectual, you have to know how to put chords together." But "with the bass you do it by feel, you do the rhythmic quality by feel and feeling" (Zablocki). "It's primal. Women may be attracted to it because it's more earthy" (Cowan). And because "it's a more primal instrument, more connection, more sensuality;' argues Karen Zablocki, "women seem to prefer the bass." 10 DISCUSSION Most bassists continue to be men, and most rock bands retain a single-sex male composition. So it remains to be seen whether the current concentration of women instrument players as bassists portends the emergence of bass playing as a fully feminized work role. But we can still begin to speculate about its significance: How does the emergence of the woman bass player as a discernible category within rock music work to challenge and/or reproduce dominant cultural understandings of gender? No single answer captures the complexities of either present realities or future possibilities. By one reading, the findings reported here suggest a pessimistic scenario. If the incorporation of women into alternative rock bands is accomplished via their concentration in a "women's" specialty, then the negative implications are both practical, in terms of a narrowed sphere of opportunity, and symbolic. By invoking the physicality of bass playing, some respondents assimilated it to the more acceptably feminine work of singing. Bass playing is portrayed as the product of a physical and emotional responsiveness that is countered to the implicitly masculine qualities of intellect, technique, and mastery; the assertion of difference is imperceptibly implicated in the reproduction of hierarchy. To construe bass playing as feminine is to acknowledge the implicit masculinity of the guitar and thus to participate in the restabilization of a gendered division of labor in which "womanly and manly natures ... are rendered natural" and "furnished with tacit legitimation" (West and Fenstermaker 1995, 22). Yet, the process is open to positive readings as well. At the level of public perception, the sight of a woman instrumentalist disrupts the image of the rock band as inevitably male, a kind of boys-only club. This is especially the case when her pres-

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ence cannot be explained by her role as a singer. Women's membership in a band conveys more than simply participation as a performer, since rock as a musical genre idealizes the band as a creative unit that writes, develops, and produces its own material (Becker 1982; Clawson 1993; Weinstein 1993). If rock performance is, as Weinstein characterizes it, the enactment of a "drama of collective creativity" (no matter how seldom the ideal is fully and practically realized), then women's public inclusion in that drama carries great symbolic import. 11 Moreover, the meaning of membership in a rock band operates beyond its impact on public perception. Because "the members of rock bands constitute a creative process embracing composition, arrangement, and performance," and because "in rock, composing songs is not a matter of writing so much as playing," even a subordinate member of a band achieves some participation in that band's project of collective authorship (Weinstein 1993, 208-9). Of greater practical importance is the fact that playing in and with a band is a principle means of skill acquisition in rock music; to the extent that women are excluded from such participation, they are excluded from the primary site of on-the-job training and professional socialization (Becker 1982; Bennett 1980). It is important to recall that the situation of a woman bassist and a man guitarist differs from that of the male wholesale baker and the female retail baker, where the gender division of labor is ratified and intensified by spatial and social separation. The production of rock music occurs in a small, informal work group. In such groups, task accomplishment rests on the group's ability to mobilize a range of aesthetic, commercial, and social resources, while power rests in large part on the often fluctuating combinations of resources that individual members are able to deploy (Weinstein 1993, 208). Band members may become indispensable, and thus powerful, because of their business acumen, social skills, or longtime familiarity with the band repertoire; thus, the status of a musician within a band is not fully predictable simply by knowing she is a woman and/or a bassist. Just as there are multiple readings of the transformative potential of women as bass players, so too the respondents' essentializing claims are replete with contradictions. Conceptions of gender are never perfectly homogeneous, but the cultural resources available for interpreting, performing, and assessing gender are especially varied at this moment as feminist and postfeminist narratives coexist, compete, and interact with more traditional gender formulations (Stacey 1991). The assertion of womanly affinities coexists (and in the minds of the same women, it must be emphasized) with an awareness of rock as a male-dominated culture in which the opportunity to work as an instrumentalist has been unfairly conditioned by gender. The latter perspective is a structural one that understands women's location as bassists as the product of men's ability to monopolize the most prized positions. These women do not see themselves as participating in relations of deference, the interactional performance of unequal status that is one of the hallmarks of gender as a system of power (West and Zimmerman 198 7). Rather, they seem to call on a notion of inherent or deeply inculcated gender differences as a means of status

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mobilization, an assertion of superiority grounded in a framework of difference. Their assertions are implicitly strategic, however self-limiting in the long term. A critical analysis of masculine power thus coexists with a theory of inborn traits. These seeming inconsistencies remind us that gender is, as many contemporary theorists emphasize, both structural and strategic, "omni-relevant," in West and Zimmerman's (1987) formulation, yet context specific and perennially subject to renegotiation (Salzinger 1997; Thorne 1990). Within this framework, it may be argued, the incorporation of women into alternative rock bands represents a breakthrough that is both symbolically and practically important. In this view, bass is a first step: Women bass players are pioneers whose participation will legitimate women as instrumental musicians while providing them access to the band-based modes of artistic and professional development that characterize rock as a pop genre. The alternative possibility is the consolidation of bass as a woman's specialty in a gender division of labor whose lines have been redrawn rather than eroded. The entrance of women into the rock band, as bass players, may provide them with hitherto unavailable opportunities. Yet, their self-portrayal as either caring and group oriented or intuitive and primal serves, as Leidner points out, to "reinforce the conception of gender differences as natural," an "expression of workers' inherent natures" ( 1991, 154). The women musicians in this study are thus engaged in a contradictory process of resistance and reproduction, with outcomes that are yet to be decided. NOTES I. Itreat alternative rock as a subgenre of rock music. Alternative traces its descent from punk and is therefore defined as much by a cultural stance of opposition to the corporate institutions of mainstream rock as by stylistic particularities. At the same time, the adoption of the term alternative or, in Billboard's usage, "Modem Rock," signifies its emergence as a major market category, a "corporate demographic and a new set of industry practices" (Wald 1998, 588) as well as, for some, a co-optation of punk's oppositional edge (Frank 1995). 2. This traditional divide was displayed, for example, in 1997's Lillith Fair, a highly successful tour of women singer-songwriters who were accompanied by 27 backing musicians, of whom 26 were men, with Tracy Chapman's bassist appearing as the only woman instrumentalist (Strauss 1997). 3. Women have also made important contributions to Black popular music, from 1960s soul to contemporary hip-hop. While consideration of these types of music is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that women's concentration in vocal performance and their exclusion from instrumental and studio-based forms of creativity are also features of contemporary Black music (Rose 1994, 57-58). 4. For example, it is a closely observed convention of rock band naming that the name make no reference to the band's individual members, thus designating the group rather than any one individual as the meaningful unit of artistry and audience focus (Finnegan 1989, 265; Laing 1985, 42). 5. Sixty-seven percent of respondents' fathers were employed in managerial, professional, or other white-collar occupations. Seventy-seven percent of the musicians had attended college, and 60 percent had completed four-year degrees.

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6. BBC-1 is the venue for the British Broadcasting Corporation's national pop music programming; thus, this respondent's band had achieved extensive airplay and significant commercial success in Britain. 7. Names of respondents have been changed to ensure confidentiality. 8. See Clawson 1999 for a fuller analysis of this finding. 9.ln 1994, women were 37.9 percent of new physicians and 43 percent of new attorneys (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1997, 194, Table 307). 10. These depictions of women as rhythmic, earthy, and uniquely in touch with their physicality display a striking resemblance to historical and ongoing discourses of racial primitivism. Thornton's study of contemporary British dance music, for example, notes that "for white youth, 'black' musical authenticity is rooted in the body" as signified by both the voice and the bass, while "Euro-dance authenticity, like white ethnicity, is disembodied" (1996, 72-73). II. It is likely, moreover, that many casual observers do not even distinguish between the guitar or bass or see the distinction as meaningful: How many early Beatles' fans were aware, for example, that Paul McCartney played bass rather than guitar?

REFERENCES Arnold, Gina, and Shawn Dahl. 1997. Chicks with picks. In Trouble girls: The Rolling Stone book of women in rock, edited by Barbara O'Dair. New York: Random House. Becker, HowardS. 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, H. Stith. 1980. On becoming a rock musician. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Billboard. 1993. The year in music. 25 December. - - - . 1994. The year in music. 24 December. - - - . 1995. 'The year in music. 23 December. - - - . 1996. The year in music. 28 December. Clawson, Mary Ann. 1993. "Not just the girlsinger:" Women and voice in rock bands. In Negotiating at the margins: The gendered discourses of power and resistance, edited by Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. - - - . 1999. Masculinity and skill acquisition in the adolescent rock band. Popular Music 18:1-17. Dahl, Linda. 1984. Stormy weather: The music and lives of a century of jazzwomen. New York: Pantheon. Dresch, Donna. 1995. Chainsaw.ln Rockshe wrote, edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers. New York: Delta. Dunn, Jancee. 1997. True confessions: Alternative sounds. In Trouble girls: The Rolling Stone book of women in rock, edited by Barbara O'Dair. New York: Random House. Finnegan, Ruth. 1989 The hidden musicians: Music-making in an English town. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Frank, Tom. 1995. Alternative to what? It's not your father's youth movement. In Sounding off! Music as subversion/resistance/revolution, edited by Ron Sakolsky and Fred Wei-han Ho. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Gaar, Gillian G. 1992. She's a rebel: The history of women in rock & roll. Seattle: Seal Press. Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. 1994. Smells like teen spirit: Riot gmls, revolution, and women in independent rock. In Microphone fiends: Youth music and youth culture, edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge. Green, Lucy. 1997. Music, gender, education. London: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Elaine J. 1993. Waiteringlwaitressing: Engendering the work of table servers. Gender & Society 7:329-46. Kelly, Christina. 1997. Kim Gordon. In Trouble girls: The Rolling Stone book of women in rock, edited by Barbara O'Dair. New York: Random House.

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Laing, David. 1985. One clwrd wonders: Power and meaning in punk rock. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press. Leidner, Robin. 1991. Selling hamburgers and selling insurance: Gender, work, and identity in interactive service jobs. Gender&: Society 5:154-77. Lozaw, Tristam. 1991. Handicapping the 1991 Rumble. Program, 1991 WBCN Rumble, produced by

The Boston Herald.

McDonnell, Evelyn. 1997. She's in the band: Maureen Tucker, Tina Weymouth and Tara Key. In Trouble girls: The Rolling Stone book of women in mck, edited by Barbara O'Dair. New York: Random House. - - - . 1998. Why aren't more geeks with the gizmos girls? The New }'cJrk Times, 12 April. O'Brien, Lucy. 1995. She bop: The definitive history ofwomen in rock, pop and soul. New York: Penguin. Powers, Ann. 1998. The male rock anthem: Going all to pieces. The New Yc1rk Times, I February. Reskin, Barbara F., and Patricia Roos. 1990. Job queues, gender queues: Explaining women's inroads into male occupations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Robicheau, Paul. 1994. Breaking out in Boston. The Boston Globe, 22 April. Rolling Stone. 1987. The I 00 best albums of the last twenty years. 27 August. Rose, Tricia 1994. Black noise: Rap music and Black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. Salzinger, Leslie. 1997. From high heels to swathed bodies: Gendered meanings under production in Mexico's export-processing industry. Feminist Studies 23:549-74. Simon, Clea. 1994. Club culture. The Boston Globe Magazine, 15 May. Stacey, Judith. 1991. Brave new families. New York: Basic Books. Strauss, Neil. 1997. Where the girls are, and why they're not so different from the boys. The New Yc1rk Times, 29 July. Sutton, Terri. 1997. The soft boys: The new man in rock. In Trouble girls: The Rolling Stone book t!f women in mck, edited by Barbara O'Dair. New York: Random House. Thorne, Barrie. 1990. "Children and gender: Constructions of difference. In Theoretical perspectives on sexual difference, edited by Deborah Rhode. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club cultures: Music, media and subcultural capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. U.S. Department of Commerce. 1997. Statistical abstract ofthe United States. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census. Wald, Gayle. 1998. Just a girl? Rock music, feminism, and the cultural construction of female youth. Signs: Journal tifWomen in Culture and Society 23:585-610. Walser, Rob. 1993. Running with the devil: Power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Weinstein, Deena. 1991. Heavy metal: A cultural sociology. New York: Lexington. - - - . 1993. Rock bands: Collective creativity. Current Research on Occupations and Prtifessions 8:205-22. West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstennaker. 1995. Doing difference. Gender&: Society 9:8-37. West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender&: Society 1:125-51. Whitson, David. 1992. Sport in the social construction of masculinity. In Sport, men, and the gender order, edited by Michael A. Messner and Donald Szabo. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Williams, Christine L. 1989. Gender differences at work: l*1men and men in non-traditional occupations. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - - . !995.Stillaman'sworld: Men wluuk1 "women'swork". Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mary Ann Clawson is an associate prrifessor rifsociology at Wesleyan University and the author of Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism. Her research has focused on gender and popular culture, with a particular interest in masculinity in historical and contemporary contexts.

[9] All Singers Are Dicks Deena Weinstein How many singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One, to hold the bulb; the rest of the world revolves around him.

"All singers are clicks." Those weren't Charlie's exact words, but it was the statement I quoted to a large array of rock musicians, some in famous bands, others in recently formed groups, most somewhere between these two extremes. "Singers are clicks" is what Charlie actually said. The drummer didn't tell me to turn off the tape recorder, nor did he ask me not to print his remark. He even amplified his view: "A lot of singers are clicks. The majority of them are clicks. I hear this from other bands too" (Dasein, "More" 4). I was interviewing Charlie for a rock magazine feature. Rarely does a band's drummer serve as spokesman, but I had asked to speak with him because I had discovered that he not only created the band's album covers, but, more significantly, wrote much of their music. Working as a rock journalist is a helpful adjunct to other modes of researching the multifaceted rock industry. It allows access to members of well-known bands, permitting one to ask them a wide variety of questions with the tape recorder running and to hang with them backstage, on the bus, and in the studio. This allows researchers interested in roles of musicians and the analysis of bands to get beyond the hype of magazine features and the long-form PR called band biography books, and to get behind the formulaic sensationalism of the Behind the Music television shows. It allows one to speak informally with band members and their assistants, and to observe their nonpublic behavior. Most of the data for this study were gathered through nonparticipant observation of, and discussions and interviews with, rock musicians conducted both for pieces in rock magazines and for the scholarly purpose of understanding interaction in bands. In addition, extensive study was done of the rock press, Internet sites, and trade books on rock bands. I repeated my version of Charlie's calumny to all and sundry. The remark was greeted with broad, knowing smiles, supplemented with rueful examples of the "dickness" of their band's singer, former singer, or the singer in some other band that they knew. Not everyone agreed with the remark, of course, but so many did that I realized that I was on to something. The methodology here can best be described as "run it up the flag pole and see who salutes it." It is a useful way to start clearing a path through an uncharted jungle. Over the years, almost a decade now, since Charlie called my attention to the lack of love between other musicians and the singer, I have discussed and observed this phenomenon with a sufficient number and variety of bands to give me some confidence that it is genuine. I shall leave it to others to use a

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behavioralist sampling and questionnaire method to confirm it. My interest here is not in determining the character traits of singers but in understanding why they were seen in a negative light by their bandmates. All singers aren't dicks, of course. To be more precise, animosity is aimed almost exclusively at singers who have no other musical role in the band. When the singer is also an instrumentalist, you rarely hear the complaint. And we are discussing male singers here. A whole set of other factors clustered around gender roles pertain to female singers. "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)'' One of a complex of factors that helps to explain negative views toward singers relates to their "otherness." The singer's instrument and role in creating the band's music is, and is felt to be, so distinctly unlike the musicians' that it creates a structural split. Difference as such is not animosity, but it always has the possibility of producing it. The history of human society is littered with innumerable instances of lynchings, witch burnings, pogroms, and genocides that erupt in times of tension, when discontent is displaced from the powerful to a scapegoated other. A singer who does not play an instrument is an alien, a stranger, whose distance from the others can be reduced but not completely bridged by ties of friendship, shared outside interests, or common background. The stranger is a tenuous social form (Simmel); those who find themselves in this role are always in danger of being expelled, isolated, or exterminated. The stranger, the other, is in the group but not fully a part of it. Tension, anxiety, and downward fortunes are never far from the career of rock bands. 1 Joe Carducci, writing from his intimate experience of working and touring with bands, explains: Bands demand of their members relationships more akin to family than to a co-worker. This means that ridicule and shame born of intimate awareness are always potential; however, the lifelong experience at accommodation developed in family relationships is lacking. The work involved in writing, arranging, practicing, recording and performing music is also more apt to bend egos than is more conventional work. Each individual musician's ego is on the line to some extent at every little artistic decision. It's more common for the music or the money to keep a band together than it is for camaraderie. (7-8)

Singers are others for several reasons, including the radical difference between their "instrument" and those of the other band members. The voice is part of the person, not a thing that can be carried, set up by others, or replaced for a better model. Like an athlete's body, the voice is vulnerable. It doesn't get played as much as it gets expressed, and its expression is influenced by the physical and mental condition of the person. Tired or energetic, with a head cold or in good health, depressed or happy, singers reflect their states of being in their vocal performances. Instrumentalists can far more easily-up to a point, of course-play at the same level of competence despite physical or mental impairments. Noting this otherness in his study of rock bands in New York City in the 1980s, Leslie Gay mentions that a singer who doesn't also play an instrument "enjoys little respect within the band ... despite his enormously important musical responsibilities and frontman functions during performance" (165).

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A band's musical sound is often arrived at interactively, with each instrumentalist either contributing his/her part or arrangement, or at least learning to integrate parts with one another. Singers are usually responsible for writing the lyrics, frequently done in the studio itself in the midst of the recording session. They speak of having a grab-bag of phrases and lines written in their ever-present notebook, from which they collage a song's lyrics. The music itself is rarely done solo and on the fly like this, but is constructed, modified, and rehearsed together. The vocals are put on top of this sound, separating them from the xest of the process. Ozzy Osbourne describes how this worked in Black Sabbath: "In Sabbath, whatever they laid down, I had to put a vocal on it" (Fricke 66). Like the added-later vocals, many singers are grafted-on heads to pre-existing groups. A group of musicians may recruit a singer, as Pearl Jam enlisted Eddie Vedder and the New Jersey musicians Skid Row found the Canadian Sebastian Bach tanked up and singing at someone's wedding. Or, if there was an original singer, the band replaces him before they become famous, as did Judas Priest (Rob Halford), Black Flag (Henry Rollins), Pantera (Phil Anselmo), AC/DC (Bon Scott), and Iron Maiden (Bruce Dickinson). Well-known singers have often come from different backgrounds (geographical, cultural, or class) than the others in their band. In each of these cases, the singer doesn't share in the band's early history, usually the most difficult and formative time. The otherness of the singer can be mitigated by common musical influences, but taste can change over time. For example, when I discussed Black Sabbath's 1992 reunion with bassist Geezer Butler, we talked about how individualized each of their tastes is now. "Our outside influences are wide apart," Butler said, understating the differences. "Tony is into all the jazz stuff. I'm more into the blues. I think that Ronnie's more into Frank Sinatra and that side of things. Vinnie's into Disco" (Dasein, "Black Sabbath" 13). Most importantly, the position of the singer in a rock band stands out from the others because he has two separate roles: singer and frontman. This is a difference in kind rather than an extreme form of the dual role of all members of bandsplaying music in the studio and in front of an audience. The latter requires something more than just making sounds; it demands concern with the visual elements of a live show. The drummer may twirl his sticks in the air or the guitarist may contort himself during his solo, and similarly the singer needs to present his vocals in some dramatic way, from staring at his shoes to running from one side of the stage to the other. But the singer, in concert, is also a frontman who greets the audience, introduces the songs and the band, and, in general, mediates the band to the audience. The problem with these two roles is that the requirements of a frontman decisively separate the singer from the other band members. Exuding personality, showing "attitude" (many genres have specific sorts of attitudes that must be shown by the frontman), and representing a group's personality compressed into one person all serve to distinguish the singer. But in a group, especially a male group, one is supposed to suppress rather than flagrantly display personal expressivity. "Check your ego at the rehearsal room door," "No egos!" read the music want ads. The ideal is to be a team player. The singer's structural position conflicts with the egalitarian ethos of the rock band, insuring a built-in tension regardless of individual traits. 2 Singers are less likely to be seen as clicks if they

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indulge in backstage clowning, joke telling, or getting out of their heads on drug or alcohol binges off stage-and many of them resort to these measures. "You're a Better Man Than I" The structural otherness of the singer is but one part of the explanation of the generalized animosity toward the occupant of that role. Probably a more important factor is the sense of unfairness, a judgment that the singer receives a disproportionately large part of the rewards. Rock bands, which came into being as a social form in the communitarian '60s, start from an ideology of equality. There had been small groups of musicians since the advent of electronic instruments made the overhead of big bands uneconomical, but those did not have an egalitarian ideology. The main example of an egalitarian musical group before the '60s was the doo-wop vocal group. Despite the ideology that all band members are equal contributors and participants, bands are rife with perceived and actual inequalities, which contradict the belief that all members of the band have put in the same time, effort, money, risk, and delay in starting other possible careers. Financial costs and income are usually split equally. Although songwriting is rewarded separately, many bands conscious of the equality norm even attribute songwriting credits to everyone in the band, no matter how much or how little they actually contributed to the creation of that song. But money is not the only reward in rock, and for most bands, even the ones that get some renown, it is not the preponderant benefit. The more ubiquitous reward is fame and its related manifestations like adoration, idolization, worship, devotion, and lust. Whether the reward is just "being known," exciting a crowd to frenzy, or having a following of groupies, recognition is the reward that motivates the majority of rockers, in whole or in part, at least for some of their careers. Rewards reaped by the singer are perceived to be even more unfair in light of the value that musicians give to the creation and playing of the music, as opposed to writing words and singing them. In their view, at least, they do most of the heavy lifting while the one who does the least gets the most. They make the cake, a complex and difficult task, while the singer puts on the simple frosting. And the cake eaters all rave about the frosting. On recordings, especially those with radio play, the vocals are usually higher in the mix, giving the singer a more prominent, more aurally frontal position. Live and in recordings, it is the singer's words and especially voice that most connect to the largest audience. 3 Carducci correctly observes that "the less literate or intelligent the listener the more likely he is to require that a singer determine his response to the music" (12). In concert, the frontman is in the foreground, addressing the audience directly, the center of its attention. "[I]n the politics of a band a singer without an instrument is essentially unarmed and outnumbered, and must turn his back to the players at the precise moment resentments are made concrete by the live audience" (Carducci 10). The frontman's face often becomes the face of the band. Posed shots find the singer out front, or he is in some other manner singled out from the musicians. Photographers of live performances need to get the singer in the shot in order to sell it to the magazines, and singers oblige with their photo-op poses. It is their

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desire to look good in the pictures that is responsible for the frequent three-song limit for the photo pit. Interviews are rarely done with anyone other than singers, and it is their clever or cliched remarks that are quoted in the rock press. As the known voice and face of the band-the metonym of the group-it is the singer who most intensely attracts fans. It is his autograph that they most want. And those specialized fans who serve as motivators for so many boys to join bands in the first place and make the grueling tour bearable-the ubiquitous groupies-also are most attracted to the singer. Carducci neatly sums up the situation: There is usually some amount of tension between a band's players and their singer. It's usually some amount of envy but also rooted in musical issues. However, when the sex groupies and the mind groupies both line up after gigs in front of the singer it tends to turn off the players who may have written the music and in any case played it. (10)

"No More Mr. Nice Guy" Even more galling to the musicians than the singer's disproportionate glory is the fact that as their singer gets more personal notice, the better it is for the band. Some musicians can bask in the reflected fame of their singer, like parents competing with their friends by bragging about their children. Most just find it rankling that the vocalist should rise while they have done so much of the work. The singer's increasing prominence changes the band's internal dynamics. One of the features of a small group of equals, like a pair of friends, a business partnership, or a romantic couple, is that any member can kill the group. Rock bands are supposed to have this same egalitarian character, but in a band's early stages no single person's leaving could eradicate the group itself. Unlike a group of children dealing with the kid who owns the only ball in the neighborhood, a band can usually count on a large pool of willing and able replacements for musicians and singers. At any point, replacing someone is more than finding another individual with the required skills; anew member must affirm the band's sound and image, and also be a person with whom the others feel they can get along. The new kid on the block has to learn the existing repertoire and integrate himself into the band's culture, neither of which create insuperable difficulties. But once the band becomes well known through the mass media, the focus on the singer permits him to become the only one who can kill the band. Bands are brands and one of their major brand elements is the voice and persona embodied in their distinctive singer/frontman. His name and face and the set of celebrity factoids dutifully trotted out in all magazine features can't be cloned; nor, technology notwithstanding, can "the voice." A musician can procure the same models of instruments and accessories as the person he replaces and more or less imitate his predecessor's style to produce the same sound. Even if the singer is not well known as a personality, in bands with one or more hit songs, his voice is familiar enough to have a certain irreplaceability. In any case, the persona and the vocal qualities are combined in rock. Dave Laing argues that, unlike other forms of popular music, which are determined by "the emotional connotations of the words," in rock the style is due to the singer's "personal style, the ensemble of vocal effects that characterize the whole body of his work" (qtd. in Frith, "Why" 100). In the same vein, Pavement's Stephen

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Malkmus says that "[a] good voice isn't so important. It's more important to sound really unique. We need more singers like P. J. Harvey or Shirley Manson, Dylan or Lou Reed. They really got their own cool style" (Gabriella). As the radical dependence on the singer increases with the band's success, the value of the band's creative forces diminishes. Songwriting is another brand element, but once the signature sound is developed with key songs, others in the band can follow the established pattern or it can hire paladin songwriters like Desmond Child. 4 The band's dependence on the singer gives him more power in the band, which he may or may not use. Knowing how crucial he is, the singer may behave like a spoiled child, or may be perceived that way by the others. Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard describes the changes in power as Eddie Vedder's personal fame grew: "Vitalogy was the first record where Ed was the guy making the final decisions. It was a real difficult record for me to make, because I was having to give up a lot of control" (Weisbard 96). Resentment against the singer is most intense when he doesn't write the music or play an instrument. When the singer pulls far more than his own weight-is the main or sole songwriter or a good or better instrumentalist-no one calls him a dick. There is no expectation of equality in this situation. The romantic ideology that permeates rock also gives "creatives" greater leeway to be "difficult." And some of them seem to live up to this expectation. At the height of the Smashing Pumpkins' popularity, Billy Corgan owned that his "reputation as a tyrant, svengali, asshole; there's truth in that" (Luerssen 155). Working with such overachievers may not evoke pure satisfaction and admiration from the other members of their bands; yet it's difficult for outsiders to hear their complaints with much sympathy. Still, that hasn't stopped some musicians from giving voice to their antipathy, like John Fogerty's bandmates in Creedence Clearwater Revival. The rise to prominence of the singer is most irritating to the guitarist who writes much of the music. "The guitar dominates rock like the singer dominates pop," concludes rock maven Joe Carducci (7). "A singer without an instrument allows too easy identification with the person; with a guitar one can only identify with the band as a whole or the genre," Laing adds (88). For bands wanting to reach the top of the charts, there is a strong pull toward pop, creating a fault line between the singer and the musicians. Iggy Pop spoke of the singer-guitarist tension some decades after his peak with the Stooges: In any band there's two camps: the lead singer's camp and the guitarist's camp. The guitar player you work with; it's like riding a fuckin' horse. He's gonna buck-that's his job. He wants to dominate you and scare you so they can dominate the band. Ron (Asheton) and James (Williamson) were like that-they wanted control. Any guitar player worth his salt is basically a thug. (Luerssen 138)

This dualism is strongest in hard rock and classic metal bands, where both singer and lead guitarist share the spotlight. In such bands, fans know the names and appreciatively recognize the distinctive sounds of both. The tension between these two positions is useful to the style-up to a point. But when it is tied to egos who cannot deal with it, it eventually splits the band. And it is usually the guitarist who stays.

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It is mainly in hard rock and metal bands where replacing the singer has been attempted. The process seems like getting a head transplant. You can imagine a new kidney or a heart-lung implant. But a new head? There have only been a few successful operations. The best example is probably AC/DC's replacement of the dead Bon Scott with Brian Johnson. When Iron Maiden's long-time athletic vocalist Bruce Dickinson left the band, the new singer, Blaze Bailey, was a rejected transplant. Both the critics and media found him to be sub-par; there may not be any love lost between Dickinson and the musicians, but he is now back in the fold. Judas Priest's charismatic frontman, Rob Halford, split from the band (whether he was thrown overboard or jumped ship is hard to know, even after I spoke with all concerned) after two decades. As in Iron Maiden's case, the rupture came at a time when heavy metal had lost much of its mass popularity. The musicians auditioned many singers and could not find anyone suitable until their drummer ran across a Judas Priest tribute band whose singer was almost a dead ringer, vocally, for Halford. Tim Owen was a huge Priest fan and modeled his singing on Halford, whose influence was strong in Owens's regular band and to whom he was an uncanny doppelganger in his Judas Priest tribute band. Priest guitarist Downing was very pleased: "[H]is similarities to Halford are just enough, really so that we can go out and play any song and nobody would ever be let down. He can hit the high notes, and has the tonal quality" (Dasein, "Judas Priest" 24). The rent in bands between the singer and musicians usually ends with the singer leaving the band that made him famous, often to go on to a successful career, sometimes far more successful than his original band. Playing upon his fame, the singer usually gives his name to the new project, for example: Ozzy (Black Sabbath), Dio (Black Sabbath), Danzig (the Misfits), Peter Gabriel (Genesis), John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival), Rollins Band (Black Flag) and King Diamond (Mercyful Fate). Guitar gods or merely guitarists have left bands too, but in general have been less successful: Steve Perry (Aerosmith), John Fruscicante (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Slash's Snakepit (Guns N' Roses), Michael Schenker-MSG (UFO). Eric Clapton (Cream) and Ted Nugent (Amboy Dukes), both of whom took up singing, were the exceptions.

"Bad to the Bone"

Before beginning this section, I showed what I had already written to a friend, who then accompanied me to a show that evening. Outside the venue, we ran into Jamie, the bassist for the band I had come to see. We spoke for about a half-hour before I asked the question I always ask: What is your view of rock singers who don't also play an instrument? Before he said a word, his facial expression said it all. As he verbalized his disgusted sneer, he mentioned most of what I'd been writing, starting and ending with "and they won't help carry the amps." My friend smiled broadly, congratulating me for getting it right. Unlike the sweet and soft-spoken person we'd been talking to up until I asked this question, the bassist became vehement. When he finished his diatribe, I asked if the term "dick" was an appropriate summary for his view of singers. "Definitely!" said Jamie, who is also his band's singer. Some of the acrimony between the singer and the musicians is documented in the press; those who work in the rock industry know far more. In a gossip website

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for the industry, the Velvet Rope, one thread was on this topic. Someone posted bands where the singer travels in a separate bus from the musicians. Another described the relations in Rage Against the Machine, saying that the hatred between singer Zach and the others was so strong that their label had to pay them to rehearse. (The band has since broken up.) So, are singers dicks, or are they merely dicks in the eyes of those who play instruments? The stories and evidence of egotistic, selfish, vain, fussy, and uncooperative behavior are too widespread to think it is only a misperception based on jealousy. If it is not only in the eyes of their mates that singers are dicks, the question is: Were they that way when they entered the band, or did they become dicks? Would bands recruit dicks? Even if most bands are more interested in the skills of the singer than in how he behaves with them, and may not be able to judge character in auditions anyway, all of those "No egos!" want ads would argue against an affirmative answer. Whether or not these perception and recruitment hypotheses have some merit, it is far more likely that singers become dicks. "Dickitude" is an emergent, a reaction to a complex of factors. Believing that the singer is of a different species, the others in the band treat him in ways that encourage just the behavior that they come to deplore. For example, they tell the singer that he doesn't have to get to the venue until all the instruments have been loaded in and set up for sound check. As a result, the singer doesn't do any of the physical labor of loading in, something that the rest of the band resents deeply. And after the show the singer, pointman for the press and special fans, is otherwise engaged while his bandmates are loading out. As a result of a selffulfilling prophecy, singers learn that they do not have to schlep stuff, and accept this state of affairs. Stress and anxiety are part of the package for members of rock bands. Thirty years ago Ozzy Osbourne, then frontman of Black Sabbath, said: you get needled easily, people can bug you, because it's the stress of the tour. It's very strenuous work, not physically hard, but mentally very hard. Fucks your nerves up, it does, this business. Sometimes I feel like it's eating me up, like I'm going fucking crazy. (Bangs 78) According to a study on musicians by Wills and Cooper, "it becomes more and more strenuous to be constantly expected to perform at maximum level-and with advancing age more effort is needed to achieve this" (Wills and Cooper 19). Furthermore: Living together as a small group of people who are totally different characters, sleeping in the same hotel, eating, drinking together, you've got different views on life-you've got to live with them month after month, and it can be a nightmare. (Wills and Cooper 53) Everyone in the band is exposed to these conditions, and all seem to have common coping mechanisms, especially alcohol and drugs. In her study of rock musicians, Susan Raeburn states that "[s]ubjects uniformly reported that their use of substances increased considerably when performance schedules increased, due to greater time duration spent in bars and clubs" (46). Wills and Cooper's research indicates that "in comparison with the overall mean male adult scores ... both the psychoticism and neuroticism scores for

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musicians were elevated" (54). They conclude that "the musician may be an individual especially susceptible to stress" (15). Are singers more high-strung, more neurotic, and more easily stressed? Are they more susceptible to the negative effects of these coping mechanisms? Is the singer subject to more stress than the others in the band? If stress or coping with stress were the same for all members of a band, one would expect to find deaths equally distributed among the band's positions. That is, given that most bands have about four members, singers should account for about 25 percent of these deaths. What I found is that singers account for slightly more than 50 percent of them. 5 There are stresses that seem to be particular to singers. They are more plagued by stage fright than others in the band, in part because they have no instrument to hide behind, and in part because they can best see the audience's reaction and feel it is more their responsibility to elicit a positive response. More than their bandmates, most singers need to look good and be energetic on stage. The wear and tear of the tour, let alone the aging process, puts them in a more vulnerable position. And, as mentioned earlier, there is more at stake for them if their instrument, their voice, is harmed. Between the growing resentment of bandmates and the increasing adoration by fans, press, and groupies, singers get isolated from genuine human relations. Staind frontman, Aaron Lewis, observes: "It's really hard for me to talk to fans now. It feels like they're teetering on every word I say" (Luerssen 60). The singer's isolation decreases his ability to cope and may be responsible for his increased use of drugs and alcohol to deal with the stress. In his classic study of suicide more than a century ago, Emile Durkheim concluded that those with weaker social bonds to others are more likely to commit suicide. There are specific problems in the singer's role that exacerbate the other stressors. The role of a rock singer fuses two dissimilar cultural forms. One part comes from the bluesman-with his dignity and his hyperindividuality. If the blues singer doesn't work alone, he has a set of musicians who follow him and respond to his every twist and tum and start when he tells them to and end, or extend, a song at his whim. The blues singer has no need for his "own" songs, since it is the performance, rather than the song, that counts. The other part of the role is rock frontman for a machine that is fully rehearsed and not responsive to the moment. Each person, including the singer, must keep to his prescripted precise moves. Here, singers demonstrate their personality, in part, through rendering "their own authentic" songs. And that A-word, authenticity,6 is far more problematic for the singer than for anyone else in the band. Frith notes that in rock the "voice is an apparently transparent reflection of feeling: it is the sound of the voice, not the words sung, which suggests what a singer REALLY means" (Frith, "Why" 98). On stage, and in interviews, it is the singer who is required to express the attitude of the band: in a goth band, solemn or morbid; angst in grunge; party animals in hair metal, etc. This ideology judges vocal performance not by how skillfully a singer can SIGNIFY or present an emotion, ... but by the listener's idea of how far a singer "really feels" what is being communicated. This position is intensified as virtually all rock performers write their own material: the assumption being analogous with that of lyric poets-what you write must be what you really feel or think; anything else is bogus or contrived. (Laing 63)

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Authenticity is constrained by genre and the specific signature stance of the band. Rock vocalists aren't like pop singers who are actors whose attitude is shaped by each particular song. Like standup comedians or other kinds of performance artists, rock singers express some real side of themselves, at least when they are developing their style. But once they become famous, no matter how their values and personalities may change and how their maturation has eliminated their rage, diminished their mordancy, reduced their raging hormones, or given them "self-esteem" they never had, they still need to keep in character. For example, describing the lack of the usual strong fan response at Eminem's concert in July 2002, a reviewer suggested: Perhaps, in wanting to, as he put it, "show growth" and put the controversies behind him with his new release, Eminem is finding himself caught in the conflict between his two personalities: Marshall Mathers, his given name, and his on-stage alter-ego Slim Shady. (Wawrow 6)

The reviewer noted the absence in this concert of songs in which Eminem put down homosexuals and fantasized about murdering his ex-wife. In a recent song, "Without Me," Mathers ruefully concedes that his fans prefer the Shady persona. Similarly, Ozzy, in his prime, sang about marijuana ("Sweetleaf") and cocaine ("Snowblind"). But when I spoke with him in the early 1990s his drug of choice was the newly fashionable Prozac. "It's the only thing that sticks my feet to the floor, because I'm a fuckin' lunatic. Without the Prozac I'd be dead" (Dasein, "Never" 92). While the music's message may be cathartic or symbolically rebellious for the audience, it may become an integral part of the singer/performance artist's life. Henry Rollins mentioned that he saw his performance, his raging on stage, as cathartic for him as it is for his audience: "a way to get what's inside out" (Dasein, "Authentically" 7). If he is correct about this, one would think that he would have long since exorcised his demons. And then what? He would either have to be an inauthentic fraud or radically change his already popular style. Or worse, he would need to make sure that he remained in a state where his rage is an authentic response to his inner turmoil. Although they may come to a band with personalities that dispose them to be uncooperative and egotistic, singers are to a great extent made "clicks" by prevailing social expectations that follow from the structural constraints and tensions of their role? Even when a singer is a generous and accommodating personality, he will experience pressures that isolate him from his bandmates and seductions that prey upon any needs that he might have for approval and adulation. The role of rock singer demands an acceptance if not an embrace of exhibitionism, which necessarily has a narcissistic component that the role encourages. Singers are surely complicit in their "dickhood," but they are not entirely responsible for its social construction. Notes 1. Even when there is no "other," when all in the group are the singers, as in the doowop vocal groups of the 1950s, there is tension. Johnny Keyes from the Magnificents says: "I don't care how close you are friendship-wise, five people constitute five

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different personalities, different patience capacities, different likes and dislikes, different timetables for achieving success and different ideas about what success means" (18). I asked Chris, bassist in the unsigned hard rock band Gladhand who had mentioned a negative view of singers, why this was the case. He replied: "It takes confidence to be a lead singer, but confidence often becomes arrogance and lead singers become dicks" (personal communication, 3 Mar. 2003). It is only some subcultural audiences, as for prog-rock or death metal genres, for example, that don't privilege the singer. Even without the key singer, or indeed without any original member, bands with famous songs get to play on the oldies circuit. A list of "rock deaths" was generated by collecting names from rock critics, students, websites like "The Rock and Roll Death List," and Google searches (died+ band). For each of the 227 people identified, information (from at least two sources-rock encylcopedias, band biographies, and band websites) was gathered on the following variables: the person's position in the band (lead singer only, lead singer/instrumentalist, instrumentalist only); whether the band was active at the time of the person's death; and the cause of death. Only those in active bands who died from drugs/ alcohol or commited suicide were used for this study. Of these 26 cases, eight were singers, five were singer /instrumentalists, and 13 were only instrumentalists. See Simon Frith's discussions of authenticity in rock in Performing Rites. "Each role shapes the person in it by confronting him or her with characteristic dilemmas and constricting the range of options for response. People respond to their position in a structure of opportunity" (Kanter 5).

Works cited Bangs, Lester. "Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber: Black Sabbath and the Straight Done on Blood-Lust Orgies, Part II." Creem July 1972: 47+. Carducci, Joe. Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church Volume 1. Chicago: Redoubt P, 1990. Dasein, Deena. "Authentically, Uniquely Henry Rollins." U.S. Rocker April1993: 7. --."Black Sabbath: An Interview with Geezer Butler." C.A.M.M. July 1992:12-14. - - . "Judas Priest: Surviving Decapitation." Illinois Entertainer January 1998: 24+. --."A More Virulent Strain of Anthrax Breaks Out." Illinois Entertainer June 1993: 28+. --."Never Say Die: Ozzy Osbourne Finally Lives the Greatest Rock Cliche of All-The Sabbath Reunion." L.A. New Times 26 June 1997: 90+. Fricke, David. "For Ozzy Osbourne, There is Reality Television-And There Is Real Life." Rolling Stone 25 July 2002: 62-66. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. --."Why Do Songs Have Words." Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Musical Event. Ed. A.V. White. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. 77-106. Gabriella. "Interview with Stephen Malkmus of Pavement." N.Y. Rock June 1999: np. Gay, Jr., Leslie Clay. "Commitment, Cohesion, and Creative Process: A Study of New York City Rock Bands." Diss. Columbia U, 1991. Kanter, Rosabeth M. Men and Women of the Organization. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Keyes, Johnny. Du-Wop. Chicago: Vesti P, 1991. Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes, UK: Open UP, 1985. Luerssen, John D. Mouthing Off: A Book of Rock & Roll Quotes. Brooklyn, NY: The Telegraph Company, 2002. Raeburn, Susan D. "Occupational Stress and Coping in a Sample of Professional Rock Musicians." Medical Problems of Performing Artists 2.2 (1987): 41-48.

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Simmel, Georg. "The Stranger." From Georg Simmel. Ed. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free P, 1950. 402-08. Wawrow, John. "Audience Leaves a Buffaloed Eminem Pleading for More." Chicago Tribune 21 July 2002, Sec. 4: 6. Weisbard, Eric. "Ten Past 'Ten."' Spin August 2001: 88-102. Wills, Geoff, and Cary L. Cooper. Pressure Sensitive: Popular Musicians Under Stress. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988.

Deena Weinstein is Professor of Sociology at DePaul University in Chicago. Her main area is cultural sociology focusing on popular culture with an emphasis on music. She has taught the Sociology of Rock course for over two decades. Her recent publications include: Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, DaCapo, 2000; "Progressive Rock As Text: The Lyrics of Roger Waters," in Kevin Holm-Hudson (ed.) Progressive Rock Reconsidered, Routledge, 2001; and "Creativity and Band Dynamics," in Eric Weisbard (ed.) This is Pop, Harvard University Press, 2004.

[10] Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe's Queerness Fred Maus

University of Virginia

I begin by indicating two thematic areas: the complex relation of the famous U.S. rock group R.E.M. to heterosexist and masculinist traditions of authenticity; and the elusiveness of singer and lyricist Michael Stipe's words. Then I suggest that these themes can be understood in reJation to Stipe's sexuality, long a matter of speculation, lately described by Stipe as "queer." I develop these issues by commenting on Stipe's role as, in his words, a "queer artist." Though my focus remains on Stipe, this topic falls within a much larger area: the creation and circulation of images of sexual identity through popular music. The question of how pop musicians articulate specific identities-in Stipe's case, one that might be encapsulated, for much of his career, as "semi-closeted, artistically-expressive queer"-is at the intersection of important and engrossing issues in popular music studies and the study of public discourses on sexualities. You're Not Going Out Like That!

R.E.M. 's first album, Murmur, quickly became well-known, topping a 1983 Rolling Stone critics' poll as album of the year. From that time into the mid-90s and beyond, R.E.M. was one of the most prominent United States rock bands, initially associated with college radio stations and a specialized audience for "alternative" music, subsequently with the crossover of alternative into mainstream success. From the beginning, critics and fans praised R.E.M. for sustaining an important tradition of American popular music. Usually this was identified with rock, or music of the 60s, but R.E.M. 's music could trigger broader associations. In 1985, journalist Helen Fitzgerald wrote enthusiastically: "R.E.M. go far beyond a mere country-chic revival, they go back to the Appalachian Mountains and bluegrass Sundays where the whole family would gather round for a hoedown with their neighbors." Fitzgerald heard through R.E.M. 's widely-recognized resemblance to the Byrds or the Band, through Dylan and the folk revival, right back to the inhabitants of folk revivalists' pastoral fantasies. As she put it, "R.E.M. 's America is a green

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land, a land of simple people and family loyalty, of old ways and traditions, a slow and friendly place" (32-34). Such descriptions, whether about the familial rustic past or sixties rock, are partly about the authenticity ofR.E.M. In such accounts, and R.E.M. 's music gains from its association with earlier styles already considered authentic. For much of its career, the existence of R.E.M. has seemed, to many fans and critics, to guarantee the ongoing possibility of authenticity in mass-marketed popular music. Its position as an "alternative" to mainstream pop is tied up with its authenticity. Along with praise for its perpetuation of important traditions, R.E.M. has often received gratitude for saving popular music from distressing possibilities of decline. Sean Bourne, a resident of Athens, Georgia, where the band began, recalled, "If it wasn't for R.E.M. everything might've sounded like Journey or Boston during the eighties" (Sullivan 45). A 1985 article in Melody Maker explained that "R.E.M. are the recognized vanguard of the new American rock renaissance, the band who virtually single-handedly returned vitality, magic and integrity to the generally discredited corpus of white American rock'n'roll. Drawing on the popular traditions of that music, they have given us two albums of the utmost majesty" (Jones 17). This description is frank in its race politics, its admiration for R.E.M. 's rescue of white rock. R.E.M. 's guitarist Peter Buck seems to agree with the rescue narrative. "When we came along in 1981, 1982, there weren't a whole lot of intelligent alternatives ... that you and I could listen to and say, 'That's got thought behind it; it's a little different, not trying to sell records through image" (Halbersberg 107). A vivid recent account by British critic Andy Gill, in Q magazine, suggests some of the political issues that figure in this gratitude. "It's hard to imagine," he writes, "18 years on, just what kind of a state music was in when R.E.M. released Murmur back in 1983. Britain was lost in a cloud of hairspray and mascara, our native pop completely in thrall to those for whom musical considerations rated poorly compared to fashion and hairstyling .... In the U.S. things were, if anything, much worse. Prog rock was in its final convulsions ... Billy Joel and Duran Duran were big ... but it was Michael Jackson-in the wake of the previous year's Thriller album-who bestrode the world of pop like a spindly, coffee-colored colossus. Music's future, it seemed, would be sleek and studio-perfect, with guitars banished to the back of class .... In this context, though it hardly enslaved the wider world at the time, Murmur represented the cavalry coming over the ridge to save rock'n'roll" (R.E.M. Revealed 24). Gill's story seems to be about masculinity-R.E.M. to the rescue, heroically taking on hairspray,

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mascara, and spindliness. It is also, once more, about R.E.M. 's whiteness. But Gill formulates it as a story about "musical considerations"-music itself-in opposition to "fashion and hairstyling." In this account, an apparently neutral notion of purely musical issues seems closely connected to more overtly political concerns about gender and race. The force of Gill's ideology shows in the vagueness of its relation to reality. Michael Stipe, who might be called "spindly," is no stranger to eye make-up, and often had interesting hair (when he had hair). Kate Ingram, an Athens friend of the band, described R.E.M. 's early relation to fashion more carefully: "All of the people from Athens were masters of style .... You may think R.E.M. wore kind of nondescript clothing, but if you really examined it, it was very descript in its subtlety along with the stage persona they would bring to a performance; That was a result of the art background that was so prevalent in Athens" (Sullivan 60). According to Ingram, the members ofR.E.M. were careful, stylish dressers, of a special sort-the sort that not everyone would notice as special. For that matter, browsing past Gill's manly reminiscences one finds, in the same special issue of Q, a two-page spread of photographs illustrating some of Stipe's more startling choices of clothing. "You're not going out like that!," admonishes the headline. Perhaps, given the ongoing public interest in Stipe's sexuality, the idiom "going out" already implies a joke on "out" (as in "coming out"). In case someone might miss the implications of Stipe's more outrageous looks for gender and sexuality, the text assures us, with a knowing reference to Lou Reed's song about Andy Warhol's entourage, that "Michael Stipe is never afraid to walk on the sartorial wild side." And, rubbing it in, the caption for one photo specifies: "with nice new wig, Mike will be in with Sir Elton" (R.E.M. Revealed 100-101 ). R.E.M., and Stipe in particular, have been less innocent of fashion, less high-mindedly musical, and less blankly masculine, than Gill suggests. Similarly, it is difficult to see how Murmur and Reckoning would communicate, to a careful listener, the conservative social norms that Fitzgerald evoked. While pastoral in various ways, they do nothing to elicit Fitzgerald's recurring mention of family values, a highly politicized notion in the 1980s. Once again this inaccuracy shows the force of the critic's ideology. Some other descriptions are pleasantly alert to complications in R.E.M.'s early performances of gender. Writing in 1983, critic J. D. Considine emphasized R.E.M. 's combination of strength and delicacy: "Buck's guitar figures tend toward lean, graceful arpeggios instead ofjagged

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power chords, while Mills's bass lines emerge more as a kind of countermelody than anything else. Strap on Stipe's dark, nasal vocals and power the whole thing with Berry's practical melodic drumming, and you've got a package that's irresistible to almost any rock fan" (Considine 24). I am not sure what is implied by the odd phrase about "strapping on" Stipe's vocals. One "straps on" a guitar, but also a dildo; and the phrase is a little sexier, here, in proximity to "power" and "package." By way of either guitar or dildo, the language evokes masculinity, but as prosthesis, a sex toy. Again, the conventional association of drumming and "power" is undercut by the far less routine notion of "melodic" drumming. The description offers mixed signals about gender and sexuality, but seems, in particular, concerned to depict R.E.M. as something other than purely macho rock. Ingram, so observant about R.E.M. 's fashion sense, also noted the importance of female performers in Athens bands, and continued: "Ironically, R.E.M. didn't have a female, but the female energy of the band is very high. Michael has a lot of creative, feminine energy" (Sullivan 15). If one cannot have Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, the women in the B-52s (themselves complexly gendered by their drag-like display of feminine artifice), Stipe can serve. Charles Aaron, who heard R.E.M. as a student in the early 80s, contrasted their approach with other rock. "Instead of thrusting out at you from the stage, R.E.M. 's songs subtly swept you forward .... Compared to most other American rock bands at the time, R.E.M. was practically disco-all bass lines, nifty beats, and superfluous, sensual lyrics." Aaron's description elegantly poses gentle invitation and sensuous pleasure as an alternative to rock's phallic aggression, reminding me of the terms ofRichard Dyer's praise of disco; indeed, Aaron went on to suggest that R.E.M. 's style derived partly from "the liberating groove of the New York gay club scene" (201). Evidently R.E.M. could be understood in different ways, representing for some listeners a welcome return to a conservative past, for other listeners a welcome revision of rock's traditional masculinity. Perception of R.E.M. has depended, no doubt, on one's cultural or subcultural placement; and the availability of such a wide range of perceptions reflects a subtlety or below-the-radar quality in R.E.M. 's transgressions of gender norms. An intriguing aspect of Stipe's self-presentation, expressed in interviews, is the recurring cross-gender identification of his influences. He consistently cites, as a crucial turning point, his adolescent discovery of Patti Smith. He both acknowledges indebtedness to her, and also describes the debt as unrecognized: "No one's ever really tied into how much I lifted

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from her as a performer" (Gray Identification with Smith, a female performer whose performance style, vocal register, and appearance offered a mix of signs of masculinity and femininity, is both a cross-gender affiliation and an identification with Smith's own gender-bending. In 1995, Stipe was explicit about this: "Patti Smith was a woman, but she was also in that gray area that I feel I embody as a public figure, the neither-nor. I've always responded to that in a big way" (Aaron 199). 2 Stipe also cites unrecognized influences from female country singers: "No one's picked up on our country thing, either. My vocals are influenced by early country singers, mostly women: Patsy Cline, Skeeter Davis, Kitty Wells, and Wanda Jackson" (Rosen 42). Another interview is more specific: "On the vocals ... I go for what I call the acid e sound, which is that nasal thing where you take the sound e and make it as terrible as you possibly can. Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline knew a whole lot about it" (Puterbaugh 48). Repeatedly, Stipe cites a real, but generally unnoticed, female influence on his vocal style. In a less practical realm, more admiration than influence, Dan Vall or, an early friend of the band, reports Stipe's enthusiasm for an ultra-camp icon of exaggerated femininity: "he slathered praise on Eartha Kitt, saying he wished he could sing. He was convinced that he had no voice and Eartha Kitt was where it was at" (Sullivan 58). It is fascinating that Stipe would be so strongly drawn to Kitt, and would praise her so emphatically at the expense of his own singing; how many male rock stars would wish to replace their voices with hers? R.E.M. 's catalogue does include some camp vocal performances, most deliciously "Crush with Eyeliner," but they fall outside Stipe's norm, which tends toward plaintive earnestness. 16). 1

Purposely Obtuse

R.E.M. has exemplified a special quality of ensemble, bringing together four sharply individual talents into a band that is greater than the sum of its parts. Nonetheless, critics have routinely singled out singer and lyricist Stipe's unique contribution to R.E.M. A few writers have found Stipe's presence annoying. One reviewer of an early performance, irritated by his "purposely obtuse lyrics" and elaborate stage performance, reported that "for much of the show, I tuned out Stipe and concentrated on Buck's fluid but precise musicianship" (Brogan 77). But more often, critics and fans have admired the enigmatic quality that Stipe contributes. One critic, after describing the instrumentalists, continued: "All this would make R.E.M. an outfit to remember in any case, but add the

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mysterious Stipe to the equation and you're looking at a unit in a million" (Sweeting 28). Stipe's mysterious quality comes partly from his lyrics and his way of performing them. In early performances and recordings, Stipe's words were hard to hear and, even when recovered through repeated listening, difficult to interpret. Still, critics have marveled at the strong impression of communication in Stipe's singing, while acknowledging his lack of verbal clarity. According to one writer, "If Stipe is still largely unconcerned with his words, it's probably because he has fashioned a more emotionally fluent language from the sound of his voice" (Sasfy 7). This suggests that the important communication is somehow in the voice itself, bypassing the meanings of the words. (Perhaps a more theoretically-inclined critic could have elaborated this account of Stipe by evoking Roland Barthes's famous essay "The Grain of the Voice," with its distinction between a voice that articulates and communicates, and a different, more highly prized voice in which one hears the singer's body.) Another reviewer wrote, as early as 1982, that "Mystery is a thing that is lacking in run of the mill pop product. Michael Stipe's voice comes close, gets right up next to you, but his mumblings seem to contain secrets. Intimacy and distance. The voice tells ofknowledge but doesn't give too much away" (Grabel4). This beautiful description notes a paradoxical combination of secrecy and proximity, and identifies it as central to the value of R.E.M. 's music. In later albums, changes in enunciation and recording technique made it easier to hear Stipe's words, but the meanings usually remained obscure. In 1986, as R.E.M. 's audience grew and Stipe's lyrics became audible, a reviewer reassured his readers: "Stipe remains the enigma at the center of this newly commercial band" (Morton 72). Recently Patti Smith, an authenticating forebear, as already noted, who has also become a friend and collaborator of Stipe, reiterated the point. "There's a mystery to R.E.M. 's music, which all the best rock'n'roll music has. Something that moves you in ways you can't understand. That penetrates your psyche and your feelings. Ultimately Michael remains a mystery too" (R.E.M. Revealed 5). In interviews, Stipe and Buck sometimes have described the lyrics as accurate transcriptions of Stipe's way of thinking, thus treating them as an unusual form of sincere expression, in which sincerity impedes comprehension. In a 1988 interview, Stipe explained that "I can try to write something simple and still no one will understand it. That's just the way I am. I've tried and tried and I just can't be that normal thing" (R.E.M. Revealed 36). Stipe also suggested that the variability of interpretation creates a pleasing

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anarchy. According to Stipe, "If there is a philosophy to the band, it's that every individual person who hears or has anything to do with the band has their own idea of what it's about and what's going on" (Considine 26). It is clear from many interviews that Stipe has often had personal interpretations of his lyrics, different from any likely interpretation by listeners. The existence of Stipe's personal interpretations creates a sense of Stipe's privacy; the words can be heard as hiding Stipe's subjectivity rather than revealing it. Still, as already noted, this privacy can co-exist with an intense sense of emotional access to the singer. A 1995 review testified to the persistence of this complex response. Stipe's fans are "people who identify with rich tapestries of emotion, who understand the place from which these emotions are born. The message is not always clear, often deliberately clouded, but at its core is raw feeling and empathy, which forms the basis of a reciprocal relationship" (Olliffe 175). (There was an element of fantasy, of course, in this writer's reference to a "reciprocal relationship.") Sometimes the difficulty of Stipe's lyrics comes from their oblique relation to narrative. In 1985, Fitzgerald quoted Stipe on his ambivalent identification with Southern story-telling: "In a way I think I am carrying on the tradition. Although I'm not really telling stories because I've never been very fond of songs with a storyline" (32). A few years later, asked whether he has written any narrative songs, Stipe mentioned two, including "Harborcoat"-"I thought that was a real simple narrative but no one else did. I had to tell someone what it was about a few days ago. God knows what that says about my narrative style" (O'Hagan 121 ). Even when Stipe tries to tell a story, he may find that he has not succeeded. It is so hard for him to "be that normal thing."

Absolutely Queer

As I noted, the issues I have identified-the performances of gender that complicate R.E.M. 's relation to norms, and the common perception of Stipe and his lyrics as enigmatic-can be brought into relation with a third issue, Stipe's sexuality. In this section, I indicate briefly the development of public knowledge about Stipe's sexual orientation, before exploring related interpretive issues for some of R.E.M. 's songs. In the early 90s, rumors increasingly interpreted Stipe's enigmatic qualities in terms of secrets: homosexuality and perhaps AIDS. While Stipe initially hoped to evade these issues by refusing interviews, he eventually began to comment.

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In 1992, an interviewer for Life asked, as though naively: "Is being a rock star the province of white, heterosexual males?" Stipe spent one sentence pretending to answer the question-"preferably beautiful with a great head of hair"-and then moved immediately (as I understand his reply) to the implied personal question about his own sexuality: "Look ... 'I yam what I yam'- Popeye, one of my heroes. I don't play it one way or the other. I'm myself. Take it or leave it" (Simon 104). Stipe is what he is ... but what is he? How is he playing it in this answer; how should one "take it"? One might hear a tang of camp in the reference to Popeye, the heavily muscled sailor. More generally, the phrase "I am what I am" has a pertinent complexity. It can encapsulate self-recognition, as in the private psychological exercise entitled "I am what I am," recommended by gay activist Michelangelo Signorile in his book on coming out (9-1 0). It can also figure in a defiant resolution to be open, as in the song "I am what I am," from the 1983 gay-themed musical La Cage aux Folles: "It's my world that I want to have a little pride in/My world and it's not a place I have to hide in. " 3 But Stipe seems to use the phrase to hide, to avoid describing himself; he protects his privacy and prolongs the interviewer's insinuating, connotative approach to sexuality. (Stipe's response also ignores the racial aspect of the question, perhaps understanding it as incidental to the interviewer's primary intention of sexual-orientation harassment.) In 1994 and 1995, on the occasion of the release of Monster and a subsequent world tour, Stipe gave a series of interviews in which, for the first time, he answered questions about his sexuality. He stated that his sexuality should ideally be private, but that "my hand was kind of forced, which is fine .... It became really evident to me a couple of years ago that there were certain factions of people who thought that I was just being cowardly by not talking about my sexuality, that I was in the closet, and that reached a boiling point at which I felt like I had to say something" (Rogers 94). He rejected any labeling of his sexuality, saying that "labeling is for canned food" and that sex is too "slippery" to categorize (DeCurtis 64). Stipe affirmed that he has always had sex with both men and women, calling himself "an equal-opportunity lech" (Heath 140). But he insisted that he did not "adhere to or appreciate the label bisexual. I think it's kind of cheap. It's confining. It's putting a male geometric set of rules onto something that I think of as female and very fluid" (Rogers 94). Stipe insisted on the appropriateness of privacy- a concept that can be difficult to distinguish from secrecy or the closet-while also maintaining, until recently, that no label suited his sexuality, or perhaps sexuality more generally. In 1995, Chris

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Heath asked him directly: "You've always let it be known that you have an indeterminate sexuality-should people deduce from that a genuinely complex sexuality, or simply a desire for privacy?" Stipe replied, "Both. Absolutely" (Heath 140). Again, in conversation with Charlie Rose: "For me it's about categorization. The other issue, of course, would be privacy, which I just felt like it really wasn't anyone's business" (Rose). These last remarks bring together considerations of privacy and labeling. Stipe does not, in any interview I have seen, explain clearly what is wrong with the label "bisexual," but his distaste for the label is not idiosyncratic. "Labels and labeling are a big issue for people who, for lack of a better word, call themselves bisexual," wrote Marjorie Garber, in an excellent book on bisexuality. "How can something fluid be something solid? How to reconcile a 'sexuality' that takes the form of narrative (this then that; this and that; this because of that; this after that) with a 'politics' that depends upon solidarity?" (47). Garber posed these questions as a conundrum for someone who hopes to act politically on the basis of openness about sexuality. But for Stipe, the reductive nature of the term "bisexual" was apparently one more reason to keep his sexuality out of public discussion. This may'cseem, if not cowardly, at least pointedly unpolitical. But it is true that mass media representations of celebrities are likely to oversimplify; Stipe had reason to distrust the public capacity for accepting complex self-representations. (For discussion of related issues, see Hubbs.) And an attempt to come out as bisexual may find an awkward reception: to many people, the term sounds, at once, excessively vague and potentially deceitful. Stipe suggested that he was more willing to let his sexuality be known through media other than language. "I just felt like there were some things that I had to keep for myself, that could come out through the music, or could manifest itself in other ways ... I just wasn't comfortable talking about it" (Rogers 98). He expressed satisfaction with his self-lmowledge, his own understanding of his sexuality. "I'm perfectly comfortable with it. I've dealt with it for over twenty years. It's other people's perceptions that throw it off' (Heath 140). He also showed a tendency to conflate elusive sexuality with gender deviance, at one point answering the question "Do you like your sexuality being indecipherable?" by saying "Yeah. I kind of like gender-fucking" (Cavanagh 172). Genderfuck, stylized gender deviance, does not always involve queer sexuality, but often it does, and, as I noted, for Stipe the issues are close enough that he sometimes seems to have trouble distinguishing them. Stipe's public departures from normative masculinity,

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and their consequences for the general effect of R.E.M., are not sharply distinct from expression of queerness. In 2001, on the release of the album Reveal, Stipe made further revelations. In an interview for Time, he said that he has been living for three years with "an amazing man" and called himself"a queer artist" (Farley 85). The Time article led to reports elsewhere that Stipe had finally come out as gay. The BBC news web site featured a remarkably misleading headline: "Michael Stipe: I'm Gay," the first-person pronoun strongly implying a direct quotation. 4 Journalists and contributors to online discussion suggested that Stipe's timing was cynical, that he had finally come out in an effort to draw attention to R.E.M. 's new record. Writers in the Seattle Weekly ridiculed his disclosure. "Man, is that R.E.M. desperate to sell some records! ... now Stipey has declared himself 'a queer artist.' This, after years of activism tempered by coyness. Sorry, Mike, but Tyson Meade [vocalist of Chainsaw Kittens] is a queer artist. Hell, Steve Friggin' Kmetko [television entertainment journalist] is a queer artist. You, sir, are a money-hungry phony-baloney who only outed yourself in Time to promote another stultifying R.E.M. record" (Krugman and Cohen 44). Such claims showed dramatic erosion of Stipe's image of authenticity, charging him at once with commercial manipulation and years of dishonesty. In fact, Stipe had not identified himself as gay, in 2001 or at any other time, nor was there any news in his acknowledgement that he has had sex with men. The Time article shows two main changes since the mid-90s interviews. Stipe is now willing to talk about a particular long-term sexual partner; in earlier interviews he said that he had never been in love. And, more interestingly in political terms, he is willing to accept a name for his sexuality-"queer" or, as reported in Time, "queer artist." Perhaps this second change comes from a new precision in his understanding of the term "queer." Around the same time, he told Q that "queer to me is much broader, the idea that something like sexuality is extremely fluid and not capable of being reduced to a category. Am I queer? Absolutely" (Pemberton). Thus, "queer" is the word that he will accept because, on Stipe's understanding, the word encapsulates a refusal of more definite categories, rather than constituting a category. In this understanding of the word, Stipe is true to recent, sophisticated political usages; see Jagose for instance. The conjunction of"queer" and "absolutely" recalls a moment in the history of outing, when an activist organization named OutPost made posters of closeted celebrities such as Jodie Foster, labelling them, in a parody of vodka ads, as "Absolutely Queer." Thus Stipe's language, as he somewhat

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reluctantly discusses his sexuality, nonetheless seems to link him to activists a decade before, as though, in a thoroughly ambivalent gesture, he accepts, and applies to himself, language sometimes associated with forceful outing. If Stipe's recent disclosures point to any dishonesty in his earlier statements, the dishonesty would lie in his previous implications of sexual indifference. A phrase like "equal-opportunity lech" seems to deny a preference for one sex over the other, while his choice of a long-term male partner might-or might not-reveal a preference. (Buckley, 296-98, offers a sensible discussion of this.) An interesting and sometimes hilarious 2004 interview in Butt ("a pocket-size, quarterly magazine for and about homosexuals") continues Stipe's reflections on preferences: "I had boyfriends and girlfriends pretty much from pretty early on. I started early. It was tough because there wasn't really a category for me and I didn't like the third sex, it didn't feel comfortable calling myselfbisexual ... I didn't like that. I didn't really figure out until I was eighteen or nineteen, I thought I had more of a preference for men, but there were certain women that I was really attracted to and wanted to have a relationship with, and so I kind of just went with my heart the whole time. And sometimes with my hard-on, I guess. [laughs]" (Tillmans). Consistently to the present, Stipe has maintained that his desires are not exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. In 2000, he summarized his thoughts on sexual self-disclosure. "I felt forced to talk about my sexuality and, you know, my queerness, just because I felt like I was being looked on as a coward for not talking about it. And I abhor that, you know. [It is not quite clear what he abhors-being forced to talk, or being seen as a coward, or perhaps actually being a coward.] If anything, I thought it was dead obvious to everyone all along, you know. I was wearing skirts and mascara in 1981, onstage and in photo shoots" ("Behind the Music"). This comment brings together a number of strands: his feeling that his hand was forced, his new acceptance of the word "queer," and his thought that non-verbal media might communicate his sexuality effectively and sufficiently, complicated by a conflation of drag and sexuality. In conjoining two ideas-it was private, it was obvious-this last statement recalls the phenomenon of "the open secret," identified by scholars of sexuality, particularly D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as a basic paradox in the practices of the closet. Miller's influential formulations appeared in 1988 and, therefore, reflect a politicized gay discourse formed in the same years as R.E.M. 's early albums. As Miller argued, habits of circumspection in discourse about homosexuality, in the era of the closet, did not prevent the circulation of knowledge about homosexuality. Rather,

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this knowledge-of homosexuality as a general phenomenon, as well as the homosexuality of individual people-was widely known but not directly spoken. "In a mechanism reminiscent of Freudian disavowal, we know perfectly well that the secret is known, but nonetheless we must persist, however ineptly, in guarding it" (207). The circulation of Stipe's open secret can be seen in a 1993 interview with writer Dennis Cooper. Cooper noted the uncomfortable pressure on famous gay people to become spokesmen, even when they feel little bond to the "collective identity" of a "gay community." He supposed that Stipe was someone who lacked that bond. But he continued: "I wish Michael Stipe would come out just because he is so famous and it would make such a big difference." Cooper assumed widespread knowledge of Stipe's queerness, though Stipe had not, in 1993, begun to announce it verbally in public. In the specialized environment of a small-scale liberal/progressive magazine, Cooper was willing to comment on Stipe's open secret, though he opposed more public practices of outing (Nicolini). For Miller and others, such open secrecy, functioning "not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge" (206), was an aspect of a powerful discursive practice that confined and controlled nonstandard sexuality and other forms of deviance. Miller's description seems to match the conjunction of Stipe's "dead obvious" sexuality with his preference for discretion. However, to the extent that Stipe intentionally gave off non-verbal signals of sexual complexity (mascara, skirts), he did not simply guard his secret, but engaged in a contradictory practice of privacy and display, helping to open his own open secret.

The Hint of the Century

How might Stipe's queerness have expressed itself in R.E.M. 's songs? This type of question is always intriguing in relation to queer musicians. Some queer musicians (and queer creators in other media) have tried to discourage such inquiries, asserting the independence of their output from private, personal matters. But Stipe, for all his concern with privacy, indicates that his sexuality "could come out through the music," and this suggestion positively invites attention to queer sexuality in R.E.M. 's songs. I shall consider a few examples. "Pretty Persuasion," from R.E.M. 's second album, is about ambivalence, and can be heard as a song about bisexual eroticism. At the beginning of the song, the protagonist feels pressure to make a choice. The tense, propulsive music conveys urgency. "It's what I want, hurry in and buy, all

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has been tried, follow reason and buy." This seems to be about commerce, but most likely commerce is a figure for erotic choice. The speaker tells himself to act, but in doing so, reveals that the commitment to act is incomplete. He would like to have made up his mind, but apparently he has not. The speaker continues: "Cannot shuffle in this heat." I do not understand the reference to "shuffling," but evidently there is a shift away from decisive action to acknowledgment of incapacity. "Cannot put that on my sleeve." This line seems to merge Stipe's concern for privacy and his resistance to labeling; he will not wear his heart on his sleeve, nor will he wear a logo or badge of affiliation. The song continues with words that seem to depict bisexual attraction directly. "He's got pretty persuasion, she's got pretty persuasion, god damn your confusion." The music of "Pretty Persuasion" offers its own images of ambivalence. The verse juxtaposes sections in D major and F# minor, and then the chorus rocks back and forth between D major and F# minor chords. More specifically, the song begins with a guitar introduction in E, moving to an A chord and back to E before ending with two quick chords: D and A. The harmonic rhythm creates an unsettling instability: starting with an E chord, the passage then seems to get stuck on an A major chord for too long, and the eventual return toE is thrown off balance by immediate movement back toward the final brief A chord. When the vocals enter, the music suddenly shifts tonic to D major, alternating with its dominant, A. It is as though the music abruptly and opportunistically seizes upon the last two chords of the introduction, changing their meaning and giving them new centrality. It feels like the musical equivalent of a sudden, somewhat arbitrary decision, giving a musical counterpart to the theme of urgent, under-motivated decisionmaking. Music in D sets text about the need to hurry and choose. With text about incapacity and uncertainty-"it's all wrong"-the music shifts to F# minor. The major/minor contrast goes along with the contrast between trying to decide and feeling unable to do so. Finally, when the chorus, about "pretty persuasion," simply rocks back and forth between D major and F# minor, the two keys offer a vivid depiction of indecision. The strange vocal style of the song-two male voices intersecting and drifting apart-provides another image of self-division and, at the same time, of male-male merging and separation. The play between the extremes of privacy and "dead obvious," central to the practice of the open secret, comes close to the language of R.E.M. 's most famous song. In "Losing My Religion" (from 1991) the protagonist addresses another person, with awkward indirectness, and interrupts himself

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to worry over the success of his communication. "Oh no, I've said too much. I haven't said enough." According to Stipe, "Losing My Religion" is about erotic obsession. But many listeners have heard it as a song about sexual selfrevelation, and specifically about coming out as queer or gay; more precisely, it could be heard as a song about not quite coming out. Stipe's response, when asked about this interpretation in an interview, seemed naive. "I thought that was sweet," says Stipe fondly. "I love it that it was taken that way. When that song first came out and I heard that, I was like 'What?' and then Scott Litt [the band's longtime producer] said, 'that's kind of what I thought it' was about.' For me the song was totally a rewriting of 'Every Breath You Take'-it was this creepy confessional." (Rogers 98). Stipe depicts himself as slow to catch on to a specifically queer reading of the song (as, in the same interview, he describes himself as unaware of the gay traditions around the imagery of Saint Sebastian, prominent in the video for the song). In any case, "Losing My Religion" shows an intensely heightened awareness of speech acts, a faltering attempt at moment-by-moment control of verbal disclosure. It expresses the self-consciousness and uncertainty of the protagonist, as he "chooses his confessions" and drops "the hint of the century"; it dramatizes the conflict between his desire to communicate something huge and his fear of doing so. The song expresses a sense of constraint and tantalizing, unrealized possibility as much through the music as through the lyrics. The vocal melody circles through just three pitches, A, B, and C, harmonized repetitiously in a dreary A minor. A fourth pitch, G, occurs often as an ornament to the other three. G also appears in a very different manner, several times, as the goal of a descent. These moments of descent to G seem to hold out the prospect of escape, not only through the sheer increase of structural pitch material but through the harmonization. At those points only, the harmony moves from aD minor chord to a G major chord. The functions of these chords are ambiguous. They make sense as a move back to A minor, through an aeolian use of the subtonic triad as a kind of alternative dominant; and the return to A minor does follow (in A: IV - VII - I, the I delayed sometimes by a drop to VI and subsequent rise). But they also sound like a half cadence, as though the music might escape to C, the relative major (in C: II - V [perhaps I? ... no, VI]). The words at these moments articulate the central tension of the song: "I've said too much, I set it up" or "I've said too much, I haven't said enough." It is as though the song sometimes might, but never will, complete a cadence to C major, at the same time allowing the protagonist to release his

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secret. Hearing these implications of half cadence, one might expect that the eventual arrival of a brief C major section would create a wonderful sense of release. But such a passage finally appears as iffrom nowhere, with thinned texture and loss of momentum, carrying little sense of arrival or culmination; and soon the music falls back into its old patterns. The words of the C major section seem to associate unreality with the potential harmonic goal: "That was just a dream," as though it was always known that a breakthrough was not possible. 5 This pained concern with linguistic communication crystallizes an issue that appears, more diffusely, throughout all the obscurities and inscrutabilities of R.E.M. 's songs. Stipe's sexuality may be pertinent to his ongoing refusal of clear, familiar meanings. Perhaps his linguistic choices reflect a sense that stories and meanings from queer lives cannot be expressed directly to the audiences he desires. A mysterious early song, "9-9," offers a generalization: "Steady repetition is a compulsion mutually reinforced," followed by a question: "Now what does that mean?'' The puzzling sentence might mean that repetitious behavior, conformity, tends to be mutually rewarded by all its practitioners, and that this mutual reinforcement discourages attempts to break out of standard patterns of intelligible behavior. And the subsequent question might mean that a diagnosis of this situation is likely, itself, to appear unintelligible. (I am making Stipe's sentence sound like a summary of some of Judith Butler's ideas in Gender Trouble.) When the song returns repeatedly to the summary formulation "lies and conversation fear," it evokes difficult truth-telling akin to that in "Losing My Religion." This worry about communication can also take a humorous, jaunty form. "Pop Song 89" depicts comical, faltering efforts to converse. "Should we talk about the weather?" As I mentioned, the release of Monster coincided with a new openness about sexuality in Stipe's interviews. The album includes "King of Comedy," a song about commercialization and popular culture. The song's ironic instructions for self-promotion include a recommendation of sexual self-labeling as an advertising technique: "Make it charged with controversy/I'm straight, I'm queer, I'm bi." This comes close to a criticism of media figures who choose to accept such labels-the same criticism that was made of Stipe in 2001 when he was accused of coming out to promote Reveal. In "So Fast, So Numb," from 1996, the protagonist addresses someone who is identified as his lover and also as a "motor boy." Depending on the configuration of one's gaydar, other bits of songs may seem pertinent to

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Stipe's queerness. One journalist expressed lack of surprise at Stipe's disclosures, and explained: "This, after all, is the gravel-voiced singer who, addressing the object of his desire on his song 'Be Mine' ... rather sweetly announced: 'I wannabe your Easter bunny'" (McCormick). R.E.M. 's promotional videos add an additional range of queer implications, most famously in the elaborate Derek Jarman-influenced video for "Losing My Religion." That video and a number of others for R.E.M. songs offer a series of potentially erotic male torsos, often displayed in conjunction with songs that do not, by themselves, seem particularly homoerotic. Some of these, as I experience them, elicit desire for men's bodies in a nonobjectifying way, mingling attraction, tenderness, and empathy toward the bodies they depict, sometimes to political ends. The exposed male flesh in the video for "Finest Worksong," for all its obvious strength and aggression, seems endangered by fire and hard materials. The age of the adolescent in the video for "It's the End of the World as We Know It" gives his exposure an obvious aspect of vulnerability, despite his playfully defiant attitudes. The body of the soldier in the video for "Orange Crush" has a different vulnerability, because of the danger to which a soldier can be exposed in combat; and the video teaches us to see, through his hard adult body, the curious child that he once was. The amusing video for "Pop Song 89" adds Stipe's skinny, bare-chested body to a line of three topless female dancers, proposing gender equity in the treatment of nudity and also, no doubt, inviting equal-opportunity desire.

A Queer Artist

As already mentioned, some listeners linked "Losing My Religion," concerned with secrecy and disclosure, to the closet, the practice of discretion that dominated twentieth-century discourse on homosexuality in the United States and elsewhere. The closet was a way of regulating speech-acts, determining what could and could not be said about sexuality. One might think of the closet as a practice of suppression of speech. But following Foucault, along with recent theorists of sexuality such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one should note that regulation did not simply suppress discourse about homosexuality. Rather, it also created and circulated discourse: the closet constituted homosexuality, made it knowable, in the obscure way that it was generally known. To know about homosexuality was, in part, to know how to say certain things and avoid saying others; such skill displayed and circulated knowledge

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about homosexuality. One could become deft at this practice without explicitly recognizing it for what it was. One could learn, for instance, to say of certain people that they were "shy," or "confirmed bachelors," or "not the marrying kind," while retaining a specific inhibition against forming the further thought: "he has sex with men" or, if one began to form the thought, maintaining an inhibition against stating it in an uncontrolled way. Miller suggests that "the social function of secrecy ... is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge" (206). The state of knowing and not knowing was complex: "curiously enough, the fact the secret is always known-and, in some obscure sense, known to be known-never interferes with the incessant activity of keeping it" (206). The obscuring of knowledge allowed for a regime of powerful ignorance (if ignorance is the right word), in which pervasive social control was more effective because it was not thematized. Sean O'Hagan, meeting Stipe in 1988, wrote that "Michael Stipe is kinda how you'd imagine him from his songs, though a little more camp" (O'Hagan 119). Gay porn auteur Bruce Labruce, meeting him in 2001, reported that "He's a little queenier than I thought he'd be-in a good way" (LaBruce). In his more public persona, performing genderfuck while trying to keep his sexuality private (or at least non-verbalized), Stipe became a hero of rock. He allowed his fans to enjoy the spectacle of his enigma, and offered them songs on a wide range of subjects, among them the difficulty of certain speech acts. After I completed a paper on the Pet Shop Boys, concentrating on their sophisticated but deniable treatment of homosexuality and the closet, I thought I might write about R.E.M., a band where I knew issues about non-heterosexual male sexuality would work out very differently. I confided my intention of writing about R.E.M. to my friend Mark, who had been a wonderful companion in thinking about the Pet Shop Boys. He was not impressed. "Lots of guitar!" he said dubiously. Mark savors electronic dance music; it is no metaphor to say that he flees guitar sound. I felt the need to regain credibility, so I continued: "I think I'm going to focus on issues about sexuality." Mark replied instantly: "Well! Stipe certainly hasn't been very forthcoming about that!" I gave up; for Mark, a project on R.E.M. was a hard sell. Though Mark's tastes can be markedly individual, in these reactions he reflected a broader pattern. Gay male communities during the years of R.E.M. 's productivity have favored neither R.E.M. 's style of music nor Stipe's way of addressing sexuality. The Pet Shop Boys, with their ironic pathos,

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camp, and borrowings from dance music, have become icons of gay creativity. R.E.M. has had a different appeal, becoming the icon of alternative rock. In doing so, the band may seem to have set aside issues about sexuality. But I have suggested that R.E.M., specifically in the figure of Michael Stipe, has offered a range of distinctive, if closeted, evocations of queerness. Stipe and R.E.M., to the extent that they have evaded questions about Stipe's sexuality, have fallen into a familiar pattern. Late twentieth-century North American culture by and large disliked queers, but loved its queer artists, typically without wishing to acknowledge their queerness. While openness about the sexuality of entertainers has increased rapidly since the 1980s, traditional patterns continue alongside their alternatives: would an openly gay Ricky Martin have danced with the new Republican President on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at George W Bush's first inauguration? 6 In welcoming queer performers so long as they do not explicitly reveal their sexuality, popular music was continuous with other aspects of culture, not least musical culture generally. Musical achievement has had a particularly close relation to the closet and its open secrets; indeed, as musicologist Philip Brett noted, the term "musical" has sometimes been camp code for "homosexual." Brett argued brilliantly that music-he had classical music in mindhas often provided a special place for people who deviate from heterosexual norms, cutting them a special deal. In the twentieth century especially, queer classical musicians such as the British composer Benjamin Britten were accepted, often prized, provided they did not make their sexuality unavoidably evident in public. Britten was able to move in high circles as part of a couple, with his partner Peter Pears, and was able to write operas such as Billy Budd and Death in Venice on homoerotic themes. He was protected by a thin veil of discretion, along with the persistent convention that high art (classical music, classic literature) created a zone of special permission for deviance. What does it mean when Stipe identifies himself, finally accepting a label, as a "queer artist"? As we have seen, writers for the Seattle Weekly dissented; possibly they understood a "queer artist" to be someone who makes queerness an overt aspect of her art, someone who makes queer art, or who makes art queer. But Stipe's usage might refer back, instead, to the older practices that Brett and others have described, the public discretion that articulates artists' sexualities as an open secret. Thus, one might hear Stipe as saying, through his self-description, "I am queer, as many artists have been, as artists have special permission to be"-as though art allows and excuses queerness, and can also excuse the closeting of that queerness.

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Coming out specifically as a queer artist, Stipe may be authenticating himself with reference to a tradition of closeted artists. Another aspect of Brett's account applies to Stipe. Brett asked why musicality and queerness seem to go together, and suggested that certain qualities of musical performance were crucial. "Music is a perfect field for the display of emotion. It is particularly accommodating to those who have difficulty in expressing feelings in day-to-day life, because the emotion is unspecified and unattached .... To gay children, who often experience a shutdown of all feeling as the result of sensing their parents' and society's disapproval of a basic part of their sentient life, music appears as a veritable lifeline" (17). Musical people, children and adults, can use music to express intense feeling without revealing the sources of the feeling; thus, they can create surprisingly strong bonds of intimacy with people who would disapprove of their lives. Classical music, like Stipe's expressive performance of mystifying lyrics, uses an emotionally fluent language to tell of secrets without giving too much away. Stipe, as an adult musician, displays the same interplay of intimacy and distance that Brett identified in pondering the musicality of queer children. 7

Insinuation

My method in this article should not, perhaps, be called argumentation. Rather, I have offered "a gathering web of insinuations," again and again trying to nudge Stipe's particular queerness toward greater visibility. 8 The method of insinuation is, of course, close to the connotative practices of the closet, which induce a duet between poorly-kept secrets and knowing allusions to those secrets. It is a way I have found to write about Stipe, mimicking the complex epistemology of the open secret. But after a whileperhaps you will agree-it is a tedious kind of writing. That judgment of tedium is the aesthetic version of a reaction that is, more fundamentally, political: a desire for the era of the closet to reach a complete, definitive end, leaving Stipe's play between the "dead obvious" and the private as a curious historical artifact. 9

Notes

1. Cross-gender identification also marked the young (but straight) Peter Buck's simultaneous enthusiasm for Smith, as amusingly recounted in Gray (6).

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2. The two singers can look startlingly similar in photographs (see, for instance, Rosen 161). 3. In these lyrics, "my world" is also the public world. "It's time to open up your closet. Life's not worth a damn till you can say 'Hey world! I am what I am!" (Herman 130-38). 4. To illustrate, the BBC chose an especially freakish photo of Stipe in performance, bald and ravaged, his puffY shirt suggesting breasts, his right wrist outstandingly limp ("Michael Stipe: I'm Gay"). 5. Most obviously, "just a dream" refers to the "fantasies" about the other person, described in immediately preceding lines. But the meaning of the words spreads, and the harmony encourages this other reading in relation to the lyrics at the C major half cadences. 6. According to one report, "hip-swiveling singer Ricky Martin ... sashayed over to Bush and coaxed him into busting a dance move, the two of them briefly swaying together on stage to the Latin beat of 'The Cup of Life'" ("Quest for the Presidency"). The description is, of course, ripe with insinuations of Martin's presumed open secret. 7. Stipe's own adolescent relation to music was somewhat different from what Brett describes, as one would expect from the very d~fferent music it involves. Finding himself an outsider, he drew strength from identification with the Velvet Underground and New York punk: "This music made the separation worse, but it gave me an ace in the hole because I had something they didn't have" (Gray 15). Gray discusses this intelligently, relating the isolation to Stipe's sexuality. In contrast, Brett describes classical music as a means of communication for adolescents, a bridge back to a mainstream sensibility through its obscuring of certain details of feeling, and I have suggested that R.E.M. 's music offers a similar bridge from the queer adult Stipe to a large audience. 8. This is the novelist Henry Green's phrase for the distinctive effect of good prose, a phrase many critics find apt for his own novels (84). 9. I benefited in many ways from comments of audiences who heard versions ofthis work at conferences or colloquia in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cleveland, Austin, Durham NC, and New York. Michael Puri read a draft very carefully, and his insightful comments led to numerous improvements. Conversations with Mark about this article and related matters have always been great. Aaron Lecklider and an anonymous reader for JPMS were generous in offering many good suggestions for further development of my ideas.

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Works Cited Aaron, Charles. "R.E.M. Comes Alive." Spin August, 1995; reprinted in Platt. 195-205. Barthes, Roland. "The Grain of the Voice." Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. and transl. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 179-89. "Behind the Music: REM." VHl Video broadcast, 6 Nov. 1998. Brett, Philip. "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet." Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Eds. Philip Brett, Gary Thomas and Elizabeth Wood. New York: Routledge, 1994. 9-26. Brogan, Daniel. "R.E.M. Has Little to Say and Says it Obtusely." Chicago Tribune 20 Oct. 1986; reprinted in Platt. 77-78. Buckley, David. R.E.M./Fiction: An Alternative Biography. London: Virgin Books, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cavanagh, David. "Tune Platt. 160-7 4.

m, Cheer up, Rock out." Q October 1994; reprinted in

Considine, J. M. "R.E.M.: Subverting Small Town Boredom." Musician August 1983; reprinted in Platt. 22-27. DeCurtis, Anthony. "Monster Madness." Rolling Stone 693, 20 Oct. 1994. 58-64, 161-163. Dyer, Richard. "In Defense of Disco." Only Entertainment. Ed. Richard Dyer. New York: Routledge, 2002. 149-58. Farley, Christopher John. "Michael Stipe and the Ageless Boys of R.E.M." Time 21 May 2001. 84-85. Fitzgerald, Helen. "Tales from the Black Mountain." Melody Maker 27 April1985; reprinted in Platt. 29-35. Foucault, Michel. The History ofSexuality. Vol. 1, transl. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism ofEveryday Life. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Grabel, Richard. "Nightmare Town." New Musical Express 11 Dec. 1982; reprinted in Platt. 4-5.

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Gray, Marcus. It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion. Revised ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Green, Henry. Pack My Bag. New York: New Directions, 1993. Halbersberg, Elaine. "Peter Buck of R.E.M." East Coast Rocker 30 Nov. 1988; reprinted in Platt. 107-15. Heath, Chris. "Michael in the Middle." Details February 1995. 80+. Herman, Jerry. La Cage aux Foiles: The Broadway Musical. Milwaukee: Jerryco Music Co., distr. by Hal Leonard Corporation, 1995. Hubbs, Nadine. "Music of the 'Fourth Gender': Morrissey and the Sexual Politics of Melodic Contour." Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance: Genders 23. Eds. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry, 1996. 266-96. Krugman, Michael, and Jason Cohen. "The Culture Bunker." Seattle Weekly 30 May-5 June 2001. 44. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Jones, Allan. "In the Heat of the Night." Melody Maker 15 June 1985. 16+. LaBruce, Bruce. "Blab." 26 Jan. 2001. http://www.exclaim.ca/index.asp?layid=22& csid=3&csidl = 434. Maus, Fred Everett. "Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys." Popular Music 20, 3 (2001). 379-93. McCormick, Neil. "We All Know What You Mean, Michael." The Age 18 May 2001. http://www. theage.com.au/entertainment/200 1/05/18/FFXVTK 1UUMC. html. "Michael Stipe: I'm Gay." BBC News, 14 May 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/entertainment/1329994.stm. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Morton, Tom. "Southern Accents." Melody Maker, 6 Sept. 1986; reprinted in Platt. 71-76. Nicolini, Kim. "Dennis Cooper's Monster in the Margins." Bad Subjects 5 March/ April 1993. http:/lbad.eserver.org/issues/1993/05/nicolini.html. O'Hagan, Sean. "Another Green World." New Musical Express 24 Dec. 1988; reprinted in Platt. 116-24.

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Olliffe, Michael. "R.E.M. in Perth." On the Street, 17 Jan. 1995; reprinted in Platt. 174-82. Pemberton, Andy. "Michael Stipe: Cash for Questions." Q 152 May 1999. Platt, John. The R.E.M. Companion: Two Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998. Puterbaugh, Parke. "R.E.M. 's Southern Rock Revival." Rolling Stone 9 June 1983. 42+. "Quest for the Presidency." AP release, 19 Jan. 2001. For one source of the release, see http://quest.cjonline.com/stories/O 11901/gen 0119017809.shtml. R.E.M. Green. Warner Brothers, 1988. Includes "Pop Song 89."

--.Monster. Warner Brothers, 1994. Includes "Crush with Eyeliner," "King of Comedy." --.Murmur. IRS, 1983. Includes "9-9." --.New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Warner Brothers, 1996. Includes "Be Mine," "So Fast, So Numb" --.Out of Time. Warner Brothers, 1991. Includes "Losing My Religion." - - . Pop Screen. Video compilation. Warner Bothers, 1991. Includes "Finest Worksong," "It's the End of the World as We Know It," "Orange Crush," "Pop Song 89." --.Reckoning. IRS, 1984. Includes "Harborcoat," "Pretty Persuasion." --.Reveal. Warner Brothers, 2001. - - . This Film is On. Video compilation. Warner Brothers, 1991. Includes "Losing My Religion." R.E.M. Revealed: A Q Magazine Special Edition. 2001. Rogers, Ray. "Choosing his Religion." Out November 1995. 92+. Rose, Charlie. Interview with Michael Stipe. Transcript 2155, 7 May 1998. Rosen, Craig. R.E.M. Inside Out: The Stories Behind Every Song. Emeryville, CA: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1997. Sasfy, Joe. "Reckoning with R.E.M." Washington Post 10 May 1984; reprinted in Platt. 6-8. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

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Signorile, Michelangelo. Outing Yourself: How to Come Out as Lesbian or Gay to Your Family, Friends, and Coworkers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Simon, Joshua. "A Session with Michael Stipe." Life Special Issue: 40 Years of Rock & Rolli December 1992. 102-4. Sullivan, Denise. R.E.M: Talk about the Passion: An Oral History, updated edn. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. Sweeting, Adam. "Hot Nights in Georgia." Melody Maker 5 May 1984; reprinted in Platt. 27-28. Tillmans, Wolfgang. "Michael Stipe Non-Gay Queer Popstar from R.E.M. Collects Sugar Packets and was Devirginized at Seven." Butt 9, 2 Feb. 2004. http://www. buttmagazine.com/Issues/9 _Stipe.html.

Part II Sounds, Structures and Styles

[11] The melodic-harmonic 'divorce' in rock DAVID TEMPERLEY Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs St, Rochester, NY 14604, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Several authors have observed that rock music sometimes features a kind of independence or 'divorce' between melody and harmony. In this article, I examine this phenomenon more systematically than has been done in the past. A good indicator of melodic-harmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. 1 argue that this does occur frequently in rock - often with respect to the local harmony, and sometimes with respect to the underlying tonic harmony as well. This melodic-harmonic 'divorce' tends to occur in rather specific circumstances: usually in pentatonically based melodies, and in verses rather than choruses. Such situations could be said to reflect a 'stratified' pitch organisation. A particularly common situation is where the verse of a song features stratified organisation, followed by a chorus which shifts to a 'unified' organisation in which both melody and accompaniment are regulated by the harmonic structure.

Introduction The last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the study of the musical dimensions of rock and other kinds of popular music - dimensions such as harmony, tonality, rhythm, timbre and form. For the most part, this research has been what I would call analysis rather than theory. By 'analysis', I mean an intensive study of a particular song (or perhaps album or artist). By 'theory', I mean a more general study of the features and principles of a musical style. Of course, analysis and theory inform each other; we cannot understand a style without closely examining individual works. But we also cannot fully appreciate individual works without considering the norms and regularities of the style. This is not to say that the theory of rock has been entirely neglected- there have been some important contributions in this area (some of which are cited below); but the preponderance of work to date has been analytical in nature. 1 Notwithstanding the undoubted contributions of analytical studies, I believe a more complete understanding of rock will require a deeper investigation of the style itself. In this article, I present some ideas which I hope will contribute to the theory of rock. I focus on an aspect of rock harmony which is of particular interest, as it sets rock apart from many other genres of Western music. This is what has been referred to as the 'divorce' between melody and harmony. The term is due to Allan Moore (1995) who -along with several other authors -has noted that rock sometimes manifests an apparent independence or divergence between the melody and the harmonic structure. I will begin by considering- more precisely than has been done in the past- what

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Example 1. Deep Purple, 'Smoke on the Water', first half offirst verse. (This and all other transcriptions in the paper are my own, except where indicated otherwise. Measure numbers only refer to the passage shown.)

Example 2. The Who, 'Baba O'Reilly', first half of first verse.

a 'divorce' between harmony and melody would mean in the context of the Western musical tradition. I will then examine the ways that this divorce occurs in rock. To anticipate my argument, I will try to show that melodic-harmonic divorce in rock is not a wholesale abandonment of the usual coordination of melody and harmony, but is, rather, a highly constrained departure from that coordination which tends to occur in quite specific ways and conditions.

Melodic-harmonic divorce: four examples Examples 1-4 show four melodies from rock songs. These four songs exemplify certain general points I wish to make about melodic-harmonic divorce in rock. In presenting these points, it will be helpful to use another style as a point of reference, namely 'common-practice' music- Western art music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not to imply that common-practice music somehow occupies a 'central' or 'normative' place in the musical universe; but it is a style of music in which pitch organisation has been thoroughly studied and is quite well understood, so it provides a useful point of comparison. The first point to note about the passages in Examples 1-4 is that they have a clear harmonic structure. By this I mean that they are divided into short segments which are governed by harmonies. The harmonies are indicated above the staff in 'lead-sheet' fashion, indicating the root and quality of each chord. Following convention, a root-name alone indicates a major triad; a root-name plus 'm' indicates a minor

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Example 3. Elton John, 'Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting', first half of first verse.

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Example 4. Oasis, 'D'You Know What I Mean', first half of first verse.

Example 5. Pentatonic scales (in C): (A) major; (B) minor.

triad; a root-name plus '5' indicates a plain fifth. As is typical in rock, the harmonies are conveyed primarily by the instruments (mainly guitar and bass). The relationship of the vocal line to the harmonies will be discussed further below. The essentially harmonic character of rock is an important respect in which it is fundamentally similar to common-practice music, as well as many other vernacular styles of earlier periods (hymns, Victorian music-hall, ragtime, swing-era jazz) and today (country, middle-of-the-road pop, salsa, etc.). 2 In all of these styles, too, the fundamental harmonic building blocks are the same: major and minor triads, with occasional or sometimes frequent use of sevenths, diminished triads, and other secondary chords. Plain fifths - commonplace in rock - are much less common in most other harmonic styles. A second feature one might observe about Examples 1-4 is their scalar organisation. If we consider the melodies, we find that each one fits into a pentatonic scale (see Example 5). Examples 1, 3 and 4 use minor pentatonic scales (in G, G and F#, respectively); Example 2 uses an F major pentatonic scale. The concept of scalar organisation is, again, familiar from common-practice music. In common-practice music, the notes within a section of a piece tend to be drawn from a single diatonic (major or minor) scale - the scale of the current key. This is not to imply that all notes are drawn from the scale- there may be occasional 'chromatic' notes- but the

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c

c

E D

E

G

F

G

A

B

c

F G E~ E A~ A B~ B c~ D F~ Figure 1. A pitch framework for common-practice music, assuming a C major harmony in the context of C major (Lerdahl 2001). overwhelming majority are. 3 In rock, the situation is more complex. One sometimes finds sections or whole songs that seem organised around a scale, but in other cases the concept of a governing scale seems to have little relevance, an issue I will return to below. In any case, the use of a pentatonic scale seems clear enough for the melodies in Examples 1-4. In the case of common-practice music, we can think of harmonic and scalar structures as forming a two-levelled hierarchy of pitch organisation. A useful system for representing such hierarchies has been proposed by Lerdahl (2001). Lerdahl represents pitch systems as structures of 'alphabets', showing the twelve pitch-classes in terms of their stability or importance; I will call such a structure a 'pitch framework'. Figure 1 shows the pitch framework for the usual diatonic-harmonic system of common-practice music (assuming a C major chord in the key of C major). At the bottom level we have the chromatic scale, including all twelve pitch-classes. Above that, we have a scalar level- in common-practice music, this is generally a diatonic (major or minor) scale. Above that, we have the harmonic level, including the chordtones of whatever harmony is operative. The harmonic level of the framework shifts with every change of chord; the diatonic level shifts less often, only when there is a change of key. Lerdahl's frameworks generally include one further level, indicating just the root of the harmony, and sometimes an additional level indicating root and fifth. These higher levels- indicating distinctions between notes of the triad- are not essential for our purposes, and we omit them in what follows. In describing what it means for music to be 'harmonic', I said that it must be divided into segments, each one governed by a particular chord. Let us examine a bit more closely what this implies, focusing for the moment on common-practice music. It does not mean that the pitches of each chordal segment are restricted to the notes of the chord. One can find passages of music where this occurs, but they are not especially common. It means, rather, that notes not belonging to the chord - 'nonchord-tones'- are unstable, generally functioning as elaborations of the chord-tones, and are treated in restricted ways. One general rule that applies to the vast majority of non-chord-tones in common-practice music is that they 'resolve by step'- moving to another note that is a step away in the scale (either a minor second or major second, depending on the position in the scale). This applies, for example, to passing tones and neighbour tones, the most common kinds of non-chord tones in common-practice music (see Example 6); it applies also to appoggiaturas, incomplete neighbours, and suspensions. It does not apply to 'escape tones'- non-chord-tones which resolve by leap; but these are rare and generally confined to certain highly stylised situations. Consider Example 7 (practically any passage from common-practice music could be used to make this point); it can be seen that all notes that are not part of the current chord resolve by step to another note. In the case of theE in m. 4, the resolution is not to the immediately following G but rather to the F that follows.

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Su;,pcn'i(>n A

Example 6. Common types of non-chord tones (over a C major harmony).

Example 7. Mozart, Sonata K. 333, first movement, mm. 1-4. Non-chord-tones are marked with asterisks.

Let us examine whether the 'stepwise resolution' rule applies to the excerpts in Examples 1--4. There are numerous non-chord-tones- notes not part of the current chord- in each of the excerpts. The question is, do these non-chord-tones resolve by step? To answer this question about every note would require consideration of a number of technical issues which I do not intend to address here, as my argument does not really depend on them. (For example: Is the minor seventh above the roote.g. the F's in m. 1 of Example 1- a chord-tone or a non-chord-tone? And what about syncopated notes, like the A in m. 2 of Example 4: Should they be shifted to their 'unsyncopated' positions, or left as they are?) 4 However, there is one important point that requires attention, concerning the definition of a 'step'. We could define a step in diatonic terms- that is, a minor second or major second. By this criterion, we can find many non-chord tones that do not resolve by step, such as the Din m. 3 of Example 1, or the last F# in m. 2 of Example 4. (Notes referred to in this discussion are marked with arrows.) But this criterion might seem inappropriate, for we have already observed that the scalar organisation of these melodies is pentatonic, not diatonic. In light of this, it seems more logical to define a step as a move between adjacent notes on the pentatonic scale. For example, in a melody like Example 4, using the F# minor pentatonic (F#-A-B-C#-E), the move from F# to A would be considered a step; F# to B would still be a leap. Some notes that are not resolved stepwise by the diatonic criterion do resolve by the pentatonic criterion, such as the F# in m. 2 of Example 4 (which resolves to A). In several cases, however, non-chord tones are not resolved stepwise even in pentatonic terms. For example, the move from D to BIJ in m. 3 of Example 1 is a leap on the G minor pentatonic scale; in Example 3, the BIJ at the end of m. 3 (extending into m. 4) is at the end of the phrase and could not really be said to resolve at all. One might suggest that these melodies do obey the rule of stepwise resolution, but in a different way. It might be argued that the underlying harmony of the entire verse in these songs is really the tonic; the non-tonic harmonies in the accompaniment are just ornamental. There is no doubt that these verses are dominated by tonic harmony; in all cases the tonic harmony occurs at the beginning of the phrase, it

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c

E~

c

E~

c

G F

G

B~

F#

F E~ E G A~ A B~ B Figure 2. A 'pentatonic-harmonic' pitch framework (assuming a C minor harmony and a C minor pentatonic scale).

C#

D

Example 8. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, 'Refugee', first line of second verse.

generally occurs at metrically (or hypermetrically) accented positions, and in Example 1 it is further emphasised by occupying much more time than any other harmony. In such cases, one might say, the underlying framework (at least for the melodies) is really as shown in Figure 2: a pentatonic scalar level, with an unchanging tonic-triad harmony above it. This does, indeed, account for some of the unresolved non-chordtones in Examples 1-4. For example, the Bl' in mm. 3-4 of Example 3, a non-chord-tone of the surface F harmony, is a chord-tone of the underlying G harmony. But other cases are not accounted for even by this rule. The unresolved B in m. 1 of Example 4, which is not a chord-tone of the local harmony (A), is not part of the underlying tonic harmony (F#) either. In Example 2, the Din m. 3 is an unresolved non-chord-tone with respect to the underlying tonic harmony (F). It seems, in these melodies, that all of the notes of the pentatonic scale are treated as 'chord-tones'- stable tones that can be left by leap or can end a phrase without resolution. Example 8 shows another striking case: the Bat the end of the phrase- on 'round'- is unresolved, yet is not a chord-tone of the underlying tonic (F#) harmony, which in this case is the local harmony as well. I suggest, then, that the system of pitch organisation operative in these songs is fundamentally different from that of common-practice music. In our rock examples, the pitch organisation is stratified: there are different frameworks for the melody and accompaniment. The situation can be represented nicely using Lerdahl's 'alphabet' system, as shown in Figure 3. The accompaniment framework features a chordal level which shifts with each harmony. Most often, there is a scalar (pentatonic, majordiatonic or modal-diatonic) level underneath (though this might sometimes be debatable); I have shown a diatonic level in parentheses in Figure 3. 5 The melody framework features only a pentatonic scalar level, with no harmonic level. The melodies in Examples 1-4 seem quite independent of the local harmony, in that non-chord tones are frequently not resolved stepwise. One might argue that the melodies reflect some influence of the underlying tonic harmony, in that phrases tend to end on 1, 3(173) or 5, and other pentatonic degrees are usually resolved stepwise to those degrees. But in some cases, as shown above, stepwise resolution is not obeyed even with respect to the underlying tonic triad. 6

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Melody

c c

C#

D

c Accompaniment

E~

E

F

G F#

C#

D

E~

D

E~

G

B~ A~

A

B~

B

G

E~

(c c

F

E~

329

F E

F

F#

G

A~

G

A~

B) A

B~

B

Figure 3. A 'stratified' pitch organisation. The accompaniment framework features a diatonic scalar level and a changing harmonic level. The melody framework features a pentatonic scalar level, with no harmonic level.

Melodic-harmonic divorce: a broader view Having described melodic-harmonic divorce in a very specific way, we now take a somewhat broader view. In this section I discuss ways that other authors have treated melodic-harmonic independence in rock. I also discuss some variants of this phenomenon that are found in rock, beyond the specific usage described above. Finally, I consider the possible historical sources for melodic-harmonic divorce in rock, and its use in other styles. The independence between melody and harmony has been observed by several other authors as an important aspect of rock. Middleton cites this independence as a characteristic feature of the blues: 'Blues melody is harmonically conscious to the extent that it usually fits the chord when that is first sounded, but otherwise it is generally independently, and often pentatonically, inclined' (Middleton 1972, p. 36). He later observes similar tendencies in rock, particularly in the music of the early Beatles (ibid., pp. 167-74). Similarly, Moore first refers to the "'divorce" between melodic and surface harmonic schemes' in connection with the blues (Moore 1995, p. 189), but later notes the 'independence of melodic and harmonic patterns' in some rock songs as well (ibid., p. 189). Everett observes that 'a song may present nontriadic tones in a sty listie context that creates no expectation or desire for resolution' (Everett 2000, p. 315); elsewhere, he notes that such free treatment of non-chord tones is especially characteristic of pentatonic melodies (Everett 2001, p. 58). Stephenson also discusses melodic-harmonic independence in rock; in some cases, he states, 'certain pitches of the scale are treated as stable despite the harmonic context' (Stephenson 2002, p. 75). Everett makes an interesting point about the way we should regard melodicharmonic independence in rock. Even in cases where non-chord-tones are unresolved, he argues, 'that still does not make the embellishments stable' (Everett 2000, p. 315); rather, he suggests, the listener is meant to perceive and appreciate their unresolved tension. I would say that Everett is partly right. Certainly one should not conclude, from the presence of unresolved non-chord-tones in rock, that rock simply has no regard for melodic-harmonic coordination - that everything is stable and anything goes. Indeed, many rock songs and sections of songs do reflect a close coordination of melody and harmony, as I will discuss below. On the other hand, I do

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Example 9. Chuck Berry, 'Rock and Roll Music', first verse. Transcription from Stephenson (2002).

not entirely agree that unresolved non-chord-tones (for example, the B in m. 1 of Example 4) should be heard as unstable dissonances, either. Rather, I would argue, the listener senses in such situations that the adherence of the melody to the harmony has temporarily been suspended (and it may partly be the unresolved non-chord-tones that indicate this). Once this is established, we grant a certain freedom to the melody within that context, so that non-chord-tones may be left hanging without a strong sense of tension or incompleteness. 7 My focus on stepwise resolution of non-chord-tones as the test of melodicharmonic independence may seem pedantic. To my mind, however, this is crucial to distinguish the treatment of non-chord-tones in rock from that of common-practice music and other styles. Here I depart somewhat from other treatments of melodicharmonic independence, in particular Stephenson's (2002). In discussing the independence of melody from harmony, Stephenson gives the example of Chuck Berry's 'Rock and Roll Music' (see Example 9), noting that 'the lowered seventh scale degree [Din an E major context] is treated as stable whether the chord is I, IV, or V ... It is the highest note of the chorus, is repeated often, begins most of the vocal phrases (thus requiring no preparation), and occurs on strong beats: it cannnot be an embellishment' (Stephenson 2002, p. 75). I would argue here, however, that this particular note is not a good example of independence between melody and harmony. The D's in 'Rock and Roll Music' are always resolved stepwise, and could mostly be explained in quite conventional terms. For example, the D on the downbeat of m. 6 (over an A major harmony) could be considered an appoggiatura. The fact that the D's are melodic peaks and (in some cases) metrically strong is not decisive; embellishing tones are frequently accented by contour and metrical placement in common-practice music as well (for example, every downbeat of the melody in Example 7 is a nonchord-tone). The D's over the B harmony (and arguably theE harmony as well) could

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Wd!

i\5

w>~

ktqw

tin'

Example 10. Steve Miller Band, 'Rock'n'Me', first line of first verse.

Example 11. Rolling Stones, 'fumpin' Jack Flaslz', first verse.

be regarded as chord-tones. The C#'s in mm. 3 and 11 might be considered unresolved non-chord-tones, however. Stephenson goes on to give two other, more convincing, examples of melodic-harmonic independence - Soul Asylum's 'Runaway Train', and the Beatles' 'A Hard Day's Night'; the second of these will be discussed further below. Having said this, I do not wish to insist that 'non-stepwise-resolution of nonchord-tones' should be the sole criterion for melodic-harmonic divorce. Certainly, there are cases where one feels that the melody is detached from the surface harmony, even when pentatonic stepwise resolution is maintained. In m. 3 of Example 10, for example, we find six non-chord-tones in a row with respect to the local AS harmony (G#-B-G#-F#-D#-D#). We could consider them all to be resolved stepwise- each one moves to an adjacent note on the B major pentatonic scale (or to a repetition, in the case of the first D#). But to have six non-chord-tones in a row, even resolved ones, is highly unusual in other harmonic styles (e.g. common-practice music). The feel of this phrase is that the vocal is freely traversing the pentatonic scale without much regard for the underlying chord changes. Consider also m. 2 of Example 11, where we find a repeated non-chord-tone Dl' over an AI'S harmony (with a Bl' pedal in the bass). We could quibble about whether such repetitions constitute a lack of resolution; but even if they do not, such insistent reiteration of a non-chord-tone is clearly unlike nonchord-tone treatment in common-practice music, and gives a sense that the melody is essentially independent of the harmony. In short, I do not argue that we can only claim melodic-harmonic independence in cases where stepwise resolution is violated; it is just that such cases seem particularly decisive.

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Example 12. Sousa, 'The Washington Post' (after van der Merwe 1989, p. 231).

One might wonder what the origins are for melodic-harmonic divorce in rock. Some authors have noted a tendency towards independence between melody and harmony in earlier styles of Western music. Vander Merwe observes this with regard to 'parlour music'- middle-class popular music in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America; in much music of this period, he suggests, 'we see melodic patterns beginning to assert their independence over harmonic ones' (Vander Merwe 1989, p. 226). In a tune such as Sousa's 'The Washington Post' (Example 12), we find unresolved A's over G7 harmony, and then over C major; in this case, van der Merwe argues, 'the emancipation [of melody from harmony] is complete' (ibid., p. 231). 8 In my view, however, the case for such melodies as examples of melodic-harmonic independence is doubtful, or at least not yet proven. I would favour the more traditional explanation for such cases, which is that they represent an expansion of the harmonic vocabulary: the A's over G7 represent dominant ninths, and the A's over C major represent added sixths. This does, of course, expand the range of possible melody notes over each harmony; but not everything is possible. We might find tonic chords with (unresolved) added sixths, but hardly ever with added fourths. By contrast, one does find unresolved 'added fourths' in rock: see Example 8 above and Example 22 below. Similarly, Winkler (1978) points to clashes between melody and harmony in ragtime and big-band jazz; in such cases, he argues, the melody is really elaborating the 'background' tonic harmony, independently of the foreground chord changes. But as I have shown, this explanation is not convincing in the case of rock; there, we find unresolved dissonances even in relation to the background tonic harmony. I would argue- following Middleton (1972, pp. 35-7) and Moore (1995, p. 189)that the roots of melodic-harmonic divorce in rock lie in another source: the blues. The association of melodic-harmonic divorce with the minor pentatonic, in itself, points in the direction of the blues, since rock's pentatonicism comes mainly from this source. Many blues songs, indeed, feature a kind of melodic-harmonic independence similar to what we find in rock. In particular, as noted by Titon (1994, p. 157), it is commonplace for the first two phrases of a blues verse to be melodically the same, even though the harmonies change. In some cases, as Middleton observes, all three melodic phrases are essentially the same. Example 13 gives an example, from Muddy Waters' 'Rollin' and Tumblin". The melody seems relatively detached from the harmony; the second melodic phrase repeats the first, despite the changing harmonic context. This leads to conspicuous clashes, notably the E-G-E over aD harmony in m. 8; notice also the unresolved A over E harmony in m. 13. 9 Given this precedent in the blues, we might also expect to find evidence of melodic-harmonic divorce in other styles that reflect strong blues influence, and this is certainly the case. In much Motown and early soul music, one finds a kind of independence between melody and harmony which is quite similar to that characteristic ofrock and blues. Consider the melody in Example 14, from Percy Sledge's 'When

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Example 13. Muddy Waters, 'Rollin' & Tumblin" (1950 version), first verse.

Example 14. Percy Sledge, 'When a Man Loves a Woman', first half offirst verse.

a Man Loves a Woman'. Despite the differences between this melody and those in Examples 1-4- there is considerably greater rhythmic freedom here, and a wider melodic range - the commonalities are also striking. Here, as in the rock melodies, there is a strong pentatonic basis, specifically a Dl> major pentatonic scale. Both the first and third phrases end on Bl>, clashing with both the local harmony (AI> major in the first phrase, Dl> major in the third) and the underlying tonic triad; note also the leap from Dl> in m. 4, over an F minor harmony. In short, while we are focusing in this paper on rock in a fairly narrow sense of the term, the phenomenon of melodicharmonic divorce as I have defined it here may have relevance to a much wider domain of popular music. One aspect of melodic-harmonic divorce that we need to consider a bit further is scale organisation. As noted above, this is a very problematic issue in rock generally. Many rock songs appear to remain consistently within a single scale: a pentatonic

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Example 15. U2, 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', first half of second verse.

Example 16. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, 'Taking Care of Business', first line of first verse.

scale, a major diatonic scale, or one of the other diatonic modes (especially Mixolydian, Dorian and Aeolian). However, other songs do not seem to reflect any clear scalar organisation. In many cases, a song or section of a song seems to be organised around a pattern of harmonies (usually major triads) which may not be contained in any conventional scale; we will consider examples of this below. 10 In situations of melodic-harmonic divorce, one most often finds a pentatonic scale used in the melody. However, this phenomenon can also occur with other scales. In Example 15, we find a diatonic melody using the B Aeolian scale. The melody seems to be more or less independent of the changing harmonies underneath; the A-F# at the end of the passage clashes with the G major harmony. Another common situation is illustrated by the melody in Example 16. I would consider this an essentially pentatonic melody, using part of the C minor pentatonic scale Br-C-Er, with the C-Er interval elaborated by a passing-tone D; such diatonic 'filling-in' of a pentatonic framework is commonplace in rock. Here again, the C-Er alternation in m. 2 clashes conspicuously with the underlying Br chord. The topic of scale organisation, as well as the topic of blues influence, brings us to another problematic issue in the study of rock: 'blue notes'. Blue notes are pitch categories, found in blues, jazz, and other styles influenced by them, which in some way 'fall between the cracks' of conventional chromatic-scale categories. In particular, several scholars have argued for the existence of tones that are in between the major and minor third scale-degrees, and in between the major and minor seventh (see Borneman 1960; Middleton 1972, pp. 35-9; Titon 1994; Weisethaunet 2001). The whole area of blue notes awaits systematic study (in terms of both acoustic measurements and perceptual judgements), and we can say little more about it here, except to observe that the kind of 'free-pentatonic' melody that is associated with melodicharmonic divorce is a frequent location for blue notes. From examples cited above, I could point to the D#'s in m. 3 of Example 10 (on 'tougher') which actually sound to me like a cross between D and D#, or the Dr at the end of Example 11 (on 'rain') which seems halfway between Dr and D. Again, we can do little about blue notes for now except to acknowledge them as a major unresolved issue in the study of rock pitch organisation. 11

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Example 17. Deep Purple, 'Smoke on the Water', chorus.

Example 18. Oasis, 'D'You Know What I Mean', chorus.

The 'loose-verse/tight-chorus' model The reader may have noted that almost all of the passages from rock songs discussed so far have been verses. Examples 17-19 shows the choruses for three of the songs discussed above: 'Smoke on the Water', 'D'You Know What I Mean', and 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' (the verses are shown in Examples 1, 4 and 11, respectively). It can be seen that these choruses feature quite a different kind of pitch organisation from their verses. In particular, the coordination between melody and harmony is now much closer. Whereas the verse melodies contain clear violations of' stepwise resolution', as well as sequences of several consecutive non-chord-tones, these indications of melodic-harmonic divorce are conspicuously absent in the choruses. Every note is either a chord-tone of the current chord, or is resolved by step; sequences of several non-chord-tones in a row are likewise avoided. The one exception is the 'yeah yeah' phrase in Example 18. As opposed to the 'stratified' organisation of the verses discussed earlier, these choruses reflect what we could call a 'unified' pitch organisation: both the accompaniment and melody are closely regulated by the harmonic structure. The scalar organisation of these chorus melodies also offers an interesting contrast with their verses. As discussed earlier, the verse melodies of these three songs are all pentatonic. While the chorus melody in Example 18 is pentatonic, the melodies of Examples 17 and 19 clearly are not. Indeed, one might well argue that these sections are not really organised around any scale. The harmonic progressions in Examples 17 and 19- which, as noted above, govern both melody and accompaniment- do not fit within any diatonic or pentatonic set. In Lerdahl's terms, arguably, we have just a 'chordal level' here with no underlying scalar level at all. 12 This in itself is an interesting and common phenomenon in rock; to explore it further, however, would take us too far afield.

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Example 19. Rolling Stones, 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', chorus. Table. Some well-known songs reflecting the 'loose-verse I tight-chorus' model.

Song

Artist

'A Hard Day's Night' 'Drive My Car' 'Taxman' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' 'Somebody to Love' 'Born to be Wild' 'Smoke on the Water' 'Come Together' 'Tumbling Dice' 'Woodstock' 'We're an American Band' 'LongTime' 'Riding the Storm Out' 'Jungle Love' 'Back in Black' 'Walking on the Moon' 'F.I.N.E.' 'Mr. Brownstone' 'Come as you Are' 'No Excuses' 'Einstein on the Beach' 'D'You Know What J Mean' 'You Ought a Know'

Beatles Beatles Beatles Rolling Stones Jefferson Airplane Steppenwolf Deep Purple Beatles Rolling Stones Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Grand Funk Railroad Boston REO Speedwagon Steve Miller Band AC/DC Police Aerosmith Guns N' Roses Nirvana Alice in Chains Counting Crows Oasis Alanis Morissette

The fact that the verses to these songs reflect a stratified organisation (with pentatonic melody), while the choruses reflect a unified organisation, is no coincidence; for this is a very common situation in rock songs. The Table lists a number of songs in which this same situation occurs. In all of these cases, we find a pentatonic (or predominantly pentatonic) verse melody over a chordal accompaniment, often with some clashes (e.g. non-chord-tones not resolved by step) between the melody and the accompaniment harmonies. In the chorus, the melody and the accompaniment reflect a more tightly coordinated harmonic organisation, with all non-chord-tones properly resolved. This, then, is a particularly favoured strategy for the construction of rock songs; I will call it the 'loose-verse/ tight-chorus' (L VTC) model. If I am right that the LVTC model is a common pattern in rock, this raises a further question: what purpose does this strategy serve? I would argue that it conveys

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a very basic expressive message: a contrast between unity and individual freedom. The verse signifies individuality by giving relative independence to the parts of the ensemble, and particularly to the vocal line (and by extension to the vocalist), which is able to wander rather freely along the scale without being tied to moment-to-moment harmonic changes. Along with individuality is the connotation of spontaneity and free expression; the lack of harmonic constraint allows the vocalist to express themselves in a natural and direct fashion. In the chorus, the parts of the ensemble - the vocal and the accompanying instruments- 'come together', as it were, under the unifying guidance of the harmonic structure. This signifies coordination, unity of purpose, and also the more planned and deliberate mode of action that coordination requires. The unified spirit of the chorus is also indicated, in many cases, by the addition of other vocals to the melody, either singing in unison or in harmony; we find this in 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', for example. This contrast between unity and individuality is expressed by music of many kinds in different ways. Consider, for example, the contrast between the solo and the ripieno group in a Baroque concerto, which has been seen to be emblematic of the tension between the individual and society (McClary 1987); or the contrast between homophonic and contrapuntal textures that is a hallmark of the classical period. This issue has also been raised, with regard to rock (and heavy metal in particular), by Walser (1993), in an analysis of Van Halen's 'Running with the Devil'. In general, Walser argues, heavy metal expresses a dialectic between controlled, collective action and individual freedom. Freedom is signified by the singer and lead guitarist, and by the sections in which they predominate, the verses and the guitar solo; control is signified by the rhythm section, and also by the choruses. Walser argues that 'Running with the Devil' is unusual in that the guitar riff, with its surprising harmonic twists, portrays both control and freedom - thus encapsulating the usual function of the riff and the solo all at once. While I find Walser's analysis quite compelling, I would simply add that the phenomenon of melodic-harmonic divorce, and in particular the LVTC model, adds another important aspect to the contrast between individual freedom and controlled unity, though not an aspect that is particularly apparent in 'Running with the Devil'. In several cases, my interpretation of the expressive meaning of the LVTC pattern receives strong lyrical support. The Beatles' 'Come Together' is a simple example: the chorus lyric, 'Come together I right now I over me', expresses the idea of unity with particular clarity. In 'D'You Know What I Mean', too, the introspective loneliness of the verse lyrics (Example 4) contrasts starkly with the communal feeling of the chorus (Example 18). A more subtle example is Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 'Woodstock'. The song tells the story of someone who comes across a 'child of God' on his way to Woodstock and accompanies him, joining a multitude that is eventually 'half a million strong'. The overall sense of the song, then, is of many individuals uniting in a spirit of peace and togetherness. This is beautifully depicted in the contrast between the verse - with a solo vocal line moving rather freely over the changing harmonies- and the chorus, especially the words 'got to get ourselves', in which the three vocal lines and the instruments come together in perfect coordination (Example 20). The Beatles' 'A Hard Day's Night' illustrates an interesting use of the LVTC model (Example 21). The song reflects an 'AABAABA' form, a common form in early rock: there is no real chorus, though each A section ends with the line 'will make me feel all right' (or something similar), which could loosely be considered a 'refrain'. As

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Example 20. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 'Woodstock', second line of chorus.

Example 21. The Beatles, 'A Hard Day's Night', first verse.

Stephenson (2002, pp. 75-6) notes, the first part of the A section offers two nice examples of melodic-harmonic independence - the D over the C harmony in the second half of m. 1 and the Dover F major in m. 3 (see also Middleton 1972, p. 170). In scalar terms, one could analyse mm. 1-8 of this melody as 'Mixolydian', or simply as an elaboration of the dominant-seventh G-B-D-F, a typical pattern for early rock'n'roll. 13 Fromm. 9 onwards, however, the melody seems to be closely regulated by the harmony. I would argue that this represents an early, and quite subtle, instance of the LTVC model. Even within this short twelve-measure verse-refrain section (harmonically based on a blues pattern), we find a contrast between the first two four-measure phrases- in which the harmony and melody are relatively independent - and the third phrase, in which a more unified pitch organisation is found. Perhaps this expresses the contrast between the individual going it alone in the cruel world of daily work ('It's been a hard day's night, and I've been working like a dog') and the romantic togetherness of the night-time ('But when I get home to you, I know the things that you do will make me feel all right'). The B section of the song- 'When I'm home, everything seems to be right'- also reflects close melodic-harmonic coordination. More generally, 'A Hard Day's Night' illustrates how the stratified I unified contrast can be used to convey a shift between unity and individuality even within a single short section of a song; this possibility is exploited in interesting ways in other songs as well, as I hope to show in future work. A final, witty, example of the LVTC idea is shown in Example 22- the Beatles' 'Drive my Car'. The verse would seem to be a clear-cut example of melodic-harmonic divorce - though an extraordinary one. While the harmonies of the verse move between D major and G major and then to A7 in m. 7, the melody obstinately reiterates

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G

339

f)

Example 22. The Beatles, 'Drive My Car', first verse and chorus.

a single note, G. The lower vocal line does follow the chords, and to some extent serves to reconcile the upper melody with the harmony (suggesting a Dmll chord); but the clash between melody and harmony is still striking. In the chorus, the melody breaks out of its solipsistic obsession and joins the ensemble, presenting a clear arpeggiation of the Bm7 and G7 harmonies. It is hard to argue that the verse melody signifies 'individual freedom' here (except perhaps freedom to be obsessive), but it does represent a detachment or conflict between the elements of the ensemble which makes the unity of the chorus all the more satisfying. In this article, I have put forth some general observations about pitch organisation in rock music, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of melodic-harmonic 'divorce' or independence. I have suggested that a good indicator of melodicharmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. Such unresolved non-chord-tones do indeed occur frequently in rock- even if we define a 'step' in pentatonic rather than diatonic terms; they occur often in relation to the local harmony, and sometimes even in relation to the underlying tonic harmony. Such situations could be said to reflect a 'stratified' pitch organisation. Most often, stratified pitch organisation involves a pentatonic melody, and it normally occurs in verses of songs rather than choruses. A particularly common situation is where the verse of a song features stratified organisation, followed by a chorus which shifts to a 'unified' organisation in which both melody and accompaniment

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David Temperley

are regulated by the harmonic structure. This strategy could be seen to express a tension between individual freedom (represented by the verse) and coordinated unity (represented by the chorus). In the course of this discussion of melodic-harmonic divorce, I have touched on a number of other issues - each of which deserves much fuller consideration than I have given it here. As mentioned several times, scalar organisation is a particularly thorny topic: to what extent are we justified in positing scalar structures in rock, and how do we make sense of those situations where we cannot? The whole issue of blue notes also needs investigation: how and where do blue notes arise, and are they especially associated with 'free-pentatonic' vocal passages? What about the nature of melodic-harmonic independence in the blues and in other popular genres besides rock- do these styles reflect similar patterns of usage, or quite different ones? Many issues await our exploration as we pursue a deeper understanding of the musical language of rock.

Endnotes 1. Some of the many recent analytical studies of rock include Whiteley (1990), Walser (1993), Hawkins (1996), Wagner (2003), Everett (2004), and many of the essays in Covach and Boone (1997), Everett (2000), and Holm-Hudson (2002). Several studies of a more theoretical nature are cited below. The distinction between 'analytical' and 'theoretical' studies is of course an over-simplification- analytical studies may have some theoretical content, and vice versa; but the distinction is still a useful one. 2. Not all of the world's musical styles have been harmonic: Those that are not include Western medieval plainchant, Indian classical music, and Javanese gamelan. 3. For evidence on the distribution of scale-degrees in common-practice music, see Temperley (2004, p. 181). 4. Regilrding syncopiltion: in my discussion of rock in Temperley (2001, pp. 255-6), I argued that, for the purposes of harmonic analysis, notes should be shifted to their unsyncopated positions - the positions at which they are understood to 'belong'. Some apparent nonchord-tones in Examples 1-4 then become chord-tones. For example, the Bb on 'shore' in Example 1 would be shifted to the right by one eighth-note; it then becomes a chord-tone of G Ininor. Hovvever, other unresolved nonchord-tones discussed here ca1mot plausibly be 'explained away' as syncopations. Another issue concerns repeated notes: If a non-chord-tone is followed by a repetition of itself, should that be considered a failure of resolution? Probably, this should be considered a deferral of the resolution; resolution may then occur if the line eventuillly moves by step to another pitch (this issue will arise in some later examples). 5. With regard to the accompaniments in Examples 1-4, the situation is varied and not always clear-cut. Example 2 is clearly diatonic, and

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Example 4 is pentatonic; Examples 1 and 3 could be described as diatonic, but neither one uses a complete diatonic scale. A more nuanced Lerdahlian analysis would perhaps include a 'weak' tonic-triad level in the melodic framework, indicating that the melodies still reflect some awareness of this level but are not totally constrained by it. Everett's own coTnTnents seeTn to ref1ect so1ne ambivalence about this issue. As quoted above, he argues that unresolved embellislunents are not 'stable', yet states that they create 'no expectation or desire for resolution'. But one might argue that instability is the creation of a desire for resolution. In this example, one could possibly argue that the A's resolve by step toG's, butin some of van der Merwe's other examples this is clearly not the Cilse; in his Example 9R, for example, we have an unresolved I3 over C major. See Headlam 1997 for a valuable discussion of the various treatments of this song by Muddy Waters and his collaborators and later by Cream. Headlam suggests that the verse of 'Rollin' and Tumblin" begins with a TV chord (D), but in the recording transcribed here, the first chord of each verse is I (A). For other discussions of scalar organisation in rock, see Moore (2001) and Stephenson (2002). A somewhat different understanding of 'blue note' is proposed by Wagner (2003), who defines the term to mean flattened degrees- in pilrticular, 1,3 and b7 - used in a miljor-mode context. For example, in the Beatles' 'The Word', b3 in the melody clashes with natural-3 in the accompaniment. This, too, could be seen to reflect a kind of divorce between melody and harmony, or at least between melody and accompaniment; in the first phrase of 'The Word', both accompaniment and melody are governed by the same root (D), but by major and minor versionB of the chord, respectively.

Rock Music

The melodic-harmonic 'divorce' in rock 12. One could also regard these progressions as diatonic with altered chords; for example, 'Smoke on the Water' could be seen as Phrygian with an altered IV. 13. Other examples of this 'elaborated dominantseventh' model are seen in Bill Halev & the Comets' 'Rock around the Clock' and Chuck

225

341

Berry's 'Rock and Roll Music' (Example 9). This model mav reflect an indirect blues influence, given the icalar 1,7, though this particular scalar formation is not characteristic of real blues, which normally reflects a minor pentatonic scale. Notice the trace of the minor pentatonic in mm. 11-12 of'A Hard Day's Night', however.

References Bomeman, E. 1960. 'The roots of jazz'. In Jazz, ed. N. Hentoff and A. McCarthy (New York, Grove Press), pp. 1-20 Covach, J., and Boone, G.M. (eds.) 1997. Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (Oxford, Oxford University Press) Everett, W. (ed.) 2000. Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection ofCriticial and Analytical Essays (New York, Garland Publishing, Inc.) Everett, W. 2000. 'Confessions from Blueberry Hell, or, pitch can be a sticky substance', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Criticial and Analytical Essays, ed. W. Everett (New York, Garland Publishing, Inc.), pp. 269-435 2001. The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarrymen through Rubber Soul (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 2004. 'A royal scam: the abstruse and ironic bop-rock harmony of Steely Dan', Music Theory Spectrum, 26, pp. 201-35 Hawkins, S. 1996. 'Perspectives in popular musicology: music, Lennox and meaning in 1990s pop', Popular Music, 15, pp. 17-36 Holm-Hudson, K. (ed.) 2002. Progressiv.youtube.com. r A survey of tonal systems in rock music, comprising major, minor, modal, mixed, triad-doubled pentatonic, and chromatic systems, is given in Everett (2004).

pattern is typically the most consistent clement among versions of a song by different artists, along with a generalized rhythmic and melodic profile, the specific details of which might vary between versions, perf(xmances, or even verses. The aspects of timbre and texture that render specific recordings of songs so immediately recognizable are essential components of the received texts, and often of the pcrfiJrmers' idiolects in general, but are not essential components of the songs as compositional texts. I make this claim not to argue fiJr the primacyr of the pitch domain in popular music, but rather to justifY the essentially formalist orientation of this study and its focus on chord patterns. Harmony in rock has been described by several commentators as less directional or functional than in conventional tonality, which is due in no small part to the prevalence of pentatonic, modal, and blues-based structures, and the corresponding lack of a leading tone in many styles, deriving from their roots in both the blues and the modal-folk rcvival 2 Related factors include the tendency of large-scale structures to be cyrclic rather than goaldirected, and the textural divergence that Allan Moore and more recently David Tempcrley have called the "melodic-harmonic divorce."3 In many instances, however, melody and harmony can be analytically reconciled through rhythmic regularization or an expanded conception of "chord tone," encompassing traditional added notes (seconds, fourths, sixths, and sevenths) and extensions (ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths). These nontriadic tones have more complex ratios with the chord root and are thus more acoustically dissonant than triad members. Nonetheless, in many vernacular genres-including blues, jazz, and rock-non triadic tones are not unstable by definition, in the sense that stylistic constraints require their resolution; common-practice rules of voice-leading and dissonance treatment do not necessarily apply. The relative tension and stability of scale degrees and chord structures in a given song arc defined by their immediate harmonic and melodic context against a background ofbroader stylistic conventions. For example, a dominant-seventh chord in a 2 See Stephenson (2002, 113-14), Carter (2005), and Bji:)rnberg (2007, 275). 3 See :Moore (1995, 189) and Temperley (2007).

228

Rock Music MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM J2

(zoro)

Tin Pan Alley song is likely to resolve, while a dominant-seventh chord in the blues might function as the tonic. The distinction between acoustic dissonance and contextual instability reflects a more general one between dissonance-as-identity and dissonance-as-behavior.4 In rock music, both types of dissonance are contextual to some degree, since acoustic dissonance is afiE:cted by timbre, and can be increased through the use of distortion until intervals at the consonant end of the continuum, such as thirds, are perceived as dissonant. Scholarship to date has explored several interpretive paradigms for pitch relationships in rock music: theories of har-

VI

monic function, 5 scale degree, 6 root motion/linear motion, 8 and neo-Riemannian transformations. 9 Each of these methodologies can provide some understanding of harmonic or melodic behaviors in rock music, but scale-degree theory (which associates characteristic behaviors with chords based on the scale degree of their roots) and harmonic-function theory (which groups chords that behave similarly into larger categories) prove most useful for generalizing about chord patterns. 10 In many cases, chord hierarchy and function are established or clarified by other musical parameters such as phrase structure, hypermeter, rhythm, texture, consonance, and contour. In his article on harmonic functionality, Eytan Agmon categorized the diatonic triads on the basis of their common tones and positions relative to the tonic, generating a diatonic-third cycle, shown in Example l(a) 11 The functions of tonic, dominant, and subdominant are mapped onto three overlapping semicircles; the prototype for each category is the encircled primary triad. The remaining triads each participate in two function categories: III as tonic or dominant and VI as tonic or subdominant, both of which are

I,i

vi, 'VI

iii, ~III

V,v

IV,iv n,n

4 For more on this topic see Kopp (1995) and (2002, 5-8). 1 Doll (2007, 1-27). Doll's theory of harmonic function is based on predictive stepwise voice-leading resolutions. 6 1\Ioorc (1992) and Everett (2009, 214-301). :Moore's modal taxonomy of harmonic patterns requires an elaborate system of categories and the assignment of a single governing mode to each pattern. 7 Sec Stephenson (2002, 102--DS) and Carter (2005). Theories of root motion are typically predicated on a binary opposition of' '"""'''e'';"" retrogression (descending fifths and thirds and seconds versus ascending fifths and thirds and descending seconds) that reflects no chord hierarchy, despite the dear tonics established in many, if not most, songs. 8 Schenkerian techniques have been adapted in essays by \Valter Everett, Lori Burns, and other authors, in Covach and Boone (1997), Everett (2008), and other works. Schenkerian paradigms oflinear motion are potentially powerful explicators of melody, but presume a concern for voiceleading and counterpoint often absent fl-om the harmony layer, especially when it is iterated by rhythm guitar rather than keyboard (see l\1oore [2001, 59-60], for a discussion of the differences between keyboard-based and guitar-based compositional harmony and voice-leading). 9 Capuzzo (2004). Neo-Riemannian transfOrmations are most applied to post-1990 alternative genres, which favor chromatic thirds other cross-relations. ro Tymoczko (2003) explores and compares the explanatory power of three of these paradigms, root-motion, scale-degree, and harmonic-function theories, as applied to harmonic motion in Bach chorales. n Agmon (1995, 199-202).

'n, n' EXAMPLE r(B).

~VII,'vii

Harmonic function.\

of modal triadr;

familiar ideas from Riemann's Vereinfachte Harmonie!ehre, and VII and II as dominant or subdominant, which have precedents in Daniel Harrison's theory of harmonic function, as each contains both dominant- and subdominant-functioning scale degrees. 12 In practice, non-primary triads might express either of their hvo potential functions, or aspects of both. Agmon's examples of dominant-functioning supcrtonics arc not convincing-most analysts would probably label them neighbor chords-and no example of a subdominant-functioning leadingtone triad is given. However, if the sub tonic triad is incorporated into the model, as in Example l(b), its dual potential function in rock music as dominant or subdominant, discussed further below, is neatly explained, as are the roles of ~II as both a subdominant-functioning Neapolitan and a dominant-functioning tritone substitute, and the similar dual roles of Lydian II'. 12

See Harrison (1994, Chapter 2, especially 50-55 and 60-66).

Rock Music

229 97

TRIADIC MODAL AND PENTATONIC PATTERNS IN ROCK MUSIC

Artist, Title (Year), Formal Section

Mode

Progression

Function

The Doors, "The End" ( 1967), A section

Mixolydian

1-bVII

T-D

Steppenwol f, "Born to be Wild" ( 1968), chorus

Mixolydian

1-bVll

T-D

J.J. Cale, "Cocaine'' (1976), verse

Mixolydian

1-bVTT

T-D

Grateful Dead, "Fire on the Mountain" ( 1978)

Mixolydian

1-bVll

T-D

The Doors, "Break on Through" (1967)

Aeolian

i- 'VTT

T-D

Black Sabbath, "Paranoid" ( 1970), verse

Aeolian

i-bVll-i

T-D-T

Deep Purple, "Child in Time" (1970)

Aeolian

bVll-i I 'Vl-bVll

R.E.M., ''The One I Love" (1987), A section

Aeolian

17_bynsus2_j7

D-T I S-D T-D-T

Santana, "Evil Ways" (1969)

Dorian

i-lV

T-S

The Doors, "Riders on the Storm" ( 1971 ), main riff

Dorian

i-IV-i7-IV

T-S-T-S

Styx, "Renegade" ( 1978), verse

Dorian

C-IV~

T-S

Pink Floyd, "Another Brick in the Wall" (1979), verse

Dorian

i-lV

T-S

Grateful Dead, "Brokedown Palace" (1970), refrain

(Lydian)

J-Ill'-I V-1-11'

T-D-S-T-D

EXAMPLE 2.

Modal progressions with conventional tonalfunctions

In Example 1(b), I have expanded the model to include these diatonic modal triads, adjusted the notation to reflect triad qualities, and reversed the positions of the dominant and subdominant areas to align with the traditional flat and sharp sides of the circle of fifths. Tonics contain scale-degree i and/or some form of 3, subdominants contain :fi)fms of 4 and/or 6, the adjacencies above and below the dominant degree 5, and dominants contain forms of 7 and/or 2, the adjacencies above and below the tonic degree i. 13 Doll has observed that in pentatonic systems, in which the two sizes of scale step are major second and minor third, the adjacencies above and below the tonic that suggest dominant function could also be ~3 or 6; 14 similarly, the adjacencies surrounding the dominant are 3 and /!. Pentatonic structures are explored in greater detail in a later section of this article. In distinction to the focus of this study, a large percentage of pop-rock music is conventionally to nail ')-particularly that of the 1950s and early 1960s, and particularly in genres better described as pop than rock, which are more likely to follow classical models of voice leading. Since the diatonic major system can serve as both a statistical and historical norm, Roman numerals in my examples are shown in relation to major. A valid criticism of this notation is that it symbolizes the flat-side triads ~III, ,VI, and ~VII as nondiatonic, although in the repertory under consideration these chords are at least as normative as their diatonic counterparts-in the case of ~VII, significantly more so. Indeed, the use of flat-side triads has been a harmonic code for rock since the late 1960s. Nonetheless, I have adopted this notation q Ibid. '4 Doll (2007, 23-24). 15 On this sec Everett (2004, §3).

1

because it seems the clearest of available systems, requires the least explication, and is in the widest current use. Triad qualities are signified by upper- and lower-case for major and minor, 0 and + for diminished and augmented, and superscript 5 for power chordsY" Jazz-chart symbols are used for chord extensions and alterations. As suggested by the diagram in Example 1(b), many modal progressions can be explained in conventionally tonal terms, especially those in the Mixolydian, Dorian, and Aeolian modes, which have a long tradition of folk-music harmonizations and are the modes closest to major and minor. Example 2 presents a selection of simple characteristic progressions in each mode (many consisting of the tonic and one other chord), and their tonal functions. 17 In the first two categories of Example 2, the subtonic most typically functions as a dominant. The replacement of the leading tone with the subtonic, and the neighboring position of the chord root, creates a flattened affect, expressing primarily dominant function but also embodying subdominant aspects, as reflected in Example 1(b). The Dorian major IV often serves its common tonal function of a plagal upper neighbor to 16 Power chords are normative vertical structures in hard rock and heavy metal: open fifths or, less commonly, fourths, often with octave doubling. These chords arc a consequence of the heavy usc of distortion, an overloading of the signal through an amplifier, which increases the overall complexity of the sound wave and in particular the audibility of the upper partials. Distortion renders chord thirds dissonant because the overtones intermodulate to create sum and difference tones unrelated to the original fundamental; also, a major third is often audibly present as the fifth overtone, but at a frequency dissonant with a sounded major third. q These examples are discussed in greater detail in Biamonte, "Modal Function in Rock and l\Ictal" (fOrthcoming).

230

Rock Music MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM 32

(zoro) b. doubk authentiC

the tonic. Other instances of the chord progressions shown in this example can be readily found in rock music. By contrast, the Lydian mode is rare in rock practice-as it has always been in art music-and is usually expressed as an inflection of the supertonic, rather than as a diatonic modality.

D_____,__S_____,__T

S _____,__D_____,__T

(S

·T)

(D

~Vll IV

lV

11

I)

(V: V

·T)

c. blues cadence D

·S

~T

In the Grateful Dead's gospel-tinged "Brokedown Palace," the

progression in the first half of the refrain ends on a major II chord, which occupies the normal position of a dominant. I hear it as a substitute dominant that oH""ers the "wrong" leading tone, to scale-degree ~ instead of to i. There is no V chord in the

(IVc

body of the song; all the cadences are plagal. The Phrygian and Locrian modes are also rare in rock practice, although they are quite common in heary metal. 18

EXAMPLE 3(A-c).

Having surveyed some simple two-chord modal progressions, I shall move on to more complex patterns of three chords, before examining larger tonal structures. This section of the article surveys in theory and practice a pair ofbriefharmonic progressions that serve as stylistic markers of classic rock and behave in very similar ways: the double-plagal progression, (I)fVII-IV-I, and the Aeolian cadence or progression, (I)-fVIfVII-1.19 Both patterns can be analyzed as modal or modally inflected harmonic progressions, repeated root motions, or chordal realizations of essentially linear structures. These interpretations are considered in greater detail below. A basic version of the double-plagal progression, fVII-IV-I, is shown in Example 3(a). It can be interpreted as diatonic to the Mixolydian mode, as an instance of major-minor mixture, or more simply as a chromatic inflection of major. 20 The progression is often expressed as two descending-fourth root motions, which can be construed as a retrogressive inversion of the conventional tonal descending-fifth progression II-V-I, shown in Example 3(b). Although redolent of the mythical "undertone series," the symmetry of this construct is nonetheless appealing. The successive descending-semitone resolutions B,-A and F-E in Example 3(a) are mirrored by the successive leading-tone resolutions FII-G and B-C in Example 3(b). It is possible to hear the subtonic as functioning differently on multiple strucrurallevels: in its immediate context as IV/IV but as a dominant 18 See Biamonte (t(mhcoming). 19 Gary Burns includes the first of these chord patterns amon~ his seven "h~r­

20

and isomorphic tonal

in relation to the tonic, just as VIV serves as the dominant ofV but as a chromaticizcd subdominant in relation to the tonic. In a different path to a similar view of the doublc-plagal function1 the subtonic, which includes forms of the dominant degrees 2 and 7, replaces V7 in the classic blues cadence V 7-IV7-I 7, shown in Example 3(c), with idiomatic parallel perfect fifths and octaves. The Bcatles' "Taxman" (1966) is an example of a blues with a ,VII-IV-I cadence 21 In a contrasting view, the double-plagal progression is a lincar motion deriving from neighboring 6/4 chords that arc given consonant root support. Everett considers IAV to be aA e7} and ('7,5,4}. To Everett's definition I add that, in theory, the tonic may be assigned to any degree of the pentatonic scale, resulting in five possible rotations;1s The traditional ordering of pentatonic rotations begins with the major pentatonic as the first mode, and ends with the minor pentatonic as the fifth. However, the minor pentatonic is fundamental to the rock-bruitar idiom: it is typically the first scale a bruitarist learns, because it can be played in an easily-mastered box pattern on the fretboard, and is often the basis of extended improvisations. In the key of E, each note of the minor pentatonic scale is an open string. It is also the most symmetrical ordering of this interval series. For these reasons, I have assigned it the first position in the rotation. Example 20 shows the rotations of the minor pentatonic scale their melodic scale dc~rccs, triad-doubled harmonics, and the r~sulting cross-relations~ Pentatonic harmony can be voiced with several different types of structures: complete triads, creating cross-relations, or power chords or stacked fourths, minimizing the cross-relations. These three chordal syntaxes_ arc characteristic of different timbres and genres. Complete tnads arc most typical in acoustic timbres; power chords in electric timbres (especially those with distortion such as hard rock and heavy metal); and quartal harmonics, a conventional jazz pentatonic voicing, in keyboard-based textures. Chris McDonald has observed that the chromatic thirds and other cross-relations-in his terminology, "modal subvcrsions"-charactcristic of t,rrungc and other alternative genres may derive from the adoption of the modally ambit,ruous power chord as a favored sonority. 36 In Example 21, these pentatonic-triad rotations arc mapped onto the cycle of fifths. The lines across the circle connect the 12 Everett (2004, §19). 13 Four instances of[025] are embedded in the pentatonic scale: [i,k3,4], [4,5, ~7}, [5, ~7,i}, and [~7,i, ,J}. Everett refers to this set class as the "blues

trichord" (2009, 169fi). 14 This contention is supported by research on melodic pentatonic structures in the blues, a genre that has retained its considerable influence on pentatonic usage in rock. In a study of early blues melodies, Jeff Todd Titan concluded that, vvhile any note might be used in a blues melody, the tonic and dominant act as stable referential pitches (1994, 154-59). Peter van der Merwe has explored melodic minor-third gestures in vernacular music, and posited a ''ladder of thirds" underlying many blues and fOlk melodies that allows fOr thirds above and below the tonic and dominant degrees: 6----i---J,j-)---J,] (1989, 120--25). 11 Chord structures deriving from these triad-doubled modes are readily ±(mnd in rock music ±Yom the mid-1960s onwards. 36 McDonald (2000, 356-58).

Rock Music

237

TRIADIC MODAL AND PENTATONIC PATTERNS IN ROCK MUSIC

Rotation

Scale degrees

'7

Triads

Cross-relations

I 'Ill IV V 'VII

r3/q3, )7 1~7

Pentatonic I (minor)

'3 4

Pentatonic 2 (major)

2

Pentatonic 3

2 4

Pentatonic 4

'3 4 '6 '7

I bTTT IV by] 'VII

Pentatonic 5

2 4 5

I II

b7

EXAMPLE 20.

v

II

V 'VII

IV

IV

VI 1

v

VI

11'1, 5(5 41'4, b71'7 b31'3, '61'6 1!'1, 41'4

Pentatonic-triad structures

bounding harmonies for each pentatonic collection, while the harrntmies at the bottom 75 i I 'III IV V 7 'VI 'VII 1'i b3'i 4') 5')

)6')

bi'

Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar" (1971) Golden Earring, ''Radar Love" (1973) Eric Clapton. "Let it Grow'' (1974) Iron Maiden, "The Number of the Beast" (1982)

Aeolian, no

3

David Bowie, ·'Suffragette City" (1972)

Aeolian, no

5

Heart, "Ban·acuda" ( 1977)

Aeolian/Dorian, no

6

Aeolian Phrygian, no

Locrian, no

S

r2 or 6 7

I 6 II "Ill IV V 1'VII6 I IT 'TIT TV V 'VII

Paul McCartney, "Maybe I'm Amazed" (1970), verse Alice Cooper, "Elected'' ( 1972), chorus

I II 'IIIIVV by] 'VII

Beatles, "I am the Walrus" (1967)

I 'II "111 IV bVI 'VII I' b25 b35 45 '6' '7'

The Moody Blues, ''Nights in White Satin" (1967) Rush, "Jacob's Ladder" (1980), verse

I'

b35 45 b55

b75

EXAMPLE 23.

Led Zeppelin, "Immigrant Song" (1970) Hexatonic- and heptatonic-triad types

diatonic context, and are rare in the modal-pentatonic repertory under consideration in this study. HEXATONIC-AND HEPTATONIC-TRIAD STRUCTURES

The pentatonic-triad structures explored above can be expanded into larger triadic structures that include semitonal root relationships. Example 23 lists a selection of songs with hexatonic-triad structures, and one probably anomalous heptatonic-triad structure. The most widespread of these is Aeolian -2, which can be considered either a subset of the Aeolian collection or a superset of Pentatonic-triad collections 1 and 4. The next most common hexatonic-triad structure is shifted one chord to the right on the circle of fifths, omitting ,VI and adding II: Aeolian/Dorian -6, a superset of Pentatonic 1 and 3. Phrygian -5, which occurs much more frequently in heavy metal than in rock, expands Pentatonic 4 by one chord in the flat direction, ~II. Two of the Aeolian subsets listed below, Aeolian -3 and Aeolian -5, as well as the Locrian subset, cannot be generated from a single fifth-cycle, strongly suggesting that these structures arise from combinations of smaller intervallic sequences-which is indeed how they typically occur in rock practice. Although the harmonic

vocabularies of these examples contain only one element more than the pentatonic-triad examples, their chord patterns are too complex to be summarized here and I will not discuss these examples in detail. However, the common triadic progressions identified in the pentatonic structures are prevalent in these hexatonic structures as well: double-plagal, axe-fall, and Aeolian progressions, as well as larger-scale pentatonic and blues patterns. Although I have presented only a small sampling of songsand, at that, only those with harmonic structures simple enough to be reducible to a few chords-the pentatonic and modal systems they illustrate represent the basis of a significant body of rock music and are a fundamental part of its harmonic and melodic grammar. The surface syntax of these modal and pentatonic systems stands in contrast to a historical and statistical background of major-minor tonality, yet at a deeper level they express many of the underlying principles which have been identified in tonal musics. The triadic structures explored in this study feature chords behaving as tonics, pre-dominants, and dominants, and patterns that accomplish traditional phrase functions such as tonic prolongation, dominant preparation, orcadential arrival. A broader study might delve more deeply into the relationships between blues and rock structures, as well as

Rock Music TRIADIC MODAL AND PENTATONIC PATTERNS IN ROCK MUSIC

structures deriving from fi)lk modality. Nonetheless, I hope that my assimilation and expansion of some existing tonal theoretical models contributes to a much-needed clearer understanding of triadic modal and pentatonic syntax and function in rock music. WORKS CITED

Agmon, Eytan. 1995. "Functional Harmony Revisited: A Prototype-Theoretic Approach." Music Theory Spectrum 17 (2): 196-214. Biamonte, Nicole. Forthcoming. "Modal Function in Rock and Metal." In Actes colloque d'Ana!yse musicale de Strasbourg. Ed. Mondher Ayari,Jean-Michel Bardez, and Xavier Hascher. Universite de Strasbourg. Bjornberg, Alf. 1984. "There's Something Going On-om eolisk harmonik i nutida rockmusic." Tviirspel: Trettoen artiklar om musik; Festskrijt til/jan ling. 371-85. Goteborg: Skrifter fran musikvetenskapilga institutionen 9. Goteborg: Musikvetenskapliga institutionen. - - - . 2007. "On Aeolian Harmony in Contemporary Popular Music." In Critical Essays in Popular Musicology. Ed. Allan F. Moore. 275-82. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Bobbitt, Richard. 1976. Harmonie Technique in the Rock Idiom: The Theory and Practice ofRoek Harmony. Belmont [CA]: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Brackett, David. 1995. Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burns, Gary. 1987. "A Typology of'Hooks' in Popular Records." Popular Music 6 (1): 1-20. Burns, Lori. 2008. "Analytic Methodologies for Rock Music: Harmonic and Voice-Leading Strategies in Tori Amos's 'CrucifY.'" In Expression in Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays. 2nd ed. Ed. Walter Everett. 63-92. New York: Routledge Press. Capuzzo, Guy. 2004. ''Nco- Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music." Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2): 177-99. - - - . 2009. "Sectional Tonality and Sectional Centricity in Rock Music." Music Theory Spectrum 31 (1): 157-74. Carter, Paul Scott. 2005. "Retrogressive Harmonic Motion as Structural and Stylistic Characteristic of Pop-Rock Music." Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati. Covach, John. 1997. "We Won't Get Fooled Music and Musical Analysis." In 117-41. Rcpr. in Keeping Score: Music, and Culture. Ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel. 75-89. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. - - - . 2004. "Form in Rock Music: A Primer." In Engaging Music: Euays in Music Analysis. Ed. Deborah Stein. 65-76. New York: Oxt!Jrd University Press. Covach, John, and Graemc M. Boone, eds. 1997. UndeJ:~tanding Rock: Euay.1 inMwicalAnalysis. New York: OxfiJrd University Press.

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Doll, Christopher. 2007. "Listening to Rock Harmony." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. - - - . 2009. "Transformation in Rock Harmony: An Explanatory Strategy." Gamut 2 (1). http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/ web/ojs/index.php/first/article/view/99/6 7 (accessed 8 August 2010). Everett, Walter. 2004. "Making Sense of Rock's Tonal Systems." Music Theory Online 10.4. http://mto.societymusictheory.org/ issues/mto.04.10.4/mto.04.10.4.w_everett.html (accessed 8 August 2010). - - - . 2008. "Pitch Down the Middle." In Expression in PopRock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays. 2nd ed. Ed. Walter Everett. 111-74. New York: Routledge Press. - - - . 2009. The Foundations ofRoek: From ''Blue Suede Shoes" to "Suite: judy Blue Eyes." New York: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Daniel. 1994. Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of its Precedents. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Headlam, Dave. 2002. "Appropriations of Blues and Gospel in Popular Music." In The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music. Ed. Allan F. Moore. 158-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kopp, David. 1995. "On the Function of Function." Music Theory Online 1.3. http://mto.socictymusictheory.org/issues/ mto.95.1.3/toc.1.3.html (accessed 8 August 2010). McDonald, Chris. 2000. "Exploring Modal Subversions in Alternative Music." Popular Music 19 (3): 355-63. Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes [England]: Open University Press. Moore, Allan F. 1992. "Patterns of Harmony." Popular Music 11 (1): 73-106. - - - . 1995. "The So-Called 'Flattened Seventh' in Rock." Popular Music 14 (2): 185-201. - - - . 2001. Rock: The Primary Text-De-veloping a Musicology ofRock. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. - - - . 2003.Analyzing Popular Music Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salzman, Eric, and Michael Sahl. 1977. Making Changes: A Practical Guide to Vernacular Harmony. N cw York: McGrawHill. Stephenson, Ken. 2002. What to Listen For in Rock: A Stylistic Analysi.L New Haven: Yale University Press. Tagg, Philip. 1982. "Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice." Popular Music 2: 37-67. - - - . 1990. "'Universal Music' and the Case ofDeath.)' In La mUJica come linguaggio universale: GeneJi e .'iforia de un'idea. Ed. Ratiacle Pozzi. Historiae musicae cultores 57. Repr. in Critical Quarterly 35 (2): 54-85, 1993. Ternperley, David. 2007. "The Melodic-Harmonic 'Divorce' in Rock." Popular Mwic 26 (2): 323-42. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1994. Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural AnalysiJ. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM

Tymockzo, Dmitri. 2003. "Progressions fondamentales, fonctions, degr6s: une grammaire de l'harmonie tonale elementaire." Musurgia 10 (3-4): 35-62. Trans. by the author as "Function Theories: A Statistical Approach" at http://www. music.princeton.edu/-dmitri/ (accessed 8 August 2010). Vander Merwe, Peter. 1989. Popular Style: the Eu,,m.mew.•of-:d'Oti>-C'enturvrut•u"''"'''"'"· Oxford: Clarendon Press.

J2 (2010)

[13] Transformation in Rock Harmony: An Explanatory Strategy* Christopher Doll One of the most common ways of explaining a musical passage is by relating it to some other musical passage. Often, along the way, we invoke a notion of transformation: one passage is understood, for various stated or unstated reasons, as a transformed version of another. 1 This explanatory strategy is so commonplace that it is frequently transparent, in the sense that we are hardly aware we are employing a strategy at all. For instance, no seasoned musician would think twice about speaking of musical 'ornaments' or 'embellishments'. These concepts are fundamental to our understanding of music, but they themselves are predicated on a transformational relationship between that which is embellished and the sonic product of embellishing. We might be given the chance to compare, by ear, the altered and unaltered versions, as with a Baroque double; in this case, the two compared structures are actualized in sound, diachronically displayed- the original followed by a variation. On the other hand, we might never get to hear the undecorated version, as when a note in a score comes to us already adorned with a trill; in this case, we must use our auditory imagination to create an unornamented, hypothetical sound. In both cases, the compared structures are, on some level, the same: in a word, the structures are linked by way of transformation. Musical transformation is an extremely broad, abstract explanatory concept, capable of covering not just instances of radical conversion but, in fact, all degrees of musical change. 2

'For their help with this article, I would like to thank Zoe Browder Doll, the anonymous readers, and -because this essay derives from my dissertation ('Listening to Rock Harmony', Columbia University, 2007) - my Ph.D. committee members: Joseph Dubiel, David Cohen, Ellie Hisama, Brian Kane and Dan Sonenberg. The notion of transformation explored here is different from the mathematical one of 'transformational theory' (as in David Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). For an application of transformational theory (specifically, NeoRiemannian theory) to rock harmony, see Guy Capuzzo, 'Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 26/2, 2004, pp. 177-99. This loose approach to the term transformation makes sense if we consider musical difference and sameness to be defined only according to some level of abstraction (for example, two things that are different on one level can be the same on another level). Accordingly, a transformation, which by definition relates two different objects that are the same at some degree of abstraction, can occur on various levels (that is, to varying degrees). See also Dora Hanninen, 'A Theory ofRecontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformations of Repetition', Music Theory Spectrum, 2511, 2003, pp. 59-97; and John Rahn, 'Repetition', in Music Inside Out: Going Too Far in Musical Essays, Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001, pp. 7-19.

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Accordingly, transformational explanations run the full range of the empirical/rational gamut. 3 Consider Schenker's often-cited essay on Beethoven's Third Symphony, which reveals how to understand the first movement as an elaboration of a simple ~2'-f descent (over a f-~-f bass). 4 This imaginary melody- the movement's Urlinie- is so abstracted from the sonic surface that it is reasonable to consider it more an intellectual construct and less a possible - let alone plausible - object of direct experience. 5 To get from Schenker's 'fundamental line' to Beethoven's symphonic score (or vice versa), we must summon transformative powers of the highest order. But not all transformations are so fantastic; some correspond to a more direct aural effect. A 'theme and variations' is an obvious case in point: the very name reflects an experience reasonably accessible to many listeners. (For that matter, voiceleading transformations of the Urlinien of shorter, less complex pieces might also border on the aurally obvious.) Such experiential transformations, if not always self-evident, are often evident from composers' instructions- from the briefest trill-mark, to the form-indicating title of a movement of a symphony or suite. When it comes to rock, 6 transformations are among the most powerful and talked-about musical effects. Many of these effects are harmonic, and this article seeks to give voice to a number of these. 7 To this end, I will present several musical examples from the rock repertoire that will help clarify some common kinds of harmonic transformations, as well as some common kinds of harmonic structures involved in such transformations. The broadest categories of transformational types will be defined according to cardinality: specifically, according to whether the number of constituent chords is the same or different between the transformee and the transformed. Transformations involving no alteration in the number of harmonies will be treated as examples of that phenomenon known widely as 'chord substitution'. Transformations entailing a change in the number of sonorities shall be called

Here I use 'empirical' and 'rational' very casually, to denote 'experientially based' and 'intellectually based' respectively. For an introduction to the old philosophical debate between empiricism and rationalism, see Peter Markie, 'Rationalism vs. Empiricism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/rational ism-empiricism. Heinrich Schenker, 'Beethoven's Third Symphony: Its True Content Described for the First Time', trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton, The Masterwork in Music, Vol. 3 [1930], ed. William Drabkin, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 10--68. At the very least, I can say I have never, despite my best efforts, knowingly heard this symphonic movement as a series of elaborations of those three harmonized melodic tones. This fact doesn't contest the insights of Schenkerian theory; it just suggests that the Urlinie of this movement, when considered as a melody to be heard in our inner ear, is better placed on the rational side of the transformational continuum. As I use the term, rock comprises a diverse spectrum of styles over several decades, from roughly the 1950s up to the present. This article covers styles as diverse as rhythm and blues, heavy metal, country pop, reggae, and new wave. See also Walter Everett, 'Making Sense of Rock's Tonal Systems', Music Theory Online, I 0/4, 2004, http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.04.1 0.4/ mto.04.10.4.w_everett_frames.html, §4. Not all of rock harmony's characteristic transformational effects will be scrutinized here. Among those left unexamined will be transposition, and the more interesting reorientation (which describes the effect of one centric pitch class being replaced by another and, in turn, altering the hierarchy and harmonic functions of a given succession).

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either 'chord addition' or 'chord subtraction' depending on the action's direction. 8 Both substitution and addition/subtraction deserve close attention, which they will receive in Part I. Part I: Types of Harmonic Transformations Substitution

Peter Winkler gives a clear-cut account of what pop musicians normally mean by 'chord substitution': According to this notion, a given chord may be replaced by any one of a number of others without disturbing the sense of the progression, rather like substituting bulbs of different colors on a string of Christmas lights. Of course, any old chord won't do: the substitute must have the same function (tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc.). 9

A dominant, then, can swap with a different dominant, as a ~IF might do with V7 in a jazz improvisation (a common occurrence known as a 'tritone substitution'). 10 'Substitution' in this sense describes a subtle transformation of a harmonic succession, in which one chord exchanges with a different, though similar, chord. (This definition will suffice for now, but later on it will be expanded beyond successions to include transformations of individual chords.) Typically, the metric for similarity in this context is harmonic function (as Winkler suggests), but the metric for dissimilarity is more elusive. At what point would we say that a change of chord has occurred at all? A good answer would be 'When we would assign a new Roman numeral', but this is not the only possibility. Surely, a chord can be identified in ways other than with Roman numerals; indeed, harmonic function itself can be understood as an expression of chordal identity. 11 In other words, since we have more than one option when defining harmonic difference and sameness, 'chord substitution' can be theorized as covering various subcategories of substitution distinguishable by the terms of identity involved (of which Roman numerals are but one). The following musical examples will help illustrate four substitutional types - Roman numeric, coloristic, functional and hierarchical - that are useful in articulating a wide array of transformational effects. Most of these examples are analytical reductions featuring only basic metric, durational, and pitch-class information; the registral placement of chordal members is not indicated, except for the relative positioning of bass notes on the bottom. The See also Charles J. Smith, 'Prolongations and Progressions as Musical Syntax', in Music Theory: Special Topics, ed. Richard Browne, New York: Academic Press, 1981, pp. 158-60. Peter Winkler, 'Toward a Theory of Popular Harmony',ln Theory Only, 412, 1978, p. 8. 10 See, for instance, Nicole Biamonte, 'Augmented-Sixth Chords vs. Tritone Substitutes', Music Theory Online, 14/2, 2008, http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.08.14.2/mto.08.14.2.biamonte.html. 11 I am not suggesting that harmonic function must be understood this way; even for its inventor, Hugo Riemann, 'function' appears to have had different senses. See Riemann, Harmony Simplified, trans. H. Bewerunge, London: Augener, 1896 (1893). For more, see Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account ofIts Precedents, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; and David Kopp, 'On the Function of Function', Music Theory Online, 1/3, 1995, http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.95.1.3/mto. 95.1.3.kopp.art.html.

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key signatures are only notational conveniences: they are used merely to keep accidentals to a minimum, and should not be taken as indicators of tonal center or mode. Roman numerals will be assigned according to the scale degrees of chordal roots, independent of actual pitch content (e.g., the chord on the subtonic is always ~VII, regardless of the key signature)Y In the chorus to Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer' (1977), shown in Figure l, the tonal center A (established in the preceding verse) is confirmed by a ~VI-~VII-I progression. Following this confirmation comes an alternative sequence, ~VI-~VII-mi. Hearing the second progression in terms of the first, we can experience CM (~III) as a substitute for Am (I)Y (It's also possible to hear Am retroactively as a substitute displaced by the proper tonic CM, but only if we ignore the previous establishment of center A.) The harmonic function of both chords, in their respective successions, is to provide a moment of resolution and stability: they are local tonics. 14 (Again, since A is the global tonal center, CM is only a local- not global- expression of stability.) Moving from one succession to the next, we hear the Roman numerals change but the local harmonic function remaining the same. I'll label this type of transformation Roman numeric chord substitution. FIGURE 1. Talking Heads, 'Psycho Killer' (from chorus) tonic rcso!utiun

A:

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"P.,:vcho Ki/l('J:

qu'cst que c'est?."'

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run run run run run run run away!'

12 Chordal roots will be sufficient for Roman numeric assignment; a third and fifth need not be present. The numerals of chords built on the minor second, minor third, minor sixth, and minor seventh above tonic are all prefixed with a fiat, while the numerals of chords built on the members of the major scale are left without prefix. 13 It is important to realize that this hearing is not predicated on our expecting the I chord to occur again; the resemblance between the progressions itself is enough to suggest comparison. Naturally, expectation often plays a role in specific contexts, but expectation is not a universal prerequisite for hearing transformations. 1" Walter Everett notes that this song 'alternates its allegiance between relative major and minor as easily as it moves between English and French [in its lyrics]' (Everett, 'Confessions from Blueberry Hell, or, Pitch Can Be a Sticky Substance', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett, New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 312). The distance the disturbed narrator wants to put between himself and the person to whom he is speaking also lines up with the tonic dichotomy illustrated in Figure I, with the word 'away' landing on the CM departure. Additionally relevant to the song's poetics of binaries is the juxtaposition of tonic-chordal qualities between verses (AMm7) and choruses (Am).

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FIGURE 2. The Troggs, 'Wild Thing'

A:

tonic

IV pre-dominant

v

dominant

IV

subdominant

tonic

Of course, we could instead say that 'Psycho Killer' briefly modulates to, or tonicizes, CM, in which case we would probably write the FM-GM-CM succession as 'IV-V-I'. There is nothing wrong with this explanation, except that it doesn't really capture the quality of transformation created by the individual CM triad (instead, it focuses on the reorientation of its threechord succession as a whole). To get at the single-chord effect, we are better off keeping the Roman numerals focused on the same point - the song's global tonal center of A - and using our functional descriptors independently of our Roman numeric labels. This separation of the expressions tonic and I (and the association of tonic with frill) might strike some theorists as quirky and perhaps even blasphemous, despite the fact that most of us already admit multiple Roman numerals to the functional categories of dominant (V, VII) and pre-dominant (IV, II). Yet permitting a many-to-one relationship for all functions facilitates our recognition of the similarity between, for instance, ~IF- for-V 7 and ~III- for-1: they are both examples of Roman numeric substitution. Conversely, we can simply abandon altogether the awkward assumption that any one Roman numeral entails a specific function. This abandonment would aid the analysis of numerous non-substitutional passages in which a single Roman numeral performs multiple roles, passages such as the repeating 1-IV-VIV-1 progression in the Troggs' 'Wild Thing' (1966), shown in Figure 2. Here, the two IVs have different functions: the first, a pre-dominant, presages dominant V, while the second, a subdominant, predicts resolution to tonic 1. 15 Roman numeric identity can thus be thought of as reflecting a chord's relation to the prevailing tonal center (via the scalar position of its chordal root), while functional identity speaks to a chord's relationship with other chords. There is much more that could be said along these lines, 16 but pursuing this topic further would move us too far away from transformation. Suffice it to say, there are good reasons to consider functional and Roman numeric identity as distinct (and we gain nothing from insisting that these identities be equivalent to one another)Y 15 The subdominant's prediction of tonic is initiated by the preceding dominant V; this sort of layered prediction is common in rock, and will be dealt with in more detail later on. For more on pre-dominants versus subdominants, see Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, pp. 489; Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 311; Dmitri Tymoczko, 'Progressions Fondamentales, Fonctions, Degn5s: Une Grammaire de !'Harmonie Tonale Elementaire', trans. Nicholas Meeus, Musurgia: Analyse et Pratique Musicales, 10/3--4, 2003, p. 57; and Kevin J. Swinden, 'When Functions Collide: Aspects of Plural Function in Chromatic Music', Music Theory Spectrum, 2712,2005, p. 253. 16 See, e.g., Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 21431; and Doll, 'Listening to Rock Harmony', pp. 27-34. 17 For a different opinion, see John Rothgeb, 'Re: Eytan Agmon on Functional Theory', Music Theory Online, 2/1, 1996, http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.96.2.llmto.96.2.l.rothgeb.html, ~ 11, which states that this sort of approach to Roman numerals 'devalue[s] a profoundly meaningful analytic

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All this said, the expression 'Roman numeric chord substitution' risks generalizing too far, as there are many substitutions in which both harmonic function and Roman numeral are left unaltered. For instance, in Lipps, Inc.'s 'Funkytown' (1980), the major tonic I chords in the verses turn minor in the choruses (darkening the textual references to the titular town). 18 This transformation does not affect the scale-degree upon which the chord is built (1), and therefore it does not affect the Roman numeral (though some of us might write 'i' versus 'I' to indicate the change in quality). Following Winkler's Christmas light-bulb simile, I'll call this an example of coloristic chord substitution. These types of substitutions can occur diachronically, as heard in 'Funkytown', but they more commonly rely on an imaginary transformee (in the vein of the untrilled note discussed in this article's introduction). This is the case with so-called altered chords (that is, extended and incomplete triads), such as the tonic harmony from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Purple Haze' (1967), shown in Figure 3. This coloristic substitute is regularly referred to as a 'raised-ninth chord' with no fifth; as such, it expands its EM-triadic source with D and F>< (usually spelled as G) and omits its source's fifth B. 19 FIGURE 3. Tonic chord from the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Purple Haze' #9th and 7th

0

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0

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symbol by turning it into a mere mechanical reduction of a trivial transliteration of note-content'. (Rothgeb is objecting specifically to Eytan Agmon, 'Functional Harmony Revisited: A PrototypeTheoretic Approach', Music Theory Spectrum, 17/2,1995, pp. 196-214.) 18 See also Ken Stephenson, What to Listen for in Rock: A Stylistic Analysis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 48. The opposite effect- brightening the tonic I by switching from minor to major- can be heard about B when moving from rapped to sung sections in the Spice Girls' 'Wannabe' (1996) (Stephenson, What to Listen for in Rock, p. 97). In this case, the major tonic is stated explicitly, while the minor is suggested only by the piano ritf. 19 For instance, see Walter Everett, 'Detroit and Memphis: The Soul of Revolver'. in 'Every Sound There Is': The Beatles' Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll, ed. Russell Reising, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, p. 38; Dave Headlam, 'Appropriations of Blues and Gospel in Popular Music', in The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, ed. Allan F. Moore, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 169; and Rob van der Bliek, 'The Hendrix Chord: Blues, Flexible Pitch Relationships, and Self-Standing Harmony'. Popular Music, 26/2, 2007, pp. 343-64. 'G' is actually the preferred spelling of the raised ninth, revealing a dependence on an alternative explanation of the chord that treats the ninth as a flatted tenth or extra third derived from the pentatonic-minor mode (E. G, A, B, D). See Naphtali Wagner, "'Domestication" of Blue Notes in the Beatles' Songs', Music Theory Spectrum, 2512, 2003, pp. 354-5.

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Note that substitution of chordal color is better described as a transformation of a single harmony (which replaces its previous real or imaginary self), contrasting with the above formulation of chord substitution in general as a transformation of a harmonic succession. In truth, all four types of substitution (including Roman numeric) can be understood as involving transformations of a single chord, because we always have a choice as to how abstract or concrete we wish our measurements of chordal sameness and difference to be. For instance, a Roman numeric substitution can involve hearing one functionally stable sonority transformed in terms of its Roman numeral, just as a coloristic substitution can involve hearing a Roman numerically invariant harmony altered in terms of its quality. 20 In this light, the local tonic in 'Psycho Killer' is substituted with a different version of itself: CM (~III) for Am (1). In 'Funkytown', minor I substitutes for its earlier incarnation as major. Deciding whether there has been an alteration only to a chord's color or also to its Roman numeral is a relatively simple process, one dependent on a comparison of the chordal roots. On the other hand, determining whether a full-blown change in function has occurred is a more complicated task. Take, for instance, the transformation of subdominant IV, in George Michael's 'Faith' (1987), into dominant ~VII, in Limp Bizkit's cover (1997); see Figures 4a-b. 21 We could hear the underlying function of both chords as the same - pre-tonic. This would be a case of Roman numeric substitution. But we also could hear one function substituting for another- dominant for (pre-tonic) subdominant- in which case we are dealing with another phenomenon altogether, one that falls beyond the usual domain of chord substitution (per Winkler's definition). I call this phenomenon functional chord substitution. In the 2° Chordal quality, or color, could be further dissected into subtypes such as pitch-class content, pitch content, and timbral/textural content, each with its own corresponding substitutional species. I will stop short of pursuing this degree of refinement here; however, I should say that I find David Brackett's exploration of various standard guitar voicings for major chords to be suggestive along these lines; see Brackett, 'Elvis Costello, the Empire of theE Chord, and a Magic Moment or Two', Popular Music, 24/3, 2005, pp. 357--67. 21 This alteration augments the concomitant lyrical and stylistic modifications, all pointing to a change in the meanings of the song (more specifically, into hypermasculine parody). This point was explored in Wynn Yamami, 'Troubled Embodiment and Sonic Gay-Bashing: Theorizing Covers through George Michael and Limp Bizkit', paper presented April 2004 at the CUNY Graduate Students in Music Seventh Annual Conference, 'Intradisciplinary Approaches to Popular Music Studies' (New York). For discussion of subtonic-containing dominants, see, among many others: Lori Burns, 'Analytic Methodologies for Rock Music: Harmonic and Voice-Leading Strategies in Tori Amos's "Crucify"', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett, New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 218; Doll, 'Listening to Rock Harmony', pp. 16-25; Everett, 'Confessions from Blueberry Hell', p. 329; Timothy Koozin, 'Fumbling Toward Ecstasy: Voice Leading Tonal Structure, and the Theme of Self-Realization in the Music of Sarah McLachlan', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, 2000, p. 248; Allan F. Moore, 'The So-Called "Flattened Seventh" in Rock', Popular Music, 14/2, 1995, pp. 185-201; Shaugn O'Donnell, "'On the Path": Tracing Tonal Coherence in Dark Side of the Moon', in 'Speak to Me': The Legacy of Pink Floyds The Dark Side of the Moon, ed. Russell Reising, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, p. 89; Dominic Pedler, The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, London: Omnibus Press, 2003, pp. 237-38; Gary M. Potter, 'The Unique Role of ,VIF in Bebop Harmony', Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, 21, 1989, pp. 35-48; and Ger Tillekens, 'A Flood of Flat-Sevenths', in 'Every Sound There Is': The Beatles' Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll, ed. Russell Reising, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp. 121-36.

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Rock Music

Limp Bizkit song, as in many substitutional situations, the transformational effect can be labeled either 'Roman numeric' or 'functional'. Our designation depends on whether or not we consider function to be changed at the level of dominant I subdominant I pre-dominant I pre-subdominant; or whether we hold out for changes at the level of tonic I pre-tonic I pre-pre-tonic; or of leading-tone-containing dominant I subtonic-containing dominant; or of whichever other functional designations we choose to employ. FIGURE 4. 'Faith' (from verse) (a) George Michael

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the strategic intertextual reference to John Lennon's 1969 Plastic Ono Band song 'Give peace a chance', which is woven into the contrapuntal fabric during the final verse in an effect not songs to teature a drum-machine beginning- the gigantic entrance of a trademark Collins descending tom-tom ritf (prior to this in the song we had heard no acoustic drums, only the drum machine) bumps up the level of emotional intensity several notches at the onset of the final chorus.

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315

Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music 49

unlike that of a Baroque quodlibetY A brief codetta- featuring a fragment of the B material -closes the movement, rising to a spectacular cadence on the subdominant. I mentioned previously that there must have been some collaboration between the two composers in order to make their respective movements work together logically as one cohesive piece. The compositional strategy for the closing section of the second movement, 'All good people'- which also functions as the closing section of the track as a whole- seems to confirm this (Example 4d). Just prior to this closing section, the pipe organ- which it will be recalled was the final component of the accumulative texture to enter in 'Your move'- is gradually faded into the mix, while the other parts are gradually faded out. What we are left with is a massive chordal setting of the vocal chorus accompanied by just the organ and bass. Not only does this prominent use of the organ at the climax of both movements forge an immediate connection between them, but also the rising stepwise bass of the organ part in this closing section recalls the similar stepwise rising progression in the cod etta of the first movement. 38 Let us now look more closely at the harmonic design of this closing section. I have provided Roman numerals below the staff, indicating the mixed modality of the harmonic progression underlying the repeating vocal chorus. Of course, mixed modality is not at all uncommon in rock harmony; indeed, this is the same progression that had accompanied the chorus on its multiple statements during the course of the second movement. 39 But what happens next is unusual: rather than continue to repeat the chorus at its original tonal level, the subdominant harmony that closes each statement pivots to become the dominant harmony of the tonality a whole step below, resulting in a large-scale descending-step sequence that quickly takes us far afield from the original key ofE major. 40 What is especially neat about this sequence is that it echoes, on a larger scale, the descending whole-step progression I-~ VII-~ VI that sounds at the beginning of each statement of the chorus riff. (I have suggested this in parentheses below the staff; on the second 37

38

39 40

For those unfamiliar with the term, the quodlibet (literally 'whatever you like') was a type of piece - especially popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries- in which pre-existing familiar tunes were woven together with other contrapuntal strands to create a new piece, as in the thirtieth and final ofJ. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (1742). Of course, quodlibet technique must always involve the composer making at least one strategic intertextual reference. One can flnd many examples of this in pop and rock, a famous one being the Beatles' weaving of'Frere jacques' into the vocal fabric of their 1966 hit 'Paperback writer' (we shall encounter another example later in this article). The 'framing' compositional strategy of 'I've seen all good people' -moving from a quiet acoustic guitar introduction to a finale that begins with a heavy organ statement - is employed by Yes elsewhere, such as in 'Roundabout' ±rom their follow-up album Fragile (1971). In fact, the inner chams of'Roundabout' (4:36 ff.) also involves a cumulative process: this chorus is different ±rom its earlier appearances in that here it is merged •Nith the distinctive groove ±rom the contrasting middle section of the song (that is, the bass/guitar/organ triplet idea that began with the bass/guitar riff at 3:25 and was answered by the organ solo at 4:00 ). The form of the second movement, 'All good people', is quite unusual in that it consists solely of a series of choruses without any verses or refrains. While abrupt modulations by ascending semitone or whole tone have been a well-worn cliche of pop and rock songs since at least the 1960s- inspiring such colourful and varied descriptions as the 'truck driver's modulation' (see Everett, The Beatles as Musicians, 318-19), the 'pump-up' (see Ricci, 'A "Hard Habit to Break"', and 'Barry Manilow tonality' (see McCreless, 'An Evolutionary Perspective', 106) - modulations by descending step are ±ar less common. I am reminded here especially of the series of descending whole-step modulations in the final chorus of the Beach lloys' 'Good vibrations' (1966); see Harrison, 'After Sundown', 41-5.

316

Rock Music

50 Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music

1,

,.

•

,.~,.

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OR.fAN

I"' :

.

.•. .-.

ple turn

their heads _

~

~,.

~

each day_ so

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'*

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f

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~·

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~

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E:

•

~

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r

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. ... . .. . .. . .

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turn

.

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.......... ---.

~

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-

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~

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I've seen alL good peo - ple tum their heads_ each day_ so sat

-

I

vu

vu

1m"

1m"

: 1>llows, where the texture abruptly thins to just the bass drum riff c - muffled in the mix so as to sound like a 'heartbeat' - accompanied by the held tonic note of riffj.

Rock Music

322

56 Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music (p)

--

2:14

•

(d-f)

,.

I I

,.

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f

r (a-c)

I I

.Fl""i"":l .Fl""i"":l __r--r=:j .Fl""i"":l

r

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Example Sf Coda, from 6:38.

octave exactly at the onset of the next textural block; indeed, one might argue that this is the 'moment of culmination' toward which the track has been ever unfolding. And here, the last of our pitched ritis (s) is introduced, consisting of a repeating one-bar synth motive that traces a descending chromatic path between :3 and i, hence reinforcing the prevailing tonic vamp. Before we leave 'Break and enter', I should point out that the series of textural blocks is more erratic during the coda than at any other point in the track: whereas the main body of the track consists mostly of eight-bar blocks, in the coda (see Example Sb) the consistent series of eight -bar blocks soon breaks down (into 4 + 4 + 20 + 8, and so on). In addition to the length of the blocks becoming more erratic, the onset of each new block is now marked mainly by subtracting riffs from the texture, which conveys an overall impression of the track disintegrating into nothingness. In all of the previous examples, the (ac)cumulative form has resulted in some way or another from a gradual process of textural growth, be it over just the opening section of the track or the course of an entire song. While this seems to be by far the preferred method, not all cumulative forms in pop and rock rely solely on such a process. Another important type of large-scale cumulative form can be found in songs where the prevailing compositional strategy seems to involve aiming towards a climactic final section, one in which two or more distinctive melodies that had previously been heard separately are made to sound in counterpoint against one another. The resultant effect in such songs, at least to my ears, is usually as if these separate melodies were somehow always destined to

325

Rock Music

Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music 59

fit together, and once this has been achieved then musically the song has nowhere else to go. A famous early example of this technique can be found in Paul McCartney's Beatles song 'Eleanor Rigby' (1966), where Paul overdubs himself singing the melody of the chorus sotto voce above the melody of the refrain only for the song's final section. Indeed, many British pop-rock composers have exploited a similar cumulative strategy in their songs. 5° None, however, is more striking than the magnificent finale to the 1997 mega-hit 'Tubthumping' by the self-professed 'anarchist collective' Chumbawamba. 51

IINTRol

J = 104

nn

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n

sing-ing

ui

I

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J'

sing-ing.

lj

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n n

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>>> I>1: > 1: 1: i i

1: 1: 1:

IV

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IV

CHORus!

~~ 1 IIJ ,JJJJJJ• J'IJJJ

JJ J J~·1'J {"J IJ JJJQ • J'l J J J J 4 •~iS~ ~· ; ) .·II

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(1

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Example 6a

;

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- ing

j

;

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night_

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way._

v

3

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I

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=II

v

IV

EtJ_J FJJ tho

you're ne-ver gon-na keep me down,

IJ

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night_

way._

Ir· vi

(etc.)

(1

v

An abridged score.

Example 6 Chumbawamba, 'Tubthumping' ( 1997). Words and music by Nigel Hunter, Bruce Duncan, Alice Nutter, Louise Watts, Paul Greco, Darren Hamer, Allen Whalley, and Judith Abbott.© 1997 EMI, Germany GMBH. All rights in the United States and Canada controlled and administered by EMI 13lackwood Music lnc. All rights reserved. International Copyright secured. Used by permission.

50

51

I could cite dozens of examples of British pop-rock songs in which melodies that had previously only been heard separately are combined in a cumulative texture at the end of the track, but three of my favourites will have to suffice (listed here in chronological order): Manfred Mann's cover of Bruce Springsteen's 'Blinded by the light' ( 1976); [the] Buggies' 'Video killed the radio star' (1979); and Tears for Fears' 'Everybody wants to rule the world' (1985). Each of these songs also exploits a variety of other accumulative or cumulative procedures. As of the week ending 31 January 1998, 'Tubthumping' had fallen to the number two spot, having spent nine consecutive weeks at number one on Billboard's 'Hot 100 Airplay' chart. It was the breakthrough single for Chumbawamba in the US, where until then they had remained virtually unknovm despite being an underground t:wourite in their native Britain and in Europe for almost fifteen years. 'Tubthumping' has, sadly, since proved to be Chumbawamba's only US hit, clocking in at number 23 on VHl 's 2002list ofthe 100 Greatest 'One Hit vVonders' of the rock era. The band give their own definition for the song's title in the liner notes for d1eir album Tubthumper: 'Tubthumping is Shouting to Change the World (then having a drink to celebrate). It's stumbling home from your local bar, when the world is ready to be PUT RIGHT'.

326

Rock Music

60 Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music

As I have shown in the abridged score (Example 6a), the song begins with a four-bar introduction, featuring a duet by two of the female members ('we'll be singing when we're winning') over a sparse, jangly electric guitar accompaniment. These introductory bars have been mixed so as to sound deliberately muffled, as if coming from a TV speaker with the volume turned down. Following this introduction, we hear the chorus of the song for the first time ('I get knocked down, but I get up again ... ') chanted by several of the band members in unison. In stark contrast to the introduction, the texture of the chorus is immediately massive: loud, distorted electric guitar power chords and a bass-and-snare-heavy hip-hop drum beat threaten to overpower the vocals, which in themselves already border on shouting rather than singing (the band members even go so far as to use megaphones while singing the chorus in live performances of the song). With the subsequent entrance of the first verse the texture again changes drastically. Although the drum beat continues at the forefront, the loud guitar power chords are replaced by soft, lush keyboards and the prevailing harmonic undercurrent of I-IV ... V gives way to the darker ii-IV-vi-V, over which a lone female voice sings nonchalantly of'pissing the night away' (i.e., the heavy drinking at the local pub that is the usual accompaniment to a good night of tubthumping). Chumbawamba have by this point established the textural dichotomy of the song: huge, brash choruses are alternated with quieter, contemplative verses. This pattern of chorus-verse cycles three times, with a calypso-flavoured trumpet solo taking the place of the vocal in the third verse. In the final chorus of 'Tubthumping', the large-scale cumulative form of the song is confirmed (Example 6b ). Up to this point the respective melodies of the introduction, chorus, and verse have been isolated from one another, but here all three tunes are made to sound together in one colossal composite texture (notice that on the fifth repetition of the final chorus the solo trumpet is even thrown back into the soup, only this time- in another example of quodlibet technique - it plays the quintessentially British-sounding theme of Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary). 52 To be sure, this composite texture is far removed from an elaborate four-part Bachian counterpoint- but it is cleverly constructed none the less. On listening to the final chorus, one can distinguish clearly each of the four melodies in spite of the surrounding chaos. Chumbawamba have achieved this effect by carefully combining tunes with markedly different rhythmic profiles, profiles that retain their individual identity against the backdrop of the other parts (a technique not unlike Mozart's typical strategy for distinguishing multiple characters that are made to sing different melodies and words all at once during the finales of his operas). But what makes this particular use of cumulative form all the more effective is that it amplifies perfectly the underlying message of the song: after a long night of drinking, presumably everyone at the pub is eager to get up and have a good 'tubthump' -and so they do in the final chorus, all at the same time. 52

The quotation of the Trumpet Voluntary appears in its original key ofD major. The use of a Baroque trumpet during a song's tlnale has a venerable history in British popular music, owing an allegiance to the Beatles. I am reminded of both the tlnal chams to 'Penny Lane' and, of course, the cumulative swirl of international quotations during the final chorus of'Ail you need is love', which includes a piccolo trumpet playing the tune to Bach's Two-Pmi Invention in F, transposed up a tone so as to tlt the G major key of the song (for a detailed intertextual analysis of'All you need is love', see my 'Strategic Intertextuality'.

Rock Music

327

Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music 61

Wc'llhc

.,

down

sing-ing

but I get up a- gain,

when we're

win-ning,

~ you're ne-ver gon-na keep me down,

we'll he

I get knocked down

oo~ooh._

sing-ing

but I get up a- gain,

••••• *

·~*'' you're ne-ver gon-na keep me down, I get knocked

GUITAR

I

I

~

IV

I

(ADD 3rd TIME)

.,

'I

I

~

I

IV

-

Piss-ingthenight _

I

~

I

IV

I

v

Piss-ingthe nigh_

a-way._

(ADD 5th TIME)

TRUMPET VOLUNTARY

Example 6b.

Cumulative swirl in the final chorus.

While I do not claim to have been exhaustive, I hope that this analytical sampler- drawing upon a diversity of styles ranging from progressive rock to post-punk to techno- has illuminated some of the ways in which accumulative and cumulative forms have proven time and again to be effective strategies for making pop-rock songs throughout the post-Beatles era. Most importantly, the use of such forms can be seen as perhaps the primary means by which pop-rock composers have been able to transcend the predictable boundaries of simple verse-chorus patterns in their songs. In highlighting the differences between spatial and temporal metaphors as they have been applied to musical form, David Brackett reminds us (echoing Morgan's Wagnerian ideal) that '[pop-rock] recordings tend to foreground the temporality of the music text'.so This seems to be especially true of recordings that feature (ac)cumulative forms: whether the accumulation occurs over just a small section of the song or across an entire track, the listener is pulled into the formal process as it unfolds in real time. We are made to experience the joy of anticipation- and indeed, that moment of sheer delight when the point of culmination is finally reached.

Discography

What follows is a list of all the records analysed or cited in the article (in the case of singles, the B side is listed along with the A side only if it is analysed or cited). The month/year and catalogue information corresponds to that of the original UK release except where noted. The Beach Boys. Oct. 1966. 'Good vibrations'. Capitol: 5676 (US release). The Beatks. Oct. 1962. 'Love me do'. Parlophone: R 4949. -.jan. 1963. 'Please please me'. Parlophone: R 4983. -.Mar. 1963. Please Please Me. Parlophone: PCS 3042. -.Apr. 1963. 'From me to you'. Parlophone: R 5015. -.Aug. 1963. 'She loves you'. Parlophone: R 5055. -.Nov. 1963. 'I want to hold your hand'. Parlophone: R 5084. -.june 1966. 'Paperback writer'. Parlophone: R 5452. -.Aug. 1966. Revolver. Parlophone: PCS 7009. -.Feb. 1967. 'Penny Lane/Strawberry fields forever'. Parlophone: R 5570. -.july 1967. 'All you need is love'. Parlophone: R 5620. 53

Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, 24 (his emphasis).

328

Rock Music

62 Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music -.Apr. 1969. 'Get back'. Apple: R 5777. -.Sept. 1969. Abbey Road. Apple: PCS 7088. - . May 1970. l.et It He. Apple: PCS 7096. [The] Buggies. c.Sept. 1979. The Age of Plastic. Island: 842 849 (US catalogue). Chumbawamba. Aug. 1997. 'Tubthumping'. EM!: EM 486. -.Sept. 1997. Tubthurnper. EM!: EMC 3773. The Clash. Dec. 1979. London Calling. CBS: CLASH. Phil Collins. Jan. 1981. 'In the air tonight'. Virgin: VSK 102. Deep Purple. Apr. 1972. Machine Head. Purple: TPSA 7504. Peter Gabriel. Mar. 1977. 'Salsbury Hill'. Charisma: CB 301. Genesis. Oct. 1972. Foxtrot. Charisma: CAS 1058. -.Mar. 1980. Duke. Charisma: CBR 101. -.Sept. 1981. Abamb. Charisma: CBR 102. -.Aug. 1983. 'Mama'. Virgin: MAMA l. The Human League. Oct. 1981. Dare. Virgin: T 2192. Kraftwerk. May 1978. The Man Machine. Capitol: EST 11728. Led Zeppelin. Nov. 1971. IV. Atlantic: 2401 012. Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Aug. 1976. 'Blinded by the light'. Bronze: BRO 29. Van Morrison. Mar. 1970. Moondance. Warner Brothers: iNS 1835. New Order. Mar. 1983. 'Blue Monday'. Factory: FAC 73 (12"). -.May 1985. Low-life. Factory: FACD 100. -.Oct. 1986. Brotherhood. Factory: FACD 150. Mike Oldfield. May 1973. Tubular Bells. Virgin: T 2001. -.Sept. 1974. Hergest Ridge. Virgin: V 2013. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Feb. 1980. Orchestral Mmweuvres in the Dark. Dindisc: DID 2. Orgy. Feb. 1999. 'Blue Monday'. F111: 44555 (US release). The Alan Parsons Project. June 1977. I Robot. Charisma: SPARTY 1012. Pink Floyd. Mar. 1973. The Dark Side of the Moon. Harvest: SHVL 804. The Plastic Ono Band. July 1969. 'Give peace a chance'. Apple: APPLE 13. The Police. Oct. 1979. Reggatta de Blanc. A&M: AMLH 64792. -.Oct. 1980. Zenyatta Mondatta. A&M: AMLH 64831. -.Oct. 1981. Ghost in the Machine. A&M: AMLK 63730. [The] Prodigy. July 1994. Music for the Jilted Generation. XL: XLCD 114. -.July 1997. The Fat of the Land. XL: XLCD 121. Queen. Nov. 1975. 'Bohemian rhapsody'. EM!: EM! 2375. Radiohead. june 1997. OK Computer. Parlophone: CDNODA TA 02. -.Oct. 2000. Kid A. Capitol: CDP 27753 (US catalogue). -.June 2001. Amnesiac. Capitol: CDP 32764 (US catalogue). -.June 2003. Hail to the Thief Capitol: CDP 84543 (US catalogue). The Rolling Stones. Jan. 1967. 'Let's spend the night together'/'Ruby Tuesday'. Decca: F 12546. The Specials. June 1981. 'Ghost town'. Chrysalis-2- Tone: CHSTT 17. Squeeze. Feb. 1978. Take me I'm yours'. A&M: AMS 7335. -.Nov. 1996. Excess Moderation. A&M: 540651-2. Tears For Fears. Mar. 1985. 'Everybody wants to rule the world'. Mercury: IDEA 9. 10cc. May 1975. 'I'm not in love'. Mercury: 6008 014. Pete Townshend. june 1980. 'Let my love open the door'. Atco: 7217 (US release). The Who. Sept. 1971. Who's Next. Track: 2408 102. -.july 1978. 'Who are you'. Polydor: WHO 1. -.Feb. 1981. 'You better you bet'. Polydor: WHO 4. Wings. july 1978. 'With a little luck'. Parlophone: R 6019. Yaz[ oo ]. Aug. 1982. Upstairs at Eric's. Mute: STUMM 7. Yes. Mar. 1971. The Yes Album. Atlantic: 2400 101. -.Nov. 1971. Fragile. Atlantic: 2401 019. -.Sept. 1977. 'Wonderous stories'. Atlantic: K 10999 (12").

Bibliography

Barrow, Steve, and Peter Dalton. Reggae: the Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides, 1997. Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

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Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music 63 Hurkholder, ). Peter. All Made of'J'unes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Harrowing. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. - - - . 'Cumulative Form in Ives and Others'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, New York, 1995. Hurns, Lori. 'Analytic Methodologies for Rock Music: Harmonic and Voice-Leading Strategies in Tori Amos's "Crucify"', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music: a Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett. New York: Garland, 2000.213-46. Butler, Mark J. 'Turning the Beat Around: Reinterpretation, Metrical Dissonance, and Asymmetry in Electronic Dance Music', Music Theory Online 7/6 (2001), . Cohn, Richard. Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich's Phase-Shifting Music', Perspectives ofNew Music 30 (1992), 146-77. Darcy, '1\farren. 'Creatio ex nihilo: the Genesis, Structure, and Meaning of the Rheingold Prelude', 19th Century Music 13 (1989), 79-100. Everett, '!\falter. The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ---.'Confessions from Blueberry Hell, or, Pitch Can Be a Sticky Substance', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, ed. Everett. New York: Garland, 2000. 269-345. - - - . The Beatles as Musicians: The Quany Men through Rubber Soul. New Yorlc Oxford University Press, 2001. Forte, Allen. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973. ---.The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era 1924-1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Frith, Simon. 'The Coventry Sound- The Specials', in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology ofPop. New York: Routledge, 1988. 77-80. Gilbert, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. New York: Routledge, 1999. Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Harrison, Daniel. 'After Sundown: the Beach Boys' Experimental Music', in Understanding Rock: Hssays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme M. Boone. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 33-57. Holm-Hudson, Kevin. '(Re)mixing as (Re)orchestration: Textural Revision in Mike Oldfield's Hergest Ridge'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Atlanta, 1999. Hubbs, Nadine. 'The Imagination of Pop- Rock Criticism', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, ed. Everett. New York: Garland, 2000. 3-29. jackson, Timothy. 'Aspects of Sexuality and Structure in the Later Symphonies ofTchaikovsky', Music Analysis 14 (1995), 3-25. Korsyn, Kevin. Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence', Music Analysis 10 ( 1991), 3-72. Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: Eng/ ish Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McCreless, Patrick. 'An Evolutionary Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Semitonal Relations', in The Second Practice of Ninetemth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.87-113. Middleton, Richard, ed. Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Moore, Allan F. 'The So-called "Flattened Seventh" in Rock', Popular Music 14 ( 1995), 185-20 I. Morgan, Robert P. 'Coda as Culmination: the First Movement of the "Eroica" Symphony', in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 357-76. New Order. Substance. Warner Reprise Video 38152-3 (1989). Newman, Richard. The Making of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. London: Music Maker Books, 1993. Regev, Motti. 'The "Pop- Rockization" of Popular Music', in Popular Music Studies, ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus. London: Arnold, 2002.251-64. Ricci, Adam. 'A "Hard Habit to Break": the Integration of Harmonic Cycles and Voice-Leading Structure in Two Songs by Chicago', Indiana Theory Review 21 (2000), 129-46. Rupprecht, Philip. 'Tonal Stratification and Uncertainty in Britten's Music', Journal of Music Theory 40 (1996), 311-46. Southall, Brian. Abbey Road: the Story of the World's Most Famous Recording Studios. Cambridge: Patrick Stephens, 1982. Spicer, Marie 'Large-Scale Strategy and Compositional Design in the Early Music of Genesis', in Expression in Pop-Rock Music, ed. Everett. 77-111.

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64 Spicer (Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music ---.'Ghosts in the Machine: Analysing Style in the Music of the Police'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Toronto, 2000. - - - . 'Hritish Pop-Rock Music in the Post-Heatles Era: Three Analytical Studies'. PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2001. - - - . 'Strategic lntertextuality in Three of John Lennon's Late Beatles Songs'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Columbus, 2002. Stump, Paul. The Music's All That Matters: a IIistory of Progressive Rock. London: Quartet Books, 1997. Tatom, Marianne. 'How to Disappear Completely: the Vanishing Subject in Radiohead's Kid A'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Philadelphia, 2001. Theberge, Paul.' "Plugged in": Technology and Popular Music', in The Cambridge Companion lo Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 3-25. Vail, Mark. Vintage Synthesizers: Groundbreaking Instruments and Pioneering Designers of Electronic Music Synthesizers. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1993. Winkler, Peter. 'Writing Ghost Notes: the Poetics and Politics of Transcription', in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1997. 169-203. Zak, Albin J, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

[16] Every Inch of My Love: Led Zeppelin and the Problem of Cock Rock Steve Waksman

(Meta) Physical Graffiti

A series of photos, laid out on a single page, tells a story about the status of the electric guitarist in 1970s rock. 'The Led Zeppelin Story', a brief history of the band's career, was published in 1975 by London rock journal Melody Maker in anticipation of Zeppelin's first British concerts in two years (Welch, 1975: pp. 32-3). Stretched sideways across two newspaper-length pages, the article is arranged in a way that offers an uncharacteristic degree of vertical space, far more than the standard page-by-page division. At the foot of the layout three photographs rest side by side. At the left corner is a picture of John Paul Jones, with electric bass in hand, peering into the distance. At the right is a picture of John 'Bonzo' Bonham attacking a cymbal of his surrounding drum set. Between the two stands singer Robert Plant, head tilted back, eyes shut, mouth open to direct a shout at the microphone. Each of these photos is cropped at the waist, and the three musicians are all squarely contained within the borders of their respective pictures; the only protruding object is Plant's microphone, which juts upward to break through the dark space that surrounds his body. The minor transgression of visual space occasioned by Plant's technologically-extended physical presence is significantly amplified by the accompanying photograph of guitarist Jimmy Page, which towers over those of his bandmates. Page's figure stretches across the expanse of the layout. Rather than being encased in a clearly bounded photographic space, the shape of his body dictates the visual arrangement of the article. His legs move down to the pictures of his fellow musicians, who appear at/or as his missing feet. Plant's wellplaced microphone resides where Page's left foot would otherwise be, and it directs our gaze toward the guitarist's crotch, where his instrument is poised. With his left hand, Page frets a chord at the bottom of the guitar's neck. With his right, he wields a violin bow that he rubs against the strings. Meanwhile, his bearded face is directed downwards at his instrument in a look of intense concentration. Beside him is the simple caption, 'Jimmy Page: guitarist extraordinaire'. Led Zeppelin was one of the most commercially successful bands of the 1970s, and also among the most 'powerful', in terms of their influence and reputed effect upon audiences. Indeed, 1975 found them at the peak of their success. Their new double album, Physical Graffiti, rushed to the top of the sales charts upon its release, and the band embarked upon one of its trademark massive tours, all of which served to strengthen the epic sense of grandiosity

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surrounding the band. Journalist Chris Welch, for instance, testified, 'It says much for the power and imagination [Led Zeppelin] pack into their playing, that somehow the very name of the band conjures something vast and heroic' (p. 32). Similar sentiments could be found during the 1970s throughout the rock press, 1 and in the many retrospective articles written since the band's demise in 1980. By most accounts, the central element of the band's vast impact was guitarist Jimmy Page. As much as Led Zeppelin was in fact a 'band', a collective entity, Page was regularly acknowledged to be the group's presiding figure, the brains behind Zeppelin's sonic brawn. In part this was due to his role in founding the band, yet the sort of attention bestowed on Page (ofwhich the opening sequence of photographs is a representative example) bespeaks more than matters of concrete history. If Led Zeppelin as a whole was something of a heroic entity to many fans and critics, Page himself exemplified a distinct version of heroism, one that can be traced back to the 1960s (or perhaps even earlier) and flourished during the 1970s: the guitar hero. In this essay, I will focus upon the career of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin to analyze the significance of the electric guitar in 1970s rock music. My premise is that the guitar hero represents a crystallization oftrends begun in the 1960s that cast the lead guitarist as an ideal male type whose virtuosity and mastery of technology connoted a unique form of power. Jimi Hendrix was in many ways the archetype of the modern guitar hero, and the confluence of race, gender and sexuality that marked his career cast a large shadow upon the subsequent history of electric guitar performance. 2 Yet the example of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin presents a unique set of challenges to the study of gender and rock performance. Widely hailed as progenitors of heavy metal (despite the band members' protestations), Led Zeppelin has also been understood by many as the quintessential purveyors of 'cock rock', that brand of guitar-driven music that most clearly articulates a male-oriented regime of power and pleasure. Consideration of 'cock rock' as a term of analysis, and of Zeppelin's relationship to that term, is here the primary focus, with a particular eye towards the ways in which the electric guitar might signify the all-mighty phallus. First, however, I want to examine more closely Page's status as guitar hero by drawing attention to one of the more curious details of the above mentioned photograph of the guitarist: the violin bow. An incongruous object within the context of rock performance, the bow was quite familiar to Led Zeppelin fans, having been a regular part of Page's onstage repertoire since the band's origin in 1968, and even before that when he was a member of the Yard birds. When asked about his use of the bow, Page asserted that it was not just a gimmick, and that he used it because 'some great sounds come out. You can employ legitimate bowing techniques and gain new scope and depth. The only drawback is that a guitar has a flat neck, opposed to a violin's curved neck, which is a bit limiting' (Welch, 1970b: p. 10). Two ideas emerge here regarding Page's role as 'guitar hero'. First, Page, like Hendrix before him, is concerned with using the electric guitar to expand the sonic palette of rock. In the bowing segment recorded in the Zeppelin concert film, The Song Remains the Same, Page generates a range of unusual sonic effects organized into a free-floating structure, sans accompaniment, that gives the guitarist maximum room for experimentation. Second, Page's recourse to a language of proper musical technique makes plain the central role of virtuosity to his persona, and to the guitar hero in general. The guitar hero is a master of his instrument, possessing the technique

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necessary to play musical passages outside the reach of other musicians; while Page was often rather humble with regard to his own technique, his concern with such matters shows him playing to type nonetheless. Technical capabilities alone do not explain the impact of the guitar hero, however. Beyond whatever Page might say about' legitimate bowing techniques', the use of a violin bow to play an electric guitar is a decidedly illegitimate practice. It was the very incongruity of the bow that made it such an effective symbol, connoting a style of virtuosity not typically associated with rock. Thus did Chris Welch ( 1970a), in an earlier article on Page, deem the guitarist the '"Paganini of the Seventies", who makes audiences scream by scraping a violin bow across screeching guitar strings' (p. 16). Here Page's musical authority is put on par with one of the most noted of classical virtuosos in a manner that suggests the transhistorical power of musical process. 3 However, as Welch elaborates the comparison, other, stranger dimensions appear. He (1970a) reminds us that 'as a young man, the violinist [Paganini] wore tight trousers, hypnotized women and made them faint, while men said he must be possessed by the Devil, such was the effect of his playing' (p. 16). The same analogy between Page and Paganini is made by Stephen Davis ( 1985) in his biography of Led Zeppelin, Hammer of the Gods, who recounts in greater detail the story of Paganini's reputed deal with the Devil, and asserts that 'there has always been something about music and the lives of virtuoso musicians that carries with it the whiff of brimstone' (p. 8). These supernatural overtones are further reinforced by the film version of Page's bowed guitar solo. Beginning as a rather straightforward documentation of the performance, the visual track of the scene mutates into a fantasy sequence featuring the guitarist as an archetypal seeker, climbing a mountain in search -one assumes -of eternal truth. When he reaches the top, he is met by the sight of an ancient man bearing a light and a staff. The camera zooms onto the man's face, which undergoes a transformation backwards in time, tracing the various ages of man. As layers of old age (and makeup) are peeled from the face, it becomes recognizable as Page's own; he is positioned as both seeker and source of wisdom. While the bow-induced guitar pyrotechnics create a maelstrom of sound on the audio track, the old man Page continues his transfiguration, his face shifting from adolescence to infancy to the fetal stage, and then reversing the process of aging to become an old man once again. At this point, the aged figure whips his staff over his head, weaving a trail of multi-colored impressions in the air above him, and then fades from sight as Page the guitarist reassumes the screen, bow no longer in hand, to whip into the guitar solo section of' Dazed and Confused' with the rest ofthe band back in tow. Often taken as an example of Page's pretentiousness and tendency to take himself too seriously, 4 the preceding scene nonetheless offers compelling evidence ofthe extent to which Page's capabilities as a guitarist were regularly framed in terms of power and mystery. Power was common to all 'guitar heroes'; mystery was more specific to Page, whose widely-noted interest in the occult played into his image as an explorer of obscure or unknown musical territories. 5 In a dialogue between rock writers John Swenson and Bruce Malamut (1975) concerning Zeppelin, one ofthe principals speaks of the band's music as' Devil music' and goes on to declare that Page 'has this whole idea of how to play that is so unique, so dissonant, so

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out of step with the norm that he develops a new language' (p. 65). Even for those less concerned with the demonic underpinnings of his music, Page stood as a musician who pushed listeners in unexpected directions. In a review of one of Zeppelin's concerts, critic Roy Hollingsworth (1972) described Page's virtuosity: 'when technical ability might just swamp feeling, Page finds a dirty dischord, and lets it cut ugly and messy through the tapestry. It sort of jerks your body and throws you and then he finds a true line again, and weaves on in a straight, sharp direction' (p. 25). These representations of Page share the idea of the guitarist as an unsettling performer, one who pushes his audience past the comfort zone yet manages to satisfy them nonetheless. Strong hints arise here of a romantic ideal of the artist as a heroic individual, one whose freedom of imagination permits him to transgress or transcend the constraints of everyday life. 6 From this perspective, the critical preoccupation with Page's interest in the occult can be interpreted as an example of the historical romantic association between art, and especially music, and the forces ofunreason. 7 More intriguing, though, is Page's correspondence to what musicologist Lawrence Kramer (1990) has termed the 'impossible object' of the virtuoso performer. Kramer describes the impossible object as an excessive figure that arouses both desire and repulsion, and he locates this structure of desire most firmly in the manner of 'bravura performance' employed by virtuoso musicians. The esthetics of bravura reduces music to sound production. What the audience sees is a theatrical icon of the inspired musician: what it hears is a highly charged extension of the performer's touch, breath, rhythm (90).

With the virtuoso, the sound of music becomes inseparable from the spectacle of the performer, whose technical flamboyance disrupts any effort to perceive music as a self-contained structure. Every note takes explicit shape as a physical manifestation of the performing musician. This intense physicality is often transmitted to those in the audience, as indicated above in Roy Hollingsworth's assessment of Page. In rock music of the 1970s, moreover, this tendency of the guitar hero to exceed the normal boundaries of musical practice was often indistinguishable from the electric guitar's role in defining those boundaries, particularly with regard to the gendered nature of rock performance.

Every Inch of My Love The association of the electric guitar with excessive male physicality has been one of the most prominent themes in the recent history of the instrument. As I have argued elsewhere (forthcoming), the electric guitar as 'technophallus' was built out of a highly charged relationship between white and black men, within which white males sought to appropriate what they perceived to be the potency of black men. 8 The electric guitar mediated this relationship in at least two ways. Visually, it was used to accentuate the phallic dimensions of the performing male body. Aurally, the volume and distortion generated by the instrument had a similar effect, amplifying the physical presence of the performer. The London music scene of the 1960s out of which Led Zeppelin emerged was perhaps the main crucible of activity with regard to this style of guitar performance. 9 It was no accident thatJimi Hendrix achieved a degree of success in London that had eluded him in the U.S. By the time of Hendrix's

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arrival in 1967, a significant cult of the electric guitarist had already developed, largely around a trio of musicians who all played, at one time or another, in a single band, The Yardbirds: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Part of the British 'beat music' movement that arose in the middle of the decade, the Yardbirds in their early period were considered counterparts of the Rolling Stones, insofar as both groups exhibited the influence of African-American music without the melodic, pop-oriented trappings of the Beatles. When the band began to move towards a more well-produced sound in keeping with standards of pop success, their guitarist, Clapton, opted to quit rather than compromise his commitment to a blues-based authenticity. As the story goes, Jimmy Page, then a noted London session guitarist, was asked to replace Clapton and refused, recommending his friend Jeff Beck instead. Page himself joined the band in the middle of 1966, replacing bassist Paul Samweii-Smith and eventually shifting to guitar, his native instrument. For a time, the Yardbirds featured Page and Beck as dual lead guitarists, but personality conflicts led to Beck's departure, and Page occupied the lead guitar position by himself until the break-up of the band in 1968. This continual shifting of personnel led long-time Yardbirds producer Giorgio Gomelsky to label the group a 'laboratory for lead guitar players' (Yorke, 1993: 44). Particularly after Beck joined, the band's 'experimental' impulses were widely championed in the London rock press. Along with Pete Townshend of the Who, Beck was one of the first British guitarists to play with the possibilities of electronic sound, crafting feedback into his solos in a way that treaded the line between controlled and uncontrolled expression. Indeed, the ability to impose control upon the potential sonic chaos of the electric guitar contributed greatly to the perception of the guitarist as a heroic figure. Meanwhile, Clapton more thoroughly represented the other side of the guitar hero equation: the mastery of the guitar as a solo instrument through the acquisition of a blues-based virtuosity. As art school students in the early 1960s, Clapton, Beck, and Page all participated in the bohemian networks of exchange that developed at these schools, networks focused upon the shared appreciation of American blues and rock 'n' roll (Frith and Home, 1987: pp. 83-9). Whereas Beck and Page never lost their early attachment to rock 'n' roll guitarists like Cliff Gallup and James Burton, Clapton has described how his tastes shifted significantly during his tenure with the Yardbirds: At first I played exactly like Chuck Berry for six or seven months. Then I got into the older I just finally got completely overwhelmed in this brand-new world. I studied it and bluesmen. listened to it and went right down in it and came back up in it (Wenner, 1981: p. 28). 00.

00.

Clapton's immersion in the blues, and his willingness to quit one of London's most popular groups rather than compromise his musical principles, led to his virtual deification among a core of rock enthusiasts. The stories of 'Ciapton Is God' graffiti appearing on London streets during his tenure with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers have become part of the popular mythology of rock. More relevant to my purposes here, though, is the way in which first rock 'n' roll and then the blues signified a 'brand new world' for Clapton and his fellow musicians. This world was made exotic by its association with two terms of otherness, 'black' and 'American', which

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together fonned the basis of an alternative teen identity among British youth (Chambers, 1985: pp. 31-7). The electric guitar, in turn, became one of the primary symbols of this identity, conferring an aura of'coolness' upon anyone lucky enough to own it, let alone play it. Clapton (1993) has related his attachment to the guitar to his youthful fantasies about 'being a Chicago bluesman, driving around in a Cadillac and living the life', a notion of black existence that he now acknowledges was born out of ignorance of the real circumstances of African American life (p. 1). Jeff Beck, meanwhile, provides a far more detailed account of his efforts to build his first electric instrument. The first one I made was out of a piece of cigar box, and then I progressed on that. ... And I had so little money, and that was the thing I wanted to do so much. I'd go down to the shop and wait till the Oh boy, I place was pretty packed out and I whipped one of these pickups right out of the shop. couldn't have cared itT d got thrown in jail for six months, I had my pickup. And there was a little hole cut in the guitar that had been waiting for that pickup for about eight months. And it fitted perfectly because I had already got the dimensions from a plan, and it just slipped in there with two screws and, boy, I was the king! I used to deliberately carry my guitar around without a case so everyone could see what it looked like the expressions on people's faces when they saw this weird guitar, that was something. It wasn't something boring like a violin or a sax in a very stock-looking case. It was bright yellow with these wires and knobs on it; people just freaked out (Rosen, 1978: p. l 0). 00.

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Beck's anecdote offers a wonderful account of the prestige associated with owning an electric guitar. The strangeness of the instrument made it an ideal symbol of rebellion for young males like Beck and his schoolboy chum Jimmy Page, who disdained the norms of bourgeois life, here represented by 'boring' instruments like the violin or saxophone. In contrast to those 'stock-looking' instruments, Beck's guitar was wholly unique, a product ofhis own endeavors and a statement of his personality. The electric guitar, in these early years, was linked to a version of expressive authenticity seen to be opposed to the standardization of everyday life; as Page states, 'The good thing about the guitar was that they didn't teach it in school. I know that Jeff Beck and I enjoyed pure music because we didn't have to' (Davis, 1985: p. 12). Even more provocative is Beck's language in describing his placement of the pickup, a perfect example of the ways in which the ideal of masculine achievement contained within the guitar hero ('boy, I was the king!') hinges in part (or in parts) upon the eroticization of technology. The pickup, without which the guitar could not be amplified, stands in Beck's narrative as the part which makes the electric guitar into a whole. This tension between the whole and its parts is, according to Judith Butler (1993), a central dynamic in the construction of the phallus as a privileged signifier. In her essay, 'The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary', Butler deconstructs the opposition between physical and imagined bodies to raise the problem of 'determining what constitutes a body part at all, and ... what constitutes an erotogenic body part in particular' (58). Her goal is to upset the persistent assumption that the penis is the dominant part in the production of sexual pleasure. She articulates a complex argument about the relationship between the penis, as that part of the male body taken to be most essentially masculine, and the phallus, as the imaginary signifier that functions to organize the various parts of the male body into a unified whole and to mask the extent to which that unity gains its significance from a single part (pp. 79-80). She asserts that the phallus bears no necessary relationship to the penis, or to the physical male body, that insofar

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as it represents an imaginary relationship, the phallus can be appropriated by any active sexual subject regardless of biological attributes. The phallus can be appropriated in ways that do not merely reproduce or imitate masculinist modes of pleasure and power. The full implications of Butler's critique of the phallus lead us beyond the scope of this essay, but her argument is central to my analysis of the gendered dimensions of the electric guitar. As much as the pickup stood for Jeff Beck as the part that ensured his instrument's wholeness, the electric guitar itself can be interpreted as the part that ensures the integrity of the performing male body, a body whose very dependence upon technology threatens its unity. This is the main importance of the electric guitar as technophallus: as a phallus clearly dissociable from the penis, it produces the appearance of male potency even as it threatens to denaturalize that appearance, to reduce masculinity to its constituent parts. All of which brings us to the matter of 'cock rock'. Though often used as a generic descriptive term to denote the masculinist orientation of rock, 'cock rock' has also been defined in more specific terms by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie (1990) to refer to the male-centered exhibitionism of hard rock performance. 1° For Frith and McRobbie, cock rock is 'explicitly about male sexual performance', and as such stands as a distinctly homosocial activity that holds little attraction for girls who 'are educated into understanding sex as something nice, soft, loving, and private' (p. 374). In cock rock performance 'mikes and guitars are phallic symbols', and 'cock rockers' musical skills become synonymous with their sexual skills (hence Jimi Hendrix's simultaneous status as stud and guitar hero)' (p. 374). The culmination of such practices for Frith and McRobbie was 'the heavy metal macho style of Led Zeppelin', which represented the consolidation of 'mass youth music ... as a male form of expression', and therefore repudiates the idea held by many that rock offers a 'liberated' version of sexuality (p. 383). Much of the 'cock rock' framework built by Frith and McRobbie is sympathetic with my own argument. Yet, as Frith ( 1990) himself acknowledged in a later essay, there is also much that is crude and reductionistic in the 'cock rock' formulation, particularly regarding the authors' failure to define clearly the relationship between sex and gender, or to decide whether cock rock merely reinforced existing gender relations or worked to produce these relationships (p. 420). My reasons for addressing it- despite these reservations voiced by one of the authors -are twofold: first, the term 'cock rock', and the conceptual framework it implies, remains influential in rock criticism, specifically with regard to Led Zeppelin; second, there are flaws in the critical notion of 'cock rock' beyond those recognized by Frith.

*** The quintessential cock rock song, by almost unanimous critical decision, is Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love', the lead track from their 1969 album, Led Zeppelin II. Structured around a three-note riff jerked into motion by Page's distorted guitar, the song's musical insistence -guitar, bass, and drums locked into a repetitive groove that stutters toward resolution with every measure - was reinforced by Robert Plant's vocals, which mediated between blues shout and high-pitched scream in a manner befitting the coarse sentiments of the lyrics:

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Way, way down inside I'm gonna give you my love I'm gonna give you every inch of my love Gonna give you my love

After two verse/chorus sequences, Plant's voice and Page's sliding guitar descend into a mid-section that shifts radically from the song's main riff. John Bonham's quickly tapped cymbal supports an assemblage of seemingly formless, unsettling sonic effects generated by Page's tape experiments and his use of the theremin, an unusual instrument that allows for the manipulation of sound by waving a hand around an antenna attached to an electronic oscillator (Davis, 1985: p. 97). Over these sounds that alternately crash and flow in waves, Plant's voice emits various groans and heaving pants that are similarly processed by electronic technology. Out of this morass, a sustained, middle-ranged hum induced by Page's guitar is punctuated by Bonham's now-pounding drum, which gives way to a stunning series of virtuosic episodes by Page, notable for their brevity: sharptoned high-pitched bent notes interrupted at every measure by two severely loud power chords. The sixth such episode brings us to another versechorus statement that speeds along into a second instance of dissolution. As the instruments fall silent. Plant's voice bursts forth the exclamation, Waaaaaaay down inside Woman You need [guitar, bass and drums issue two massive power chords, from E, the song's dominant, to A, and then lapse back into silence] Loooooooooooooove

The descending pitch of Plant's last, extremely protracted syllable gives way to yet another fit of Bonham's drums and, as the main riff reasserts itself one last time, Plant's guttural vocal gestures echo a How lin' Wolf blues: 'Shake for me girl/I wannabe your back door man'. In his discussion of 'Whole Lotta Love', Charles Shaar Murray (1389) stresses the tune's crude paraphrase of blues sexuality, using the song to illustrate how this particular strain of the blues 'gradually mutated into the penile dementia of heavy-metal rock' (p. 59). Whereas the clearest precedent for the song, Muddy Waters' 'You Need Love', is described by Murray as 'intimate, relaxed, utterly sensual', Led Zeppelin's version is likened to 'thermonuclear gang rape' within which the woman addressed in the song is reduced to a 'mere receptacle' (p. 60). Like Frith and McRobbie, Murray stresses the extent to which such a style of performance is ultimately intended for other men, serving as a ritual that validates masculine prowess. He goes on to assert that the 'Love' of the title 'is a euphemism for something measurable with a ruler. When Plant howls, "I'm gonna give you every inch ofMAH LURVE", the term "imply" is too mild for the intensity he brings to the suggestion that his love is, quite literally, his penis' (p. 60). That Led Zeppelin, in a song like 'Whole Lotta Love', work to elide any separation of penis and phallus in a way that upholds a phallocentric regime of power and pleasure is, for all intents and purposes, inarguable. What I find problematic in the observations of Murray, Frith and McRobbie is the extent to which their criticisms, however well articulated, leave this operation

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intact, and how the term 'cock rock' reifies the very process it seeks to break down. I want to suggest that 'Whole Lotta Love' presents a less unified version of masculinity than the above critics would admit. The interruption of the throbbing, single-minded riff by the quagmire of the middle section enacts a crisis in the representation of phallic potency. 11 Even the resuscitation performed by Page on his guitar is a rigidly contained musical statement, with his virtuosity hemmed in by the wall of sound produced by the band as a whole. While Page's guitar and Plant's microphone do indeed work to produce an effect of phallic mastery, they do so in a way that makes plain how that mastery is not a given, but must be achieved, and further signify that masculine integrity, as Judith Butler suggests, continually threatens to break down into its parts. The relationship between Page and Plant alluded to above warrants further attention, for they present an important example ofthe sorts of relationships that were established between men in hard rock performance. Reviewers of the band's shows regularly discussed the interplay between the two, examples of which can also be seen in The Song Remains the Same: singer and guitarist seek to echo and imitate one another 'as both get inside each other's phrases to twist, expand and blow them up', with Plant exploiting the possibilities of electronic sound every bit as much as Page does (Dove, 1969: p. 22). Such exercises work to reinforce both a sense of fraternal bonding and camaraderie among the musicians and, as the above observations imply, the homosocial content of cock rock. As described by Robert Plant, the interaction between himself and Page was at once tense and playful: Jimmy was a vicious bastard .... [During the climax of the song 'You Shook Me'] we used to lean forward and look at each other. He would go higher and higher up the frets until he was somewhere around top E. I could see his fingers going further and further up, and I'd be going, 'No, don't do this to me!' ('Led Zeppelin, U.S. Tour', 1987: p. 136).

Much as 'Whole Lotta Love' presented the assertion of sexual/musical prowess as a process ridden with conflict, the interplay between the members of Led Zeppelin was marked by both cooperation and competition. 12 Equally compelling here is the disturbance of the boundary between voice and guitar, and the manner in which the singer's voice is, in descriptions of the band in performance, effectively denaturalized. Plant emphasized how he used his voice as 'another instrument ... geared along the lead guitar's screaming highs' (Walley, 1969: p. 22). Page and Plant employed electronic technology to negotiate their shared space, complementing and clashing with one another as they worked to strike a balance of power between their respective instruments. 13 In the rock world of the 1960s and 1970s, a similarly competitive dynamic existed among lead guitarists. Indeed, one of the main results of the heroization of the guitarist was precisely this highly gendered element of competition to see who could outplay whom. Jimmy Page often spoke in such terms when describing his experience with the Yardbirds: The whole group was a guitar precedent. Everybody was just into doing what's now known as jamming on stage. Eric [Clapton] began the precedent, and when he left Jeff [Beck] felt that he had to be better than Eric, and when I was left, I felt I had to try hard too (Yorke, 1993: p. 55).

Meanwhile, Yardbirds' bassist Chris Dreja spoke of the tension that often arose onstage during the brief period when Page and Beck were together in the band: 'I personally don't think

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Jimmy ever went out on stage with the intention of trying to blow Jeff offthe stage. But with Jeff! think it got to be a "my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours" sort of thing' (Yorke, 1993: p. 49). Inter-group tensions reflected the broader mood of the rock scene. By the 1970s, guitarists interviewed by Guitar Player magazine regularly bemoaned the emphasis upon technique that turned music into a contest to see who could play the fastest, loudest or most precisely. 14 Jimmy Page, for his part, complained that 'people shouldn't expect to see the epitome of what they consider to be the best rock guitar There's nobody who's the best- nobody's the best' (Yorke, 1971: p. 18). The process of heroization was already well underway, breeding a new hierarchy of masculine achievement that was continually reinforced, first by magazine polls that ranked guitarists according to their abilities, and secondly by guitarists - Page definitely included- who combined virtuosic display, bodily flamboyance and mastery of the ability to control and manipulate technology. 000

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But, as Sheryl Garratt suggests: The people most attracted to the ideal of the hard, hairy, virile hunk of male are, in fact, other men (Garratt, 1990: p. 402).

She articulates what seems to have become the conventional wisdom regarding the guitaroriented style of hard rock performance purveyed by Led Zeppelin. It certainly restates the assumptions of Murray, Frith and McRobbie regarding cock rock as a sort of homoerotic spectacle oriented towards the affirmation of male prowess. While there is a significant degree of truth in this interpretation, I think we might do well, once again, to investigate this claim further. To begin, Eve Sedgwick (1985) reminds us that the line between homosociality and homosexuality is one of the most strenuously guarded in the last several hundred years ofEuroAmerican culture: 'What counts as the sexual is variable and itself political'. She goes on to assert that while homosociality has been central to the operation of partriarchy, it has tended to exist alongside a virulent homophobia (p. 15). One can easily apply such notions to the study of rock sexuality. As the electric guitar as technophallus works to affirm a phallocentric, male-dominated sexual order, it works with equal vigor to produce the appearance that this order is unquestionably heterosexual. Thus did Susan Hiwatt (1971) argue that despite the relative marginalization of women within rock, 'The whole rock scene (as opposed to rock music) depends on our being there. Women are necessary at these places of worship so that, in between sets, the real audience (men) can be assured of getting that woman they're supposed to like' (p. 146). However eroticized the relationships between men might seem in hard rock performance, then, we stress their homoerotic content at the risk of reducing their complexity and their full political significance. 000

Where Led Zeppelin is concerned, women tend to assume one of two roles in the narratives spun around the band's career: wife or groupie. The wives are the mostthoroughly marginalized characters in books like Stephen Davis' Hammer of the Gods and Richard Cole's Stairway to Heaven. When they are mentioned, it is usually in the context of trying to keep them ignorant of the band's sexual antics while on the road, which, of course, is where the groupies enter the picture. Tales of Zeppelin's sexual excesses have assumed mythical proportions, which members of the band have done nothing to deny. Plant's nostalgic reminiscence of 'shoving the Plaster Casters' cast of Jimi Hendrix's penis up one of the girls in Detroit' as

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an instance of 'free love' might be read as disingenuous, but no interpretation can overcome the connotations of rape contained within the scene (Considine, 1990: p. 59). The spectre of female violation that hovered around the Zeppelin entourage was powerfully conveyed by Ellen Sander (1973), one of the relatively few women who wrote regularly about rock during the 1960s and 1970s. After travelling with the band for weeks to report on their 1969 U.S. tour for Life magazine, Sander 'stopped in to say good-bye and god speed'. She continued, Two members of the group attacked me, shrieking and grabbing at my clothes, totally over the edge. I fought them off until [Zeppelin manager] Peter Grant rescued me, but not before they managed to tear my dress down the back. My young man of the evening took me home in a limousine borrowed from an agent friend and I trembled in exhaustion, anger, and bitterness all the way. Over the next week I tried to write the story. It was not about to happen. It took a whole year just to get back to my notes again with any kind of objectivity. If you walk inside the cages of the zoo you get to see the animals close up, stroke the captive pelts, and mingle with the energy behind the mystique. You also get to smell the shit firsthand (p. 122).

Sander's is a rare female voice that articulates the trauma that many women who participated in the rock scene undoubtedly shared. Her example stands as evidence that the deployment of sexuality by the members of Led Zeppelin had very little to do with 'free love', or with any notion of sexuality providing for female pleasure or female agency. That such behavior was effectively normalized in the context of 1970s rock is borne out by another tour report filed by a female rock journalist, Jaan Uhelszki (1977). More subtle in tone and detail, Uhelszki recounts a conversation with an evasive Plant concerning the band's activities. She notes how guarded Zeppelin try to be about their offstage antics, and then teases her reader by asking, 'But wouldn't you be disappointed if there weren't any? I know I'd be aghast if I heard Zeppelin had cleaned up their offstage act' (pp. 46-7). Later in the article, Uhelszki pauses to wonder 'if part of their popularity is due to the fact that they're the last of an era of cock rockers who play dirty and, if you'll excuse the expression, "chauvinistic" rock 'n' roll' (p. 50). Uhelszki 's critical voice rears its head, but defensively, for she knows both her audience and her subjects too well. Rock stars of Zeppelin's stature were expected to play dirty. Part of the privilege of being a male rock star was the power to do so with impunity, even when the stakes involved something on the order ofrape. 15 Important as it is to recognize the reality of sexual violence in this context, though, it would be a mistake to conclude that violence was the only outcome for women drawn to Zeppelin, or that rock sexuality offers no satisfying outlet for female heterosexual desires. The memoir of Pamela Des Barres (1988), who for years was the reigning groupie on the Hollywood rock scene, offers a fascinating account of a woman who was clearly coveted as a prize by male rock stars, yet who in having sex with those rock stars also enacted her own version of sexual fantasy. Her discussion of her sexual coming of age, which occurred amidst her shifting allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, is especially suggestive: My brief sexual encounters with [my boyfriend] Bob had opened new vistas of turgid, twisting thoughts, and Mick Jagger personified a penis. I took my new records and my glossy photographs into my rock and roll room, where I scaled new heights of tortuous teen abandon .... With my precious

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Paul [McCartney], I never really got past the hoping stage, but now I dared to imagine Mick with his widewale corduroy trousers down around his ankles (pp. 23-4).

Out of such youthful desires, Des Barres formed her ideal of 'hanging on to the hand of an English rock star', which she fulfilled many times with figures like Jagger and, in perhaps her most reputed affair, Jimmy Page. For Des Barres, Page and Led Zeppelin epitomized 'The Glorious English Pop Star to perfection', with their long hair and satin outfits (p. 133). She recounts the aura of danger that hovered around the band, and particularly Page, who had already earned something of a reputation among the groupies on the scene. However, when she is invited to accompany the guitarist on tour, she exclaims, 'I was exactly what I had always aspired to be: the girlfriend of the lead guitar player in the world's biggest and best rock and roll band' (p. 142). Des Barres' experiences cannot be taken as wholly typical. As perhaps the most coveted groupie on the rock scene, she occupied a clear position of privilege that exempted her from the mistreatment that many other women faced. Yet her account of the pleasures to be derived from a fascination with 'hard' rock stars should not be judged as a simple anomaly either. In a 1969 interview with Germaine Greer (1969), for instance, a groupie by the name of Dr. G. asserted that 'the great thing about starfucking is that every time you play a record, or just dig his thing again, it's all there, like he was there' (p. 32). Meanwhile, Greer (1986) herself offers a more hands-off analysis of the appeal of rock stars for women. Contrasting rock musicians with the 1970s proliferation of nude male pin-ups that were supposed to turn women on sexually, Greer declares that the musicians 'celebrate phallic energy' rather than 'exposing passive flesh'. 'The way the singer moves, the pulse and boom of the music, the guitarist's affair with his instrument, the exhibitionism of the drummer, all demonstrate the power of libido' in a manner that Greer herself found quite arousing (p. 181 ). Regarding Led Zeppelin, similar sentiments are put forth by Susan Whitall in a 1979 article in Creem, in which the writer remembers listening to: Jimmy's tarty guitar on 'You Shook Me'- a few bars and my lower torso would become 17-year-old rice pudding. Which brings me to my pet Heavy Metal theory- girl fans only go for the bands who sell sex along with their consciousness-destroying power chords. And nobody can peddle below-thebelt heaving and moaning as prettily as the Zep boys (p. 27).

Zeppelin's brand of phallic display was indeed male-oriented, and the band's antics sometimes had violent effects that were not merely imaginary. But neither of these points foreclosed the possibility of active female desires within which the boys figured as coveted objects. Along these lines, perhaps the most provocative statement was made by Emily XYZ (1994). Writing for a recent Village Voice retrospective on Led Zeppelin, Emily XYZ reiterates Susan Whitall's observations concerning the sexual content of Zeppelin's music, but in more exaggerated terms: If ever a band generated SEX on a grand, gothic scale, it was Zeppelin. So high was their net efficiency that by 1979 it was determined they had added something like 40 per cent to the world's

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proven reserves ofUncontrollable and Insatiable Lust. In fact, there is nothing in their music but sex, all of it unequivocally male. Jimmy Page's insistent guitar is the voice of a man bent on seduction, whose goal is not pleasure but absolute domination .... And Plant is his flip side: regular guy as victim of coldhearted sorceress, kicked in the balls by the little schoolgirl he worships ... in a word, PUSSYWHIPPED. Makes my cock hard just to think about it, and I don't even have a cock (p. 72).

'Cock rock' here assumes a new fluidity rooted in the sort of lack of sexual fixity suggested by Judith Butler in her discussion of the lesbian phallus. Emily XYZ appropriates through language the cock that others have assumed was only for male use, and she proceeds to proclaim that 'Jimmy Page the two-timing fuck and Robert Plant the pathetic dweeb made soundtracks for the edification of young women everywhere, all with the same moral: sex is power. Love may be democratic, but sex is autocratic, maybe even dictatorial' (p. 76). Where critics of cock rock have decried the gender/power dynamic enacted in Led Zeppelin's music, 16 Emily XYZ celebrates its exaltation of potency. Her comments do not overturn the 'cock rock' argument so much as they present a model of desire that existing criticisms of rock sexuality have rarely taken into account. Although desire and power often reinforce one another in the context of rock performance, and both generally work to uphold patterns of male domination, desire is nonetheless not determined by these relations in any simple correlative manner. Moreover, phallocentrism does not stand in absolute opposition to a pure, non-hierarchical 'feminine' desire, as some critics have suggested. It exists as a powerful- at times, brutal- tendency that opens certain possibilities for pleasure and closes others. This may not be the sort of 'liberated' sexuality that many had come to hope from rock during the 1960s, but neither was it a bleak, repressive sexual dystopia that only served the gratification of some mythic 'cock'. Works Cited Altham, K. 'Question-time with the Yardbirds', New Musical Express (965) (July 9): 10 Butler, J. 1993. 'The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary', in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 57-91. New York: Routledge. Chambers, I. 1985. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture, New York: St. Martin's Press. Christgau, R. 1994. 'Dumb Genius', Village Voice 39 (46) (November 15): 69. Clapton, E. 1993. 'Foreword' to Damn Right I've Got the Blues: Buddy Guy and the Blues Roots of Rock-and-Roll, by Donald Wilcock with Buddy Guy, I. San Francisco: Woodford Press. Cole, R. and R. Trubo. 1992. Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored. New York: Harper Collins. Considine, J.D. 1990. 'Led Zeppelin', Rolling Stone (587) (September 20): 57-60, l 09. Davis, S. 1985. Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, New York: Ballantine Books. Des Barres, P. 1988. I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, New York: Jove Books. Dove, I. 1969. 'Herman Wooden in Mods Dress', Billboard 81 (24) (June 14): 22. Duncan, R. 1977. 'The View from Hear', Creem 8 (8) (January): 50-I. Frith, S. 1990. 'Afterthoughts', in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin, 419-24. New York: Pantheon Books. - - - . 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value ofPopular Music, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frith, S. and H. Horne. 1987. Art into Pop, London: Methuen. Frith, S. and A. McRobbie. 1990. 'Rock and Sexuality', in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin, 372-89. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Garratt, S. 1990. 'Teenage Dreams', in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin, 398-409. New York: Pantheon Books. Greer, G. 1969. 'The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie's Vision', Oz (19): 31-3, 47 - - - . 1986. The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Hi watt, S. 'Cock Rock', in Twenty-Minute Fandangos and Forever Changes: A Rock Bazaar, edited by J. Eisen, 141-7. New York: Random House. Hollingsworth, R. 1972. 'Whole Lotta Led', Melody Maker 47 (July 1): 24-5. Kramer, L. 1990. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900, Berkeley: University of California Press. 'Led Zeppelin. U.S. Tour, December 1968-January 1969', 1987. Rolling Stone (501) (June 4): 57, 136. Logan, N. 1969. 'Zeppelin and Fleetwood Take off with a Roar', New Musical Express (1173) (July 5): 13. Marsh, D. 1976. 'They Probably Think This Film Is About Them', Rolling Stone (227) (December 2): 19, 21. McClary, S. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, C. 1989. Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Rock 'n' Roll Revolution, New York: St. Martin's Press. Press, J. and S. Reynolds. 1995. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'n' Roll, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Robinson, L. 1975. 'Led Zeppelin Dances on Air and It Ain't the Quaalude Shuffle', Creem 6 (12) (May 1975): 34-9, 70-l. Rock Guitarists. 1978. Saratoga: Guitar Player Books. Rock Guitarists, Volume ll. 1978. New York: Guitar Player Books. Rosen, S. 1978. 'JetfBeck', in Rock Guitarists, I 0-12. Saratoga: Guitar Player Books. Sander, E. 1973. Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Sedgwick, E. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Swenson, J. and B. Malamut. 1975. 'The Zeps Runneth Over', Crawdaddy (49) (June): 65-6. Uhelszki, J. 1977. 'Sodom & Gomorrah in a Suitcase', Creem 9 (July): 44-50. Waksman, S. 1998. 'The MC5 and the Politics of Noise', in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, edited by T. Swiss, J. Sloop and A. Herman, 47-75. Waltham, MA: Blackwell. ---.Forthcoming. 'Black Sound. Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar and the Meanings of Blackness', Popular Music and Society. Walley, D. 1969. 'Led Zeppelin', Jazz and Pop 8 (10) (October): 22-3. Walser, R. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Welch, C. l970a. 'Jimmy Page, Paganini of the Seventies', Melody Maker 45 (February 14): 16-17. - - - . l970b. 'Jimmy Page, part three', Melody Maker 45 (February 28): 10. --.1975. 'The Led Zeppelin Story, part two', Melody Maker 50 (May 17): 32-3. Wenner, J. 1981. 'Eric Clapton', in The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking with the Legends of Rock and Roll, 1967-1980, edited by B. Fong-Torres, 24-31. New York: St. Martin's, Rolling Stone Press. Whitall, S. 1979. 'Led Zeppelin: A Psychobiograph', Creem I 0 (9) (February): 26-31. XYZ, E. 1994. 'You Shook Me', Village Voice 39 (46) (November 15): 72, 76. Yorke, R. 1993. Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography, Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller. Zappa, F. 1987. 'Good Guitar Stuff or Stereotypifications', Guitar Player 21 (I) (January): 16.

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Endnotes

1. This despite the reputed fact that Led Zeppelin was generally met with antagonism by rock critics. The members of Zeppelin themselves often fostered the idea that they were disliked by the press, perhaps as a means of maintaining some semblance of 'outsider' status with regard to the rock establishment even as they sold more albums and concert tickets than virtually any other band ofthe era. Canadian journalist Ritchie Yorke (1993), one ofthe band's biographers, has also promoted this idea, though in his case the motivation seems primarily self-serving; by declaring that other critics disdained Zeppelin, he makes himself appear prescient and of good judgment for having recognized the band's brilliance (and also presents their brilliance as an undisputed truth). Yet my own wide-ranging forays into 1970s rock journalism have shown little evidence that Zeppelin was widely reviled by critics, and as Robert Christgau ( 1994) notes, it was only at 'the old hippie singer-songwriter stronghold Rolling Stone' that the band was condemned with any degree of regularity (and even they eventually made gestures of compromise) (69). This is not to say that the band was not controversial, though; the details of some of the debates centered around Led Zeppelin will occupy a significant part of this essay. 2. I have treated Hendrix's career at length in another piece, 'Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar and the Meanings of Blackness', forthcoming in the journal Popular Music and Society. For a complementary analysis of the combined racial and sexual dynamics of hard rock performance during the 1960s, see my piece on Detroit rock band and musical arm of the White Panther party, the MC5 ( Waksman, 1998). 3. For a detailed discussion of the interrelationship between heavy metal and classical music, albeit one more focused on the 1980s than the 1970s, see Walser ( 1993: 57-1 07). Walser posits that the main significance of guitarists' efforts to fuse rock and classical techniques is the blurring of the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' cultural spheres, though he also refers to the elitism and self-absorption that arise from the resulting fetishization of technique. Most relevant to my own purposes, though, is his discussion of virtuosity as a display of potency, and the ways in which that potency is often perceived to have an almost supernatural dimension to it (76). 4. Generally, Zeppelin's concert film, The Song Remains the Same (1976; directed by Joe Massot and Peter Clifton), was met with a pretty negative reaction among the rock press. Most harsh was Dave Marsh's (1976) review in Rolling Stone, which condemned the film as a vanity project and condemned the band for its sadism and contempt for its audience, which Marsh took to be evident in the film (19-21). A more tongue-in-cheek response was offered by Robert Duncan (1977) in Creem. who concentrated the bulk of his review on the scene described above: 'You know how sometimes when [Page] goes up high in a really good solo, how it can sort of take you places you've maybe never been before? (I get that effect all the time from him.) Well, that's how it is when he gets to the top [of the mountain]' (50-51). 5. The mythicization of Page's interest in the occult, and especially in the notorious practitioner of 'magick', Aleister Crowley, is one of the more curious elements of Led Zeppelin's history, and has gained force from Page's continual reluctance to explain his proclivities. Stephen Davis ties Page's supposed fascination with the underworld to both Paganini and bluesman Robert Johnson, constructing a sort oftranshistorical idea of the virtuoso musician as a transgressive and mysterious figure. Perhaps the strangest outgrowth of this dimension of Page's image, though, is the controversy surrounding the song 'Stairway to Heaven', on which the members of the band

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have been charged with backward-masking Satanic messages to brainwash the minds of young listeners. (For the record, as a curious teen and big Zeppelin fan, I went to the trouble of playing the song backwards myself on an old turntable, and I did hear what sounded like references to Satan, such as 'my sweet Satan' and 'I give you 666'. Maybe I was already brainwashed to hear them.) 6. The most interesting consideration of the influence of romanticism upon rock music is Frith and Horne ( 1987), which observes the influence of art schools upon the British rock of the 1960s and 1970s. Frith and Horne discuss the tension within the art schools between idealized notions of 'art' and 'commerce', and the ways in which many students of the 1960s (of whom Jimmy Page was one) adopted romanticism as a means of asserting their own marginality even as they opted to participate in the world of pop music production. 7. For a useful take on the development of musical aesthetics, and the discursive relationship between reason and unreason, see Frith ( 1996: 253-64). Robert Walser ( 1993) includes a suggestive analysis of the role of mysticism in heavy metal, and the furor over the possible inclusion of subliminal satanic messages in such music. in the last chapter of Running with the Devil. There he posits that fear of these subliminal messages is tied to the lack of an available framework among the mass oflisteners for understanding music as a social discourse ( 147), the implication being that music has been relegated by many to a realm of wordless enjoyment that should be unencumbered by disturbing effects such as those posed by musicians like Page. 8. I explain the concept of the electric guitar as technophallus most fully in my essay, 'Black Sound. Black Body', cited above in n. 2. From the unpublished manuscript of that essay: 'The electric guitar as technophallus represents a fusion of man and machine, an electronic appendage that allow[s the guitarist] to display his instrumental and more symbolically, his sexual prowess. Through the medium of the electric guitar, [the guitarist is] able to transcend human potential in both musical and sexual terms; the dimension of exaggerated phallic display [is] complemented by the array of new sonic possibilities offered by the instrument.' 9. Chambers (1985: 50-83) covers this period of time well. The electric guitar was still enough of a novelty in the mid-1960s to have provoked no small degree of anxiety among pop music critics. In a 1965 interview with the Yardbirds, for instance, writer Keith Altham (1965) poses the question, 'How far do you think we can go before the machine takes over from the musician?' and singles out the Who as a band who has 'gone too far with electronic sounds'. Singer Keith Relf dismisses such a notion, insisting that 'The Who are creating with sounds just as surely as an artist with brush strokes. What is most important they are original'. Beck then interjects that he 'was experimenting with echo effects and feed-back years ago. Now it's become the thing', and expresses his admiration of the Who for their ability to draw crowds while creating their own sound (10). 10. While Frith and McRobbie have put forth the most influential statement regarding 'cock rock', at least in quasi-academic circles, they by no means originated the term. As far as I can tell, the first recorded use of'cock rock' was in Susan Hiwatt's (1971) essay of the same name, in which Hiwatt recounts her experience as a rock fan whose encounter with feminism led her to recognize the extent to which women were marginalized as both fans and musicians within the rock 'community'. One assumes that it already had some currency before the publication of Hiwatt's essay in 1971, and

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continued to do so until the publication of Frith and McRobbie's essay in 1978, although Frith and McRobbie make no reference to Hiwatt and give no background to the term. 11. This interpretation of the song's middle section has been put forth by Joy Press and Simon Reynolds ( 1995: 115). Yet despite such flashes of insight, Press and Reynolds abandon all subtlety (as perhaps is appropriate) in their analysis of Led Zeppelin, going even farther than the critics already cited in equating the band with a destructive, violent male sexuality, while leaving any other dimensions of the band completely unexplored. Most foolishly, to my mind, they make direct comparisons between Led Zeppelin and fascism in a manner that equates the two without acknowledging any separation between performed and actual violence. 12. Another concert review, by Nick Logan ( 1969), reinforces this observation: 'In one way they appear to be fighting each other for dominance, in another they become as one but in the final analysis they serve to haul each other onto greater heights. Plant, with shoulder length blond curls, employs his voice as a fourth instrument. Page, a contrast with shoulder length black hair, evens the score by using his instrument as an extra voice. The result at low key is fascinating; at its high devastating' (13). 13. Plant, once again, offers a suggestive comment in this regard: 'You know every vocalist is a frustrated guitarist. As much as I love the mike and my freedom of movement. I really like to play instruments' (Robinson, 1975: 70). 000

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14. A number of these interviews are collected in the volumes Rock Guitarists ( 1978) and Rock Guitarists, Volume JJ ( 1978). Frank Zappa ( 1987) offered a characteristically acerbic assessment ofthe situation in 1977, speaking of a contemporary setting 'that accepts concepts like The SuperGroup, The Best Guitar Player In The World, The Fastest Guitar Player In The World, The Prettiest Guitar Player In The World, The Loudest Guitar Player In The World, The Guitar Player In The World Who Has Collected The Most Oldest Guitars In The World (some of which have been played by dead guitar players who were actually musicians), and so forth' (16). 15. Feminist writer Germaine Greer ( 1986) offers a discussion ofrape that refutes any efforts at rationalization, such as those put forth by Zeppelin's former tour manager, Richard Cole (1992), in his memoirs of life on the road. Greer states, 'Many (men) believe that rape is impossible. The more simple-minded imagine that the vagina cannot be penetrated unless the woman consciously or subconsciously accepts the penetration, and so the necessary condition of rape cannot be fulfilled. Doubtless such a view reflects upon the potency of those who hold it. The difficulty of getting a fully erect penis into the vagina is in direct proportion to the difficulty of overcoming the woman: either by physical force or by threat or by drugging her or taking her by surprise' ( 153). 000

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16. See especially Press and Reynolds (1995). The authors' position is somewhat complicated by the fact that they apply the term 'feminine' to music by male artists such as the German group Can, yet their insistence upon maintaining a continuum of sexual/musical expression from masculine to feminine nonetheless seems to me to fix the terms of sexual representation too narrowly. A similar tendency can be found in McClary (1991 ), which speaks of'feminine' musical forms in a way that ultimately seems to uphold rather than challenge categories of gender difference.

[17] Examining rhythmic and metric practices in Led Zeppelin's musical style JOHN BRACKETT University of Utah, 1375 E. Presidents Circle, Salt Lake City, UT [email protected]

84112~0030,

USA

E~mail:

Abstract In this essay, I examine how aspects of rhythm and metre play a fundamental role in shaping and defining Led Zeppelin's musical style. At the same time, I will show how Led Zeppelin was able to modify, manipulate, and develop pre~existing musical models and forms through various rhythmic and metric strategies. Comparative analyses will be used in an effort to show how Led Zeppelin's flexible conception of rhythm and metre enabled the band to put their own stylistic 'stamp' on (i) specific musical genres ('The Crunge' and the song's relation to James Brown~style Junk), (ii) their riff constructions ('Black Dog' in relation to Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well'), and (iii) their cover versions ('Dazed and Confused'). Drawing upon my analytical points, I re~visit the complex issues that persist regarding the possibility that Led Zeppelin even has an 'original' or 'unique' style given their often overt reliance upon earlier musical models and forms. Therefore, in my conclusion, I argue that the development of any artist or group's individual style necessarily involves the ability to assimilate and transform pre~existing musical features features such as rhythm and metre - in novel ways and where issues relating to musical style intersect with influence.

Introduction Led Zeppelin's distinctive approach to matters relating to rhythm and metre is often identified as a key feature of the band's individual style. For example, in a published conversation between Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore, Goodwin describes how 'funky [the band's sound] is', a feature Gore attributes to drummer John Bonham's 'slower, lazier, slightly behind-the-beat feel that's different from the lockstep, straight up-and-down feel of most other heavy rock like Deep Purple or the Scorpions. There's more of a tension. A slight tease about where the beat is placed'. Focusing on particular songs, Gore notes that on '"Black Dog", which is usually perceived as a straightforward rock number, the meter is unusual. But John Bonham plays it absolutely straight, setting up a tension that's technically quite complex for rock, but which sounds very funky ... '. On the pervasive use of odd-time signatures in songs such as 'The Crunge', 'The Ocean' and 'Over the Hills and Far Away', Goodwin suggests that 'the measure of success here is how little attention it draws to itself ... you groove to it, it's not like hearing a King Crimson or Genesis song where it holds up a flag and congratulates itself [on its metric complexity]' (Goodwin and Gore 1987, pp. 6-7).

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Example 1. Superimposition of 3 and 4 groupings in 'Kashmir'.

While Goodwin and Gore can both be accused of overstating the imperceptibility of such metric phenomena, they do have a point regarding a key component of the band's individual style. In an interview from 1972, Robert Plant, the band's lead singer, authenticates these opinions. In this interview, Plant emphasises the band's interest in matters relating to musical time: Interviewer: When you first got the band together, you must have had some basic ideas, [some] basic musical concepts as a group that you wanted to follow. How would you sum those up? Robert Plant: Well, at the beginning it was the construction of things with different time patterns and with changes ... y'know like in 'Dazed and Confused' and 'How Many More Times?' which somehow or another came to us like that [snaps his fingers]. Y'know everybody just skipped in and fell in ... very seldom did [the music] sort of ease its way into another change it just fell automatically, y'know. So that was the first thing we got into ... 1

The band's interest in musical time was not restricted to their early records. Two familiar examples will illustrate the continued importance played by 'different time patterns' and 'time changes' (i.e. explorations of a variety of rhythmic and metric possibilities) in Led Zeppelin's later music. 'Kashmir', from the band's Physical Graffiti record, is notable for the superimposition of two groupings - groupings of three in the string and guitar parts and groupings of four in John Bonham's drumset part, shown in Example 1 (see also Moore 1993, p. 71; Fast 2001, chap. 3). These layers pull back and forth against each other creating a tension that is momentarily resolved when the two layers line up, shown by the dotted line that extends through both staves near the end of Example 1. On the one hand, it is possible that these superimpositions form the 'hook' of the song. That is, as listeners, we are constantly engaged by the continuously shifting parts and their eventual alignment. On the other hand, it can also be argued that the listener is never forced to decide between a single metric interpretation of these groupings- say, the 3/4 of the guitar and string layer or the 4/4 of the drum layer. Instead, we are carried along by the song's overall rhythmic flow and tend to focus only on the points of coincidence; how we get to these points is of no concern to us. Robert Plant's vocal part adds to this feeling as he seems to sing in a manner that is completely independent of these metric incongruities. A second example, 'Custard Pie' also from Physical Grafitti, opens with Jimmy Page's solo guitar playing the primary riff, repeated four times. 2 I would argue that we begin to form some sort of metric context at some point shortly after the onset of the second repetition and, by the third repetition we have probably 'settled' in to, or decided upon, some type of metric regularity. Example 2a represents one way of

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Gtr.

Example 2a. Possible metric interpretation of 'Custard Pie'.

hearing metre at the song's opening. Here, the riff begins as an anacrusis to a suppressed (deliberately unaccented) downbeat. If we hear the riff this way, we can imagine the drumset pattern that enters in measure 4 of Example 2a. Here, the first snare drum articulation is coordinated with the end of a subphrase within the riff (the arrival on the pitch Gas part of the E-F#-G ascent in the top part of the guitar line). The next snare drum attack (on beat 4) fills in the space between the end of the riff and its repetition. While this might be a perfectly acceptable way of hearing some type of metric structure for the opening unaccompanied guitar riff, it is not realised. With the actual drum entrance, the opening of the riff coincides with a downbeat as shown in Example 2b. In this example, notice that drummer John Bonham appears to acknowledge the type of hearing represented in Example 2a. The first snare drum attack in every measure occurs on the 'and' of beat 2 corresponding with the end of the riff's first subphrase (the conclusion of the E-F#-G ascent). At the same time, Bonham's syncopated bass drum part emphasises the ascending pitch line in the guitar (the same E-F#-G figure). With the entrance of the complete drumset, therefore, the metric positioning of the riff is clarified. 3 Both 'Kashmir' and 'Custard Pie' are original songs and both evince certain rhythmic/metric 'interplays and subtleties' (Moore 1993, p. 71) common to much of Led Zeppelin's music. It is clear that the band devoted as much attention to these musical parameters as they did to their riff constructions, formal structures, and recorded sound. In this essay, I will examine how aspects of rhythm and metre play a fundamental role in shaping and defining Led Zeppelin's musical style. At the same time, I will show how Led Zeppelin was able to modify, manipulate and develop pre-existing musical models and forms through various rhythmic and metric strategies. Comparative analyses will be used in an effort to show how Led Zeppelin's flexible conception of rhythm and metre enabled the band to put their own stylistic 'stamp' on (i) specific musical genres ('The Crunge' and the song's relation to James Brown-style funk), (ii) their riff constructions ('Black Dog' in relation to Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well'), and (iii) their cover versions ('Dazed and Confused'). In many ways, my examination of the rhythmic and metric aspects of Led Zeppelin's style continues and develops the methodology employed in Headlam

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>

Example 2b. Realised melodic/metric structure of 'Custard Pie'.

(1995). Whereas Headlam focuses specifically on the relations and transformations between earlier songs and Led Zeppelin's 'cover versions', I hope to broaden this area of investigation by considering how Led Zeppelin not only transforms specific songs (in the case of 'Dazed and Confused' which, as we will see, can be understood as a 'cover of a cover') but also musical genres and other musical models as well. Following this line of thought, we are forced to re-visit the complex issues that persist regarding the possibility that Led Zeppelin even has an 'original' or 'unique' individual style given their reliance upon earlier musical models and forms. Therefore, in my conclusion, I will briefly consider the notions of influence and originality and how they figure into discussions of musical style.

'The Crunge' 'The Crunge', from the band's fifth album Houses of the Holy, is, quite clearly, Led Zeppelin's attempt at James Brown-style funk, complete with Robert Plant's own take on the recurring request to 'Take me to the bridge' as heard in Brown's 'Sex Machine', 'Mother Popcorn', 'In A Cold Sweat', and many others. In the case of 'The Crunge', the joke is that the song has no bridge: Plant wonders 'Where is the bridge?' and 'Has anyone seen the bridge?' The funk parody heard in 'The Crunge' also extends to the song's rhythmic and metric organisation. We may expect a funk song to establish some sort of 'groove' that, although highly syncopated on the musical surface, is metrically unambiguous. This is not the case with 'The Crunge' where metric irregularities dominate the song creating- what Chris Welch calls- a' dance groove that you [can't] dance to' (Welch 1999, p. 80). In his analysis of James Brown's 'Superbad', David Brackett describes a number of musical features that are common to a great many funk songs (Brackett 1995, chap. 4). Building on Wilson (1974), Brackett points to certain timbral regularities, specifically the 'intensification of the musical lines by means of emphasising the independence of timbre (color) for each voice' as well as the 'high density of musical

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GUJtar

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Drums

Example 3. Texture X from James Brown's 'Superbad' (Brackett 1995, Example 4.3, p. 141).

events within a relatively short musical space'. Wilson writes that there 'tends to be a profusion of musical activities going on simultaneously, as if an attempt is being made to fill up every available area of musical space' (Wilson 1974, pp. 15-16; Brackett 1995, p. 136). Brackett develops Wilson's analysis by considering how aspects of metre and rhythm figure in various textures heard throughout the song. Here, the distinct rhythmic and metric profiles of the independent musical lines 'emphasize how the different accentual patterns create a complex, compelling "groove" ... ' (Brackett 1995, p. 139). 4 Example 3 reproduces Texture X from Brackett's Example 4·3. This example can be understood as a generic textural and rhythmic representation of a great many funk songs. The short, choked bursts in the horns and guitar emphasise the first half of each measure leaving the bass guitar's busy sixteenth-note figuration to complete the rest of the measure while, at the same time, providing a driving pulse leading into the next measure. All of the instrumental layers emphasise the downbeat, even the snare drum. This is exceptional, perhaps, given the predominance of the back-beat pattern common in so much popular music where the snare drum emphasises beats 2 and 4. 5 We can consider Brackett's Texture X from Brown's 'Superbad' as a textural and rhythmic/metric model commonly found in many of Brown's funk tunes. Of course there will always be variations and modifications but many of the features we generally associate withJ ames Brown-style funk are present: independent musical lines with characteristic timbral associations, complex rhythmic interactions, and, most important for my discussion, a continuous and unambiguous metric 'groove'. Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, has commented upon the band's interest in funk music. In particular, Page mentions the influence of funk on 'The Crunge': "'The Crunge" just happened spontaneously. Bonzo [drummer John Bonham] started playing, Jonesy [bassist John Paul Jones] came in next and then I joined in. It happened as quickly as that. At the time it seemed to be undanceable, because it keeps crossing over from the on to the off beat, as opposed to most James Brown things which are totally danceable' (Kendall and Lewis 1995, pp. 65-6). Interestingly, Led Zeppelin would sometimes incorporate moments of Brown's 'Sex Machine' in live performances. During their performance of 'Whole Lotta Love' from 25 March 1975 in Los Angeles, for example, the band broke into Brown's 'Sex Machine' before leading into

354

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58

John Brackett "Rover" on beat 3

+

+

+

+

+

+

r~ liD~~~~~t§p~r~~~~~~.~~Fl~lf~n~fJ~;d@~D~.J~§R~ + ~ open hrgh-hat

Example 4. 'The Crunge' - drumset opening.

13

Gtr

08

Bass

03

+

+

+

+

HH SD

BD +- open hr-hat x- palm mute

Example 5. 'The Crunge' - opening according to metric structure established by drums.

the psychedelic, 'freak-out' section. Before this, the rhythm section can briefly be heard playing the opening of 'The Crunge'. 6 The 'undanceable' irregularities of 'The Crunge' are the result of a single elongated beat that embellishes a quadruple metre (Example 4). This one beat comprises three eighth notes and, when combined with the three remaining large beats in each measure, creates, in effect, a measure of nine? In Example 4, I have highlighted the elongated beat with braces and provided it with a name- 'The Rover'. The song opens with John Bonham laying down the drum groove and, in the absence of any supporting metric context from the rest of the rhythm section, the elongated beat can be heard as occurring on beat 3, creating some sort of 214 +3 I 8 + 1 I 4 metric interpretation. The bass drum part on the elongated beat 3 can be understood as a 'mishearing' or, perhaps, an attempt at replicating the syncopated bass drum part in the same part of the measure in 'Superbad'. Gradually, the overall texture of 'The Crunge' begins to emerge as the remaining instruments enter. As shown in Example 5, the next instrument to enter is John Paul Jones' bass part (at 00:08). The bass line begins with a quick chromatic descent from C down to the tonic A followed by an octave leap that is embellished with the lower 1:>7 neighbour-note, G. Referring back to Example 3, we can see how this figure directly parallels the bass part in 'Superbad'. Jimmy Page's rhythm guitar part enters next playing short, choked chords that duplicate the rhythms heard in Jones' bass part, perhaps mimicking the horn and guitar parts of Brown's song. As the other

355

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Examining rhythmic and metric practices

59

Gtr

+

+

03

+

+

+

HH

SD BD

+ = open high-hat X =palm mute

Example 6. 'The Crunge' - revised hearing of metre in opening.

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"Rover" on Beat 2

:28

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Example 7. 'The Crunge' - return of 'The Rover' in verse.

:--1

i

=-..,J

ccj

j

i

i

instruments enter and the Brown-like stratified texture emerges, it is difficult to sustain the melodic and rhythmic phrasings of the bass and guitar parts according to the 2/4+3/8+1/4metric structure established by the drums. As can be seen in Example 5, we would need to hear the bass and guitar phrases across the 'mental barline' we have supplied since the beginning of the song. To simplify matters, therefore, it may be best to understand the opening according to a different metric interpretation, possibly one represented by Example 6. Here, the first sixteenth-note in both the bass and guitar parts functions not only as a pick-up to The Rover figure itself, but also as a pick-up to a new measure. This way of hearing transfers The Rover from beat 3 to beat 1, notated as 3/8+3/4. Although 'The Crunge' might still be difficult to dance to, we seem to know exactly where we would have to make an adjustment in our steps - beat 1. Unfortunately, The Rover has other ideas. Beginning with the first verse, The Rover figure is heard again but now on beat 2 as seen in the second measure of Example 7.

Rock Music

356

60

John Brackett :46

Gtr

" ~

..

-

"Rover" on last beat

•

I

~

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i Example 8. 'The Crunge' - 'The Rover' heard in the turnaround from the verse to the riff

The Rover is not done roving, however, appearing again as a turnaround figure connecting the end of the verse to the return of the riff. As I have transcribed it in Example 8, The Rover is attached at the end of a 'measure' comprised of six beats. Metrically, The Rover certainly gets around. Throughout the song, we can hear The Rover in four metric positions: beat 3 in the unaccompanied drum opening which is subsequently transferred to beat 1 with the entrance of the guitar and bass parts, beat 2 in the verse, and beat 6, the last beat at the turnaround from the verse to the return of the riff. Despite the various metric positions occupied by The Rover, the song still exhibits a strong quadruple regularity (except for the turnaround measure). Although we hear the song 'in four', it is a 'limping' four- definitely not a 'funky' four. Certain funk elements, however, are still recognisable: for example, Plant's vocal delivery and lyrics, the stratification of instrumental layers, the choked guitar voicings and active bass line. The thing that makes funk 'funky' -the danceable groove is nowhere to be found. Because of The Rover's metric peregrinations and irregular length, it is, perhaps, not surprising that the band abandoned their original idea for the cover of Houses of the Holy - Fred Astaire-like dance step diagrams showing album buyers how to dance 'The Crunge'.

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Examining rhythmic and metric practices

357

61

Bassist John Paul Jones recalls how he and drummer John Bonham were 'James Brown freaks' and how they would constantly play his records while on tour (Palmer 1990, [n.p.]). 'The Crunge' can be understood as Led Zeppelin's return gift, or an homage, to Brown in particular and funk music in general. While the 'irregular regularities' created by The Rover can create the impression that Led Zeppelin did not entirely 'get' the meaning and essence of funk, it may also be viewed as a stylistic marker signifying Led Zeppelin's style. Instead of trying to recreate the generic template common to a great deal of James Brown-style funk, the inclusion of a mobile, irregular beat in 'The Crunge' represents Zeppelin's contribution to the funk genre.

'Black Dog' Whereas Led Zeppelin modified genre expectations in 'The Crunge', they had a more specific model in mind with 'Black Dog' from their fourth album. The riff to 'Black Dog' was composed by bassist John Paul Jones and, as Jimmy Page has mentioned in interviews, was influenced by the riff to Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well'. 8 Both songs contain the distinctive call and response form between the solo vocalist who is then answered by the riff. In addition to this formal similarity, a number of notable motivic relations exist between the structure of the riff to 'Oh Well' and the riff to 'Black Dog'. 9 Comparing Example 9 with the riff to 'Black Dog' (look ahead to Examples 10 and 11), we can see that (i) both begin with an anacrusis figure (highlighted in Example 9 with a solid box); (ii) both end with a long held note directly preceded by a syncopated figure that throws off the established rhythmic and metric regularity (dashed box); (iii) both contain a distinctive ascending chromatic figure (in ovals). Where Led Zeppelin's riff is a single melodic gesture, Fleetwood Mac's riff comprises three distinct units: an opening idea formed by the fast eighth-notes heard in alternation between the acoustic and electric guitars (from the end of the first system to the end of the third), a middle idea played by the electric guitar (fourth system through measure two of the fifth system), and a closing scalar figure where the acoustic guitar briefly returns. The greatest amount of tension is present in this closing idea as syncopation becomes predominant and by the fact that the electric guitar and acoustic guitar reach their harmonic goals at two different times. The goal pitch of E is reached by the electric guitar on the and of beat 2 as the acoustic guitar is playing a D major triad that does not resolve to E minor until beat 4. Our attention is drawn to this spot by the fact that the syncopation is broken at this point: the emphasis on off-beats is prolonged by an eighth-note setting up the 'real' arrival on beat 4. Even this arrival is bit unsettling as we expect this major formal and structural event to occur on a downbeat. As the guitars sustain their pitches, cowbells and maracas re-establish the pulse leading to the entry of the complete band supporting a guitar solo. The pulse is maintained throughout the held notes while the band's entry on a strong downbeat satisfies, perhaps, any lingering sense of metric ambiguity. As certain features of the riff to Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well' were absorbed into the riff to Led Zeppelin's 'Black Dog', Led Zeppelin adapted these features in a number of important ways. In constructing the riff to 'Black Dog', Led Zeppelin developed the potential rhythmic and metric irregularities nascent in Fleetwood Mac's riff. By doing so, Led Zeppelin were able to transform the riff into something that was stylistically in line with their own group aesthetic, an aesthetic relating to matters of 'time' described by Plant above.

358

Rock Music

John Brackett

62

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t)

1

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t)'

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~ ~cowbe~ a~ m:a~as)x

BD

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(Electric gtr.)-

~

J j

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i

Example 9. 'Oh Well' (Fleetwood Mac)- main riff showing motivic similarities to riff to 'Black Dog'.

359

Rock Music

Examining rhythmic and metric practices Gtr. and

Bass (2)

(I)

c. c.

H. H. S.D. B.D

63

·-

Example 10. 'Black Dog' (studio version) -main riff.

Gtr

and

Bass

HH

cc

SD BD

Example 11. 'Black Dog' (outtakes)- early version of riff structure.

In Example 10, I have isolated the riff to 'Black Dog' and the accompanying drumset part from any surrounding music in order to show more clearly the riff's melodic and rhythmic structure. One of the first things we may notice about the riff is its irregular length (see also Fast 2001, pp. 122-3). 10 As I have notated it in Example 10, the riff spans seven quarter-notes plus a sixteenth-note (not counting the held note at the end). In this regard, the riff to 'Black Dog' is far removed from the more regular riffs heard in so many of Led Zeppelin's songs- songs such as 'Whole Lotta Love' or 'Livin' Lovin' Maid'. In addition to its irregular length, certain melodic and rhythmic features of the riff stand out. The riff begins with an anacrusis whose goal is not entirely clear. In other words, we're not sure where the pick-up puts down. Immediately following the opening group of five sixteenth-notes in the guitars and the snare drum, the change of texture initiated by John Bonham's big cymbal crash can be heard as a strong arrival point, possibly a downbeat. The number 1 in parentheses in Example 10 represents this hearing. Another way of hearing the opening is to interpret the first three sixteenth-notes of the riff as an anacrusis whose strong beat goal is the fourth sixteenth-note, the tonic pitch A (resembling the opening anacrusis figure of Fleetwood Mac's riff). In the opening to Led Zeppelin's riff, the strong beat is elided as the stark textural change discussed in the first hearing is now heard as an after-beat. The number 2 in the same example represents this second hearing. Studio outtakes of the band rehearsing 'Black Dog' show a transformation in the way the band heard and subsequently performed the riff.U As seen in Example 11, a transcription from these outtakes, Bonham plays a cymbal crash on the fourth sixteenth-note of the riff in a way that corresponds to the second hearing detailed in Example 10 now with the crash cymbal shifted to the left. At other spots in the rehearsal outtakes, Bonham and the rest of the band - seemingly more comfortable

360

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John Brackett

with the riff- begin to experiment with the placement of this cymbal crash. At first, the riff is played like Example 11 but, in the riff forms that follow, the crash is shifted by an eighth-note and played on the after-beat as heard in the studio version. In the absence of a larger musical context, all of this talk about how to hear the opening of the riff might appear overly pedantic. When the riff is put back within the context of the entire song, however, things get a bit more interesting. As shown in Example 12, the unaccompanied vocal part preceding the riff establishes a regular sense of metre with its clear beginning, repetition of rhythmic motives, and Plant's emphatic delivery of the word 'Make' of 'Make you sweat' sung to his highest pitch on the downbeat of measure 2. If we continue to hear within the quadruple metre set up by the opening vocal part, the onset of the ensuing riff occurs as a sixteenth-note pickup to beat 2 of measure 3. Because of this particular metric positioning, the riff concludes on an expected downbeat- the downbeat to measure 5. As a result, the internal metric irregularity of the riff seems, for the moment, to have been regularised. The call and response pattern between Plant's vocal part and the riff is heard again beginning in measure 5. This time, however, the riff enters as a sixteenth-note pickup to measure 7. Here, if we try to hear the end of the riff as corresponding to a downbeat (a downbeat accentuated by the cymbal crash, arrival on tonic, and the onset of Plant's next vocal entry), we would be required to adjust our established sense of metre. The 3 I 4 signature of measure 8 of Example 12 reflects this adjustment. During the course of the song, the riff appears at yet a third metric position - as a sixteenth-note immediately following the final note of Plant's vocal line. In order to see more clearly these three riff forms, Example 13 represents an abstracted version of the last measure of Plant's vocal part (shown on the top staff) and the three different metric starting points of the riff heard in the studio version of 'Black Dog'. The times included above the lower three staves indicate where each version of the riff can be heard in the studio version. Because of the irregular length of the riff itself, only the metric form of Riff A- heard only once in the song- fits with the quadruple metre established by Robert Plant's vocal part. Riffs Band C both force us to step outside of this established metric framework. As we can see from this last example, except for its first appearance at 00:13, the riff does not enter into the regularity set up by Plant's vocal part but, instead, intrudes upon and disrupts any sense of a regular metre. As a result, the various metric placements of the riff give the studio version a looser, more improvised feel. A strong sense of metre is established during the solo vocal parts but, with the onset of the riff, we suspend any sense of metric regularity, allowing the music to float above or outside any metric interpretation. 12 While we might sense some sort of metric suspension in this song, it is clear from listening to studio outtakes that a strict conception of the song's metric and rhythmic structures were clearly planned out in the studio. For example, in an outtake from the Physical Graffiti sessions, we get a glimpse of the band rehearsing 'In My Time of Dying'. At one point, Plant sings the unaccompanied line 'Jesus is gonna make up my dying bed' after which the entire band is supposed to enter. After a few brief drum hits from Bonham, the following exchange occurs between the drummer and Plant: Bonham: We have to have a count. Because Robert there you have freedom. And then it doesn't matter what [unintelligible] we still can do it if we have a count. Plant: Well where are you counting from now?

Rock Music

361

Examining rhythmic and metric practices 1

:06

A ~

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and

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Example 12. 'Black Dog' (studio version)- opening. Bonham: Well you can't count from where you stop 'cause your vocals might be a different- I mean- your voice just might go off a beat and we're gonna be fucked ... Plant: Ah, but if you do that, it'll be like 'Black Dog' then it gives me room to move and solo ... Bonham: Yes, but the reason we did 'Black Dog' is because we counted it and you did it afterwards ... That's the only way we can do this ...

362

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66

John Brackett fl

Vocal

u

-

~

n== l:..l..:j :13

l'l

.

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When recording 'Black Dog', it seems that the band carefully counted out the spaces between various entrances of the riff. After the band settled on an acceptable take, Plant came in and overdubbed his vocals, fitting his vocals to these spaces giving the impression of complete freedom and spontaneity. As this exchange seems to imply, the exact opposite appears to be the case. 13 Interestingly, many of the band's live performances of 'Black Dog' are stricter, tighter, and seemingly more calculated in their placement of the riff. 14 In fact, in all of the live performances of this song I have heard, the riff commences in the same metric position: immediately following the last note of Plant's vocal line (corresponding to Riff C from Example 13). In these live performances it is possible to establish a certain type of metric regularity due to the fact that we know when and where the riff begins and, knowing the length of the riff, where it will conclude with the return of the vocal part. At the same time, however, we are forced to abandon a regular quadruple metric pattern. 15 The metric consistency that can be heard in live performances of the riff to 'Black Dog' more closely resembles the clear-cut and predictable metric design of the original model, the riff to Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well'. As I have tried to show in my analysis, the unique qualities associated with the studio version of 'Black Dog' derive, in part, from the band's desire to develop certain potentialities inherent in Fleetwood Mac's original riff. Instead of the obvious metric regularity established in Fleetwood Mac's riff, the unaccompanied vocal parts and the riff to 'Black Dog' are treated almost as separate ideas, as the riff seems to intrude upon and disrupt the overall pacing implied by the call and response formal design. This gives Led Zeppelin's version a distinctive sense of hesitancy and expectation as we are not always sure when the 'boom' of the riff will be dropped. Furthermore, the 'boom' of the riff itself- the strong downbeat arrival- is obscured in Led Zeppelin's version where the guitar and drum

Rock Music

363

Examining rhythmic and metric practices

67

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Example 14. Opening of 'Dazed and Confused' (Jake Holmes).

parts seem to reach their expected downbeat goals at different times. A similar feature is present in Fleetwood Mac's original riff where it appears at the close (see the syncopated and interlocking guitar parts leading to the held harmony near the end of Example 9). By extracting and re-positioning a similar melodic/metric fragment, Led Zeppelin were able to add to the overall sense of imbalance that has come to be associated with the studio version of 'Black Dog'.

'Dazed and Confused' 'Dazed and Confused', from the band's debut album, is a cover of a song by American folk/ psychedelic singer Jake Holmes. 16 Example 14 presents a partial transcription of

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John Brackett

Example 15. Reduced representation of 'Dazed and Confused' (The Yardbirds).

the opening of Holmes' version up to the vocal entry. Holmes' version utilises at least three guitars and bass guitar. The guitar harmonics set the song in motion followed by the distinctive chromatic descent in the bass guitar part that also establishes the basic pulse. The repetition of the harmonics in measure 2 helps us to hear a downbeat despite the tied note in the bass. The metre is established in measures 2 to 3 with the strong anacrusis-downbeat figures in the guitars in systems 2 and 5. Sometime after 1967, The Yardbirds covered Holmes' song during Jimmy Page's tenure as lead guitarist. In Example 15, I have provided a generic representation of how the Yardbirds transformed the original. The bass guitar picks up on measure 4 and follows Holmes' original version, treating this idea as an ostinato or, in this case, a riff. The drums serve to emphasise the metric structure present in Holmes' original version. 17 In Led Zeppelin's version of 'Dazed and Confused', the riff resembles the more 'normalised' Yardbirds' version. As shown in Example 16, the entire riff occupies two 12/8 measures and is formed by the two chromatic descents found in Holmes' original: a descent from G down to E in the first measure, the other from D down to B in the second measure. A strong sense of metre is established by the agogic accents at the beginning of each measure of the riff. In measure 1, the anacrusis eighth-note E is followed by a wide upward leap of a tenth to the long note G, while in measure 2 this same figure is succeeded by an upward leap of a seventh to D. Already, this transforms the metric structure of Holmes' original and the Yardbirds' cover where these pitches and the ideas they initiate appear on beat 2. It seems that when the song made its way to Led Zeppelin, the band heard a different metric structure for the riff, different from both Holmes' original and the Yardbirds' cover. Imitating the opening of the riff, Robert Plant's vocal entrance also begins with an eighth-note pick-up. Instead of arriving on an implied downbeat - as heard in Holmes' original and the Yardbirds' cover- Plant's vocal line begins as a pickup to beat 4 of measure 2. Plant's delivery of the second line of verse 1 (measure 4) falls directly on a downbeat thereby counteracting any initial sense of ambiguity. A short sixteenth-note delay signals the onset of the third line (measure 5) and any remaining sense of metric uncertainty is cleared away with the strong downbeat arrival of the fourth line of the verse (measure 6). Here, Plant emphatically leans into the downbeat, accompanying the word 'Soul' with a relatively long rhythmic value while slightly varying his vocal timbre. The first verse is followed by two repetitions of the riff played by the entire rhythm section with Bonham playing a standard back-beat pattern. Following a second verse, the first contrasting material enters. This contrasting idea is distinguished by new melodic material, an emphasis on the minor dominant harmony, and a precise and determined rhythmic drive where a persistent and

Rock Music

365

Examining rhythmic and metric practices 09

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"Been Dazed n d confused "

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Example 16. 'Dazed and Confused' (Led Zeppelin, studio version) - opening.

regular eighth-note feel replaces the rolling and spacious dotted quarter-notes heard in the main riff. According to the metric hearing that we have established since the song's opening, the onset of this contrasting section appears to overlap with the last measure of the second verse. The pitch B of beat 4 of the second measure of the riff is also the beginning of the contrasting section. We can hear this moment in a couple of different ways. As shown in Example 17, the contrasting section can be heard as beginning on a downbeat where the last measure of the second verse is shortened by a dotted quarter-note. Another way to hear this moment involves retaining the 12/8 metre established in the verse and hearing the contrasting section as beginning on large-beat 4, shown in Example 18. As the music of the contrasting section unfolds, it appears that this second way of hearing is preferable. Following four repetitions of the melodic motive associated with the contrasting section, a big arrival on a low E (circled in Examples 17 and 18) signals the return of the song's primary riff. For the most part, this point of arrival in measure 3 of Example 18 re-establishes the metric, rhythmic and melodic organisation of the riff as heard in the opening. Although our sense of metric regularity may have been disrupted with the onset of this contrasting music, the return of the primary riff following this moment affirms our original metric interpretation. I say for the most part because Bonham's drum part- following the contrasting section- shifts by a full beat in relation to the established metric/ melodic structure of

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John Brackett 1 09

(B5)

(B5)

(B5)

(B5)

W1th Gurtar doublmgs

Example 17. 'Dazed and Confused' (studio version) -first hearing of transition to contrasting section and return to riff

the riff. That is, instead of emphasising beats 2 and 4 on the snare drum as he did in the opening two verses, Bonham now plays on beats 1 and 3. If we follow the metric interpretation provided in Example 17, the example that explains away the formal overlap, we are able to keep Bonham's backbeat pattern on beats 2 and 4 but we give up the established metric/melodic structure of the riff. No matter how we choose to hear this moment, we cannot deny that there exists a mis-alignment between the riff and the drum part following the arrival of the low E. It appears that Bonham may have heard this arrival in a way that corresponds to Example 17 (and Holmes' original version and the Yardbirds' cover) while the rest of the band heard it along the lines of Example 18. Whatever the reason, this mis-alignment persists throughout the remainder of the song as it appears on the studio album. Because the parts never line up again, we are forced to revise our metric understanding of the song according to the newly reinterpreted regularities between the melodic instruments and the drums. 'Dazed and Confused' was a staple of Zeppelin's live show. Although no two performances of the song were ever exact, the song did undergo an important transformation. With the release of BBC Sessions in 1997, three concert performances by the band from 1969 and 1971 were made commercially available for the first time. 'Dazed and Confused' was performed on two of these concerts, one from John Peel's Top Gear from June of 1969 and the other from John Peels' Rock Hour from April of 1971. The 1969 version follows the studio version almost exactly, right down to the metric/melodic shift. The later version, however, does away with the shift. In this

367

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Examining rhythmic and metric practices (B5)

I 09

(B5)

(B5)

71

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Example 18. 'Dazed and Confused' (studio version) - second hearing of transition to contrasting section and return to riff 2:39 Bass and

Gtr

HH SD BD

Gmtar with doubhngs

Example 19. 'Dazed and Confused' (Live/1971)- transition to contrasting section and return to riff

performance, Bonham plays a heavily syncopated pattern following the contrasting section that disrupts any sense of metric regularity. As I have tried to show in Example 19, Bonham emerges from this rhythmic chaos emphasising the original metric/ melodic structure of the riff. The shift is gone. In fact, it appears to be gone for

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good. In all of the live versions of 'Dazed and Confused' that I have been able to listen to from recordings after 1971, the metric/melodic shift never appears again. 18 The metric-melodic shift that occurs in 'Dazed and Confused' is born from the inherent metric ambiguities present in Jake Holmes' original version. By the time Led Zeppelin recorded and performed this song, it had already passed through one other cover version, the version by the Yardbirds. In one sense, Led Zeppelin's version can be considered a 'cover of a cover' as certain metric and riff alignments present in the Yardbirds' version make their way into Zeppelin's. At the same time, however, Led Zeppelin transforms the fundamental riff/metric alignments over the course of the song in ways that seem to have as much to do with Holmes' original as they do with the Yardbirds' version. As a result, we are unable to clearly identify what has moved or changed: has the metric position of the riff shifted or has the backbeat been inverted? 'Dazed and Confused' indeed.

Conclusion Led Zeppelin's ability to transform pre-existing genres (funk as seen in 'The Crunge'), riffs or formal models ('Black Dog'), and songs ('Dazed and Confused') through their unique approach to rhythm and metre is -along with other musical parameters such as timbre and instrumentation- an important component of the band's individual style. The various rhythmic and metric tendencies employed by the band function as key musical-stylistic 'stamps' signifying Led Zeppelin's style that are instantly identifiable even as they borrow or develop earlier musical genres, models or songs. From a theoretical perspective that considers the notion of style in various forms of popular music, identifying markers such as those described in my analyses might function as concrete indicators that distinguish one band from another, bands that might typically be understood as stylistically similar. From a different perspective, one that focuses on 'originality' or 'authorship', such features can serve a variety of functions, a notable function being the ability to identify or locate what is 'new' or 'original' in a song that might otherwise be considered a cover version or a borrowing. It is this second perspective that is the primary focus of Headlam (1995). Set against the backdrop of Willie Dixon's lawsuit over the band's cover of Dixon's 'You Need Love' (re-worked by Led Zeppelin as 'Whole Lotta Love') and other lawsuits brought against the band concerning the unattributed use of copyrighted material, Headlam analyses a number of Led Zeppelin covers andre-workings in an attempt to not only problematise the question of authorship in the world of rock and pop music, but also to lay bare some of the stylistic features that are uniquely associated with Led Zeppelin. 19 In his comparative analyses, Headlam describes a number of significant alterations (thematic and motivic, harmonic, as well as rhythmic) that distinguish Led Zeppelin's covers or re-workings from the original songs. Headlam ultimately concludes that 'the question of whether Led Zeppelin can be considered the true "authors" of their own music cannot be determined by copyright laws or attitudes toward proven or unproven influences or appropriation. The true evidence lies in the music itself, independently of the social and cultural concerns of popular music writers, and can only be discovered by analysis of the musical features themselves' (Headlam 1995, p. 362). As I have tried to show, key 'musical features' of Led Zeppelin's style might include certain rhythmic and metric tendencies, from mobile rhythmic units or entire riffs to ambiguous downbeats or 'inverted backbeats'. At the same time, however, we

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must avoid the tendency to identify these (and other) 'musical features' as being specific only to Led Zeppelin's musical practices. Without a doubt, the rhythmic and metric techniques described in my analyses are not sui generis, springing from the creative facilities of Led Zeppelin. Many examples can be cited of songs that evince similar rhythmic or metric tendencies, songs that would have been familiar to the members of Led Zeppelin. For example, Headlam identifies an interesting melodicmetric shift in Muddy Water's 'You Need Love', a shift that clearly resembles what occurs in 'Dazed and Confused' (Headlam 1995, pp. 332-43). Cream's cover of Howlin' Wolf's 'Sitting On Top of the World' employs a very interesting start and stop rhythmic pattern that works quite strongly against the prevailing compound duple metre in a way that is reminiscent of what is heard in 'Black Dog'. In another example from Cream, 'Politician', drummer Ginger Baker sounds like he wants to play a waltz pattern over the 4/4 blues groove played by the rest of the band. This sense of stratified metric layers is perceptible not only in 'Black Dog' but also 'Kashmir' as well. Furthermore, the 'irregular regularity' of 'The Crunge' can be linked to the numerous phrase extensions or contractions often encountered in early blues performances. The picture that emerges, then, is that even those rhythmic and metric techniques described in my analyses are, themselves, traceable to earlier genres, models, and/ or specific songs. Such a fact could be used as further evidence supporting the charge that Led Zeppelin are 'musical pilferers' (Guterman 1991, p. 41) and that their music cannot be considered 'original' because they rely so heavily on the ideas of other artists. Such an argument, I believe, misses certain key points pertaining to the complex relationships between influence and originality in discussions of a band's style. We must remember that the lawsuits brought against Led Zeppelin focused primarily on the band's unattributed use of lyrical material. Given our modern-day copyright laws, it is clear that Led Zeppelin was in the wrong, despite any appeals to contemporary practices (many other bands freely borrowed lyrics from earlier sources) or audience expectations. (Dave Headlam correctly points out that Led Zeppelin 'developed at a time when" cover" bands were greatly appreciated, and American audiences cheered groups like the Rolling Stones and Cream as they performed songs originally written by [earlier musicians]' [Headlam 1995, p. 362].) When we turn our attention from lyrics to specific musical features such as riffs or certain rhythmic/ metric strategies, it is not clear if claims pertaining to ownership or authorship apply in either a legal sense (copyright) or in an evaluative sense (originality). Robert Palmer makes his position clear: 'You can copyright a melody or lyrics, but not styles or riffs or rhythm patterns' (Palmer 1990, [n.p.]). While we might be able to find predecessors to the types of rhythmic and metric processes described in my analyses, we must- I believe - understand them from the perspective of influence. More specifically, we must allow for the possibility that an individual or band adopted certain musical practices or musical strategies learned from (hence influenced by) earlier artists, styles or genres. A band's originality, or sense of individual style, subsequently develops from its ability to combine and transform these and other musical influences - harmonic progressions, rhythmic ideas, approaches to instrumentation, etc. -in novel ways. The complex interactions between a variety of musical features and musical styles work together in forming an individual style. Therefore, the analytical observations presented above should be understood as representing only one aspect of a much larger project that is required

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when attempting to describe a notion as slippery and complex as style. To accurately represent and describe Led Zeppelin's individual style, the types of rhythmic and metric practices detailed in this essay (as well as those that appear in Headlam 1995, Fast 2001 and Moore 1993, among many others) must also take into account a number of other sonic features, most notably certain timbral characteristics associated with the band's recording and engineering practices. For reasons of space and scope (not to mention my woeful lack of knowledge in matters relating to recording and production techniques), I have chosen to focus on only one aspect of Led Zeppelin's musical practices. Hopefully, future work in the area of popular music style(s) will develop a methodology that effectively combines the 'musical features themselves' (i.e. rhythmic, melodic, and/or harmonic regularities) with aspects of sound production and sound recording, for it is only when all of these factors and issues are taken into account that the notion of a distinctive style can even begin to make sense. 20

Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Covach, Dave Headlam, Andy Flory, and the anonymous reviewers at Popular Music for their helpful comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank Jennifer Chartier at Hal Leonard Corporation for allowing me to reproduce excerpts from Jake Holmes' 'Dazed and Confused'. Every attempt was made to secure permissions from Alfred Publishing for the Led Zeppelin, James Brown and Fleetwood Mac examples.

Copyright acknowledgements 'Dazed and Confused', Words and Music by Jake Holmes. Copyright (c) 1967 Universal Music Corp. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Endnotes 1. Interview included on the bootleg recording Conversations With Led Zeppelin (disc 1, track 1: 20:35-21:38). No definitive information on the locations and dates of these interviews is provided. The interview with Plant and Bonham from which the excerpted quote appears might have occurred sometime in 1972. Plant mentions the release of Led Zeppelin IV (released in 1971) and concerts in Australia, concerts that took place in February of 1972. 2. The opening riff is not entirely unaccompanied: a brief clavinet part appears during the second repetition while an overdubbed guitar part is present in the third and fourth repetitions. Neither of these parts, however, helps to clarify any type of metric regularity. 3. To be sure, it is possible that no sense of metric ambiguity is perceived in the song's opening. If we hear a quicker pulse (for example, if we understand the sixteenth-note values in Examples 2a and 2b as eighth-notes) then any

anacrusis/ downbeat ambiguity seems to evaporate. However, the ensuing drum part must then be understood in 'half-time'. In fact, we will be forced to view the drums as playing in half-time throughout the entire song. My transcription reflects the fact that I privilege a standard backbeat pattern with the snare drum on beats 2 and 4. 4. For the purposes of this essay, I will be employing the term 'groove' as referring to the interlocking rhythmic and metric patterns formed by the entire ensemble. This roughly follows the definition given in Spicer (2001): 'Groove: the complex tapestry of riffs - usually played by the drums, bass, rhythm guitar and/or keyboard in some combination- that work together to create the distinctive harmonic/rhythmic backdrop which identifies a song' (Spicer 2001, p. 10). While I am not in complete agreement with this definition, it is sufficient for the purposes of the present paper.

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Examining rhythmic and metric practices 5. Brackett (1995) and Wilson (1974) consistently refer to the polymetric profiles of the individual lines in Brown's 'Superbad'. I don't hear polymetre so much as I hear different rhythmic patterns that all serve to emphasise different points within the prevailing duple metre. 6. Available on Deep Throat II. The band played a good portion of "The Crunge" a night earlier as part of 'Whole Lotta Love' (heard on Deep Throat I). 7. A few words regarding my notational decisions are in order. Although each measure of Example 4 comprises nine eighth-notes, a time signature of 9 I 8 would not, I believe, adequately reflect my sense that each measure contains 4 nonisochronous beats. The three beat pulse of 9/8 would obscure this quadruple feeling. (Incidentally, Moore 1993 describes this particular song as 'nominally in 4/4 ... '[Moore 1993, p. 72].) In reading Example 4 (and the examples that follow that also utilise similar time signature indications), it is useful to think 'two quarter-note beats PLUS a beat of three eighth-notes PLUS a quarter-note' as equalling one measure. I experimented with a variety of time signatures when transcribing the examples to 'The Crunge'. Although I am not entirely satisfied with the end result, it does, I believe, best represent my hearing. In a commercially available transcription of this song, the editors transcribe the opening measures in 5/4 (Led Zeppelin, 1973). It seems that they ran into the same difficulties I did and, rather than come up with some compromise, they had no choice but to misrepresent what actually happens in the music by adding an extra eighth note. 8. See Cross (1991, p. 129). Not coincidentally, when Jimmy Page toured with the American band The Black Crows, Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well' was regularly featured during live shows. See Jimmy Page and the Black Crows, Live at the

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Greek.

9. The larger structure of 'Oh Well' is essentially a two-part form consisting of the opening 'heavy' section followed by a 'lighter' second section. This might have appealed to the band's own formal proclivities; see, among others, 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You', 'What Is and What Should Never Be', and, of course, 'Stairway to Heaven'. See the discussion of 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' in Headlam (1995, pp. 343-53). 10. Fast (2001) transcribes the song in 2/4, using eighth-notes in place of the sixteenth-notes used in my transcription. My transcription decisions are based on an unreleased acetate of songs from Led Zeppelin IV, available on the bootleg recording Control Monitor Mixes. On the version of 'Black Dog' included on this recording, Bonham can clearly be heard counting off a tempo and pulse that corresponds to my 4/4 transcription decisions. 11. These outtakes are included on a number of bootleg recordings. These examples come from

18.

75

an eleven-CD set entitled Studio Daze. The material relating to 'Black Dog' appears on CD 6, track 1. This reverses a tendency described in Waterman (1952): 'Examples of call-andresponse music in which the solo part, for one reason or another, drops out for a time, indicate clearly that the chorus [response] part, rhythmical and repetitive, is the mainstay of the songs and the one really inexorable component of the rhythmic structure. The leader, receiving solid rhythmic support from the metrically accurate, rolling repetition of phrases by the chorus, is free to embroider at will' (Waterman 1952, p. 214). This exchange can be heard on a number of non-commercial recordings. See, for example, Physically Present, track 3 (00:20-00:56). See also Studio Daze, Disc 9, track 9 (11:50-12:30). This fact reverses what we might generally expect from live performances where the music is freer and more spontaneous in comparison to the rigidity of studio versions. Readers familiar with 'Black Dog' are probably wondering why I do not consider the middle section, where the riff is transposed, fragmented and syncopated. I have two reasons: first, Fast (2001) provides an excellent discussion of this section (see especially pp. 122-3 and her Example 4·6 on pp. 126-7). Second, although complex, there is nothing really metrically ambiguous about this section. The guitars play a syncopated variation of the riff against Bonham's backbeat drum part. What is interesting about this section is how the pesky crash cymbal gets transferred to the downbeat when the riff returns to tonic. See Fast (2001, chap. 1) for an extended discussion of this song. The Yardbirds' version expands upon and develops the psychedelic middle section of Holmes' version. Many of the formal features and a great many musical ideas first used in the Yardbirds' version make their way into Led Zeppelin's version. See Fast (2001, pp. 21 ff). It is quite possible that the metric shift was done away with shortly after the 1969 recording included on the BBC Sessions release. As stated in the body of my essay, the metric shift does appear in 'Dazed and Confused' from this 1969 recording, recorded 3 March. On 21 July, the band played a show in Central Park in New York City as part of the Schaefer Music Festival where the shift is not used. At some point between these two dates, the shift was abandoned. The 21 July show is available on a number of bootleg releases, including Central

Park 1969, Complete Central Park, Schaefer Music Festival, Superstars and Twist.

19. Headlam (1995) makes the distinction between 'covers' and 're-workings'. See also Shaw (1974, pp. 124-6). 20. Some of this work is already starting to be done. See, for example, Zak (2001) and Everett (1999 and 2001).

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References Brackett, D. 1995. Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) Carson, P. 2004. The Rover', The Greatest Classic Rock Albums Ever! Q/Mojo, Special Limited Edition, Fall, pp. 13-14 Cross, C. 1991. 'Tales from Led Zeppelin's recording sessions', in Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell, ed. C.R. Cross and E. Flannigan (New York, Harmony Books), pp. 107-56 Everett, W. 1999. The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 2001. The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul (Oxford, Oxford University Press) Fast, S. 2001. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press) Goodwin, A., and Gore, J. 1987. 'Your time is gonna come: talking about Led Zeppelin', OneTwoThreeFour: A Rock 'n' Roll Quarterly, 4 (Winter), pp. 4-11 Guterman, J. 1991. 'Your time is gonna come: the blues and other inspirations', in Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell, ed. C.R. Cross and E. Flannigan (New York, Harmony Books), pp. 37--44 Headlam, D. 1995. 'Does the song remain the same?: Questions of authorship and identification in the music of Led Zeppelin', in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945, ed. E. West Marvin and R. Hermann (Rochester, University of Rochester Press), pp. 313-63 1997. 'Blues transformations in the music of Cream', in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. J. Covach and G. Boone (New York, Oxford University Press), pp. 59-92 Kendall, P., and Lewis, D. 1995. Led Zeppelin: In Their Own Words (London, Omnibus Press) Led Zeppelin. 1973. Led Zeppelin: Houses of the Holy (New York, Superhype Publishing) Moore, A.F. 1993. Rock: The Primary Text (Buckingham, Open University Press) Palmer, R. 1990. 'Led Zeppelin: The Music', liner notes accompanying Led Zeppelin, Atlantic 82144-2, no page numbers Shaw, A. 1974. The Rockin' '50s. (New York, Hawthorn Nooks) Spicer, M. 2001. British Pop-Rock Music in the Post-Beatles Era: Three Analytical Studies, Ph.D. diss., Yale University Waterman, R.A. 1952. 'African influence on the music of the Americas', in Acculturation in the Americas, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 207-17 Welch, C. 1999. Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused (New York, Thunder's Mouth Press) Wilson, 0. 1974. 'The significance of the relationship between Afro-American music and West African music', The Black Perspective in Music, 2 (Spring), pp. 3-22 Zak, A. 2001. The Poetics of Rock (Berkeley, University of California Press)

Discography Commercial Releases

Fleetwood Mac, Then Play On. Reprise 6368-2. 1970 Jake Holmes, The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes. Tower T5079. 1967 Jimmy Page and the Black Crows, Live at the Greek. TVT 2140--2. 2000. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin. Atlantic SD 19126-2. 1994; originally released as Atlantic 19126. 1969 Led Zeppelin IV. Atlantic 82638--2. 1994; originally released as Atlantic 19129. 1971 Houses of the Holy. Atlantic A2-19130. 1994; originally released as Atlantic 19130.1973 Physical Graffiti. Swan Song 92442-2. 1994; originally released as Swan Song 2-200. 1975 Led Zeppelin. Atlantic 821444--2. 1990 BBC Sessions. Atlantic 83061-2. 1997 The Yardbirds, Cumular Limit. Burning Airlines, Pilot 24 800945000246.2000

Unreleased material

Led Zeppelin, Control Monitor Mixes. Watchtower WT-20020895. No date Studio Daze. No label. No date Deep Throat I. Empress Valley Supreme Disc. 2003 Deep Throat II. Empress Valley Supreme Disc. 2003 Conversations With Led Zeppelin. No label. No date Physically Present. House of Elrond. No date

[18] Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation "All along the Watchtower" ALBIN J. ZAK III

In the United States when traditions are juxtaposed they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, irresistibly to merge. -Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music"

O

n 4 September 1968, Reprise Records released Jimi Hendrix's recording of "All along the Watchtower." The song was written by Bob Dylan, who had recorded it himself the previous year, including it among the group of songs on his John IDsley Harding album released in December of 1967. Hendrix's recording would become his best-selling single and an enduring work in rock's historical canon. It was a harbinger of Electric Ladyland, his third and final studio album, which was released several weeks later on 16 October.l Reflecting Hendrix's expanded ambitions for composing in the recording studio and aided by a larger budget than that of his previous albums, Electric Ladyland has a monumentality about it confirmed by its double-LP length, its broad sonic canvas, and its musical scope, which includes stylistic evocations of blues, psychedelic rock, rhythm and blues, pop, This essay developed from a seminar at the City University of New York led by Stephen Blum, whose thoughtful explorations of interracial musical exchange in the United States brought me to the topic. Subsequently, through paper presentations at meetings of the Music Theory Society of New York State, the American Musicological Society, and the Music of the Americas Study Group at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, I have had opportunities for useful conversations with Paul Anderson, Naomi Andre, Graeme Boone, Mark Clague, Richard Crawford, David Headlam, Jas Obrecht, and Joseph Straus. Conversations and correspondence with Travis Jackson have been especially fruitful. Finally, I would like to thank this journal's anonymous reviewers for many helpful suggestions in the manuscript's final stages. l. "All along the Watchtower" reached no. 20 on the Billboard singles charts; Electric Ladyland reached no. 1 on the album charts. Both turn up regularly on critics' lists of canonic recordings. See, for example, Paul Williams, Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles (New York: Carroll and Grat~ 1993); and Paul Gambaccini, The Top 100 Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time (New York: Harmony Books, 1987).

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and avant-garde experimentalism molded into a cohesive, if sprawling, work. 2 Two of the tracks-"Voodoo Chile" and "1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," which is adjoined with "Moon, Turn the Tides ... gently gently away"-are in themselves monumental, each over fourteen minutes long. Together, they exemplifY the album's stylistic and aesthetic range. "Voodoo Chile" is a blues jam played live in the studio with Stevie Winwood and the Jefferson Airplane's Jack Cassidy sitting in on organ and bass respectively. Answering each of his vocal calls with a guitar response, Hendrix showcases his improvising skill in a blues context, complete with a lyric that reflects a traditional blues theme.3 The track "1983 ... (AMerman I Should Turn to Be)," on the other hand, is a composition created in multiple stages and assembled finally in a mix "performed" by Hendrix and engineer Eddie Kramer, both "playing" the console. 4 Here, the music moves as a flowing stream of consciousness that incorporates pop song, blues, psychedelic soundscape, and free improvisation in an ode to utopia beneath the sea. The musical sensibilities exemplified in each of these tracks are intertwined in various ways throughout Electric Lady/and, and "All along the Watchtower," the album's penultimate track, serves as both its climactic moment and its summary motto, drawing together in a focused way much that has been presented on the album's earlier tracks in terms of stylistic amalgam, instrumental virtuosity, and sonic spectacle. There is little in Dylan's recording of the song-a spare, folklike acoustic rendition-that would seem to have invited either Hendrix's flamboyant electrified version or its eclectic attitude. Although Hendrix's "All along the Watchtower" contains all of the song's basic elements and retains its theme of alienation and apprehension, its affective sense is altogether different. While Dylan's is a stark glimpse of an overheard fragment reported in the third person (see the lyrics in the Appendix), Hendrix's is wrought in large dramatic gestures in which he, though ostensibly the song's narrator, appears to have an overtly protagonistic role. In both versions, the song's characters, a joker and a thief, may be seen as facets of the artist's persona, two sides of an internal dialogue. But, as we shall see, Dylan's 2. An apparent concern for overall shape is evinced in the album's cyclic recurrences and in the segues that link many of the tracks. Recurrences: "Voodoo Chile" (track 4) and "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" (track 16); "Rainy Day, Dream Away" (track 10) and "Still Raining, Still Dreaming" (track 13). Segues: the tracks on side A(" ... And the Gods Made Love," "Have You Ever Been [to Electric Ladyland]," "Crosstown Traffic," "Voodoo Chile") are run together, as are those on side C ("Rainy Day, Dream Away," "1983 ... [A Merman I Should Turn to Be]," "Moon, Turn the Tides ... gently gently away"). 3. Blues songs-for example, Muddy Waters, "(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man"; John Lee Williamson, "Hoodoo, Hoodoo"; Richard M. Jones/Thelma LaVizzo, "New Orleans Goofer Dust Blues"-often invoke the mystical power of voodoo. See also Paul Oliver, The Meaning of the Blues (New York: Collier Books, 1966), 161-68; and Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1993), 14-18. 4. Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1990), 319.

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arrangement imparts an air of detachment, while Hendrix, in deepening the musical problem both sonically and syntactically, situates himself firmly at the center of the song. Hendrix began recording "All along the Watchtower" on 21 January 1968 at Olympic Studios in London with his band the Experience, producer Chas Chandler, and engineer Eddie Kramer. 5 The twenty-six talces recorded that night were only the beginning of a lengthy production process. Over the next several months, the recording would continue to develop as work moved from London to New York's Record Plant, the tape format changing from the initial four tracks to twelve, and Hendrix himself tal so-called protest songs gave way completely, a change Dylan himself commented on: "Those records I've made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing.... I don't want to write for people anymore. You know-be a spokesman.... From now on, I want to write from inside me. "58 In an "open letter" to Dylan in the November 1964 issue of Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber, who in a series of editorials had staked out a position against the growing commercial success of folk music, worried that Dylan might become yet another victim of the "American Success Machinery." Silber's cautionary note carried both moral and aesthetic overtones: "You said you weren't a writer of 'protest' songs ... but any songwriter who tries to deal honestly with reality in this world is bound to write 'protest' songs .... Your new songs seem to be all innerdirected now, inner-probing, self-conscious-maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. "59 The consternation in Silber's editorial--expressed, he claimed, on behalf not only of himself but of Dylan's "many other good friends"-would turn to outright rejection in 1965 when, on the second side of his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, and then in public at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan brought the amplified, backbeat-driven sound of rock and roll into the traditionalist realm of folk music. As he embraced what many earnest folkies considered a debased music, nothing more than another consumer product, Dylan appeared to some as an exuberant vandal shattering his own 57. For a transcript of the speech, see Shelton, No Direction Home, 200-201. 58. Quoted in Nat Hentoff, "The Crackin', Shakin', Breakin' Sounds," New Yorker, 24 October 1964, 65; emphasis in original. Reprinted in Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, ed. Craig McGregor (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 47. 59. Irwin Silber, "An Open Letter to Bob Dylan," Sing Out! 14 (November 1964): 22-23. The other relevant Silber editorials in Sing Out! include "Folk Music-1963," vol. 13 (October/ November 1963): 2-3; "Folk Music and the Success Syndrome," vol. 14 (September 1964): 2-4; and "After Newport-What?" vol. 14 (November 1964): 2.

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integrity. In truth, more listeners were fascinated than were turned off by the change in sound; Dylan's transformation from troubadour to pop star was well under way, and the album marked a new sales peak.60 But from the moment he "went electric" until his retreat to Woodstock, New York, in June 1966, there were many who saw the new Dylan as a "traitor," a "Judas. "6 1 His former champions at Sing Out! published an article in September 1965 that reckoned "only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel. "62 Dylan, of course, was simply continuing a long-standing process, enriching his experience and expression by entering into a broader dialogue, with more diverse musical idioms, than some of his audience were prepared to accept. Electrified rock and roll was a strong formative influence on him, and it is not surprising that Dylan would eventually seek to integrate his expanded sense of the pop song, gained through his experience in the urban folk scene, with the sonic impact of a rock band. His musical forays were akin to the rambling hobo life of his imagined past, unfettered wanderings from which he took whatever moved his imagination. As longtime Dylan commentator Paul Williams has put it: He was inspired, moved, by a pantheon of American voices, musical heroes, from Johnnie Ray and Jimmie Rodgers and Elvis Presley and Little Richard to Odetta, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, Leadbelly to Robert Johnson, Buddy Holly, and Woody Guthrie, and a couple of actors, Marlon Branda and James Dean .... [I]fhis given name and his natural voice and the circumstances of his childhood didn't seem to him appropriate vessels for the spirit that was moving him, he was ready and eager to change them all, to recreate himself in the composite, unfocused but palpable image of everything that was inspiring him and moving inside him.63

And as he gathered from his sources the material from which to fashion his self-invention-which James Miller has characterized as a move from "hobo minstrel" to "troubadour of dissent" to "rock and roll Rimbaud"-the associations invoked were themselves reshaped in the form of Dylan's own "composite" persona. 64 60. On the album charts, Bringing It All Back Home reached no. 6 in the U.S. and no. 1 in the U.K. 61. " 'Traitor,' some shouted as Dylan and his quartet finished a song" (Joseph Gelmis, "Show Sold Out; But Did Dylan?" Newsday, 30 August 1965; reprinted in Bob Dylan, ed. McGregor, 80-81). The "Judas" tatmt came from a heckler at Dylan's concert at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on 17 March 1966. It was captured on tape and film, and may be heard afrer "Ballad of a Thin Man" on Bob Dylan Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert, Columbia 65759 (1998). 62. Ewan MacColl, "Contemporary Song," Sing Out! 15 (September 1965); reprinted in Bob Dylan, ed. McGregor, 92. 63. Paul Williams, Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan (Novato, Calif: Underwood Miller, 1990), 15. 64. James !v1iller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 (New York: Fireside Books, 1999), 222.

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Jimi Hendrix grew up in Seattle, Washington. Though his father's record collection tended to the blues and rhythm and blues of artists like "B. B. King and Louis Jordan and some of the downhome guys like Muddy Waters," 6 5 in a city where radio catered to an overwhelmingly white audience he also had plenty of exposure to the pop hits of the day. As a beginning guitarist, according to his father, "he lived on the blues. "66 But, like many young musicians, he eagerly absorbed influence from whatever source he came in contact with. According to biographer David Henderson, Hendrix enjoyed accompanying his friend James Williams, who "liked to ... croon," playing songs like Dean Martin's 1955 hit "Memories Are Made ofThis."67 Biographers Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek report that Hendrix also had a fondness for Buddy Holly, and clapped and stomped his feet with abandon at Elvis Presley's concert at Sicks' Stadium in Seattle on 1 September 1957. One of Hendrix's boyhood sketches depicts Presley with guitar surrounded by graffiti naming many ofPresley's 1950s hits.68 By the time Hendrix left Seattle in 1961 to join the Army, he had been playing guitar for two years in local rhythm and blues bands, The Rocking Kings and The Tomcats. Apparently, he was already an impressive guitarist. Fellow soldier Billy Cox, a trained musician whose mother was a classical pianist and whose uncle played for a time in Duke Ellington's band, recalls his impression on first hearing Hendrix play, when both were posted at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as being "somewhere between Beetl1oven and John Lee Hooker. " 69 As we shall see, the characterization is somewhat less fanciful than it appears. After their discharges in 1962, Cox and Hendrix settled in Nashville and formed their own rhythm and blues group, the King Kasuals. Hendrix also worked around the country as a backup musician on various package tours that made the rounds of night clubs catering to black audiences. Although he was learning the ways of show business while coping with the conventional role of sideman, he chafed at the limitations imposed by the short, tightly choreographed showcase sets. Increasingly, his aspirations pointed him toward a wider world of experience and possibility, one that would allow him to pursue not only an expanded stylistic conception of rhythm and blues guitar playing, but also songwriting. Like Dylan, he eventually headed for New York City, arriving early in 1964. 65. James A. Hendrix as told to Jas Obrecht, My Son ]imi (Seattle: AlJas Enterprises, 1999), 126. 66. Ibid. 67. David Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of]imi Hendrix (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 39. "Memories Are Made of This" (Capitol 3295, 1955) was written by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller, known collectively as the Easy Riders, who ap· pear with Martin on the recording. 68. Hendrix and Obrecht, My Son ]imi, 101. 69. Cox, quoted in Shapiro and Glebbeek, ]imi Hendrix, 59-60. This quote, in various forms, turns up often in Hendrix biography and commentary. Its original source, however, is unclear.

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Although Hendrix would not find in New York the breakout success that Dylan had, the city did offer him new opportunities. He found work as a sideman with the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Curtis Knight, and perhaps most significantly from a musical standpoint, the tenor saxophonist King Curtis. Through nearly constant practicing and frequent touring with increasingly sympathetic frontmen, Hendrix developed a hybrid guitar style that owed an acknowledged debt to Albert King and B. B. King, yet also incorporated rhythmic and textural elements he developed working in rhythm and blues bands. As he aspired to his own place as a frontman, however, he found himself stymied by established aesthetic attitudes and music industry standards for black entertainers. As a songwriter, the musical and lyric sensibility on display in songs like "Purple Haze" and "Manic Depression" was well outside the mainstream of the contemporary black hit parade; and as a singer, even he considered his voice inadequate in comparison to such stars as Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, or Solomon Burke.7° Dylan, however, had shown that in the stylistic climate of mid-1960s rock, such apparent shortcomings might in fact hold the seeds of an idiosyncratic success. The urban folk aesthetic, which found a certain purity in the unrefined utterance, had by the mid sixties, and largely through Dylan, made inroads into the pop mainstream. Dylan had become a pop star with songs whose lyrics radically revised traditional pop conceptions, and a voice celebrated, if at all, for its distinctiveness, not its refinement or range. Hendrix was drawn increasingly to Dylan during these early years in New York, listening repeatedly to the early albums. Shapiro and Glebbeek recount an incident where Hendrix entered a Harlem dance club with a copy of The Freewheelin) Bob Dylan and "asked the DJ to put on 'Blowin' in the Wind.'" The DJ complied, though Hendrix's enthusiasm was not shared by the dancers. 71 Hendrix's refusal to accept the constraints not only of the music business but also of music's conventional social uses reflected the same sensibility that drove his eclectic gatherings of musical style elements. It also made him something of an outsider. "In his life as in his songs, he was forever searching for a place of his own," writes British critic Charles Sharr Murray. "He escaped from Harlem by moving to Greenwich Village; by relocating to London he escaped the codes of black showbiz and their attendant rules as to what a black entertainer could be." 72 Albert Allen, with whom Hendrix stayed for a time before he "escaped from Harlem," recalled that Hendrix "was very selfconscious about himself ... about the things he wore, because he was kind of different you know, kind of freaky, especially in comparison to a lot of brothers 70. Both songs appear on Hendrix's debut album, Are You Experienced? Reprise 6261 (1967). 71. Shapiro and Glebbeck,]imi Hendrix, 92. 72. Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock 'n' Roll Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 4.

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at that time." 73 And, according to Murray, soul singer Bobby Womack contends that Hendrix "was tryin' to fit in on his side of town, but it wasn't his side of town. He needed to be in another place ... when he got to Europe, he got with people that was Wee him, and I was glad that he found a place. " 74 Indeed, it was in small, down-market Greenwich Village clubs like the Cafe Wha? that Hendrix began to be noticed in 1966, not as a rhythm and blues musician but as the blues-rock virtuoso Jimmy James (and the Blue Flames). Chandler saw him in July, signed him to a management contract, and took him to London on 24 September 1966. Finally, Hendrix's musical performance and visual flamboyance would find an enthusiastic reception, captivating audiences whose members included then-reigning pop royalty such as Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger. The timing was perfect. On the one hand, British blues-rock was established in the commercial mainstream when Hendrix arrived displaying blues skills of a caliber apparently unknown in England. "Good as they were," recalls British writer and guitarist John Perry, "none of the English players I'd seen-Clapton, Beck, Townshend-prepared one for Hendrix. It wasn't a question of degrees of ability but a qualitative difference: the English guys all seemed like highly skilled workers applying themselves to a task while Hendrix seemed a natural."75 Murray similarly reports his sense ofHendrix's authenticity and naturalness: "[Hendrix] was everything which the Townshends and Mayalls and Jaggers and Claptons had only pretended to be." 76 On the other hand, the virtuoso individual display Hendrix had mastered, and that had been so misplaced in his role as a backing musician in rhythm and blues shows, had recently emerged in England as an avenue to rock stardom. The most acclaimed virtuoso blues-rock group of the time was Cream (Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce, and drummer Ginger Baker), with whom Chandler managed to secure a guest spot for Hendrix at their 1 October 1966 performance at the Polytechnic of Central London, only a week after Hendrix arrived from New York?7 The encounter would become storied. In Perry's account, "Within 73. Shapiro and Glebbeek (]imi Hendrix, 93) take Allen's quote from Joe Boyd's film A Film About]imi Hendrix (Warner Bros., 1973 ). 74. C. S. Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 5. 75. Perry, Electric Ladyland, 44. 76. C. S. Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 7. Paul Gilroy extends the public's perception of authenticity to Hendrix's blackness and his overtly sexual theatrics, which Gilroy characterizes as "neominstrel buffoonery." In London, "Hendrix was reinvented as the essential image of what English audiences felt a black American performer should be: wild, sexual, hedonistic, and dangerous" (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 93). 77. Chandler's music industry contacts were in the U.K. As a former member of the Animals, he was well acquainted with both the musicians and the clubs of the London pop scene. The Cream encounter, which the group's drummer, Ginger Baker, agreed to with some reluctance, was among several of Chandler's deftly orchestrated moves aimed at creating a rapid and sharp public impact.

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thirty seconds of[Howlin' Wolf's] 'Killin' Floor,' Clapton's jaw dropped, and the hierarchy of the English rock world experienced a profound shift. " 78 Chandler's recollection was similar: "I'll never forget Eric's face; he just walked off to the side and stood and watched. "79 London would remain Hendrix's base of operations through February 1968. In 1967, having formed his first band using the same trio format as Cream, he became an international rock star with the release of his first two albums-Are You Experienced? and Axis Bold as Love-along with concerts throughout the U.K. and Europe, and a successful U.S. tour highlighted by a performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival that would become one of rock's most famous. 80 The musical range on the first two albums is impressive, their blues foundation supporting a mix of stylistic strains. "We don't want to be classed in any category," Hendrix protested in response to questions of genre. "If it must have a tag, I'd like it to be called 'Free Feeling.' It's a mixture of rock, freak -out, blues and rave music. "8 1 The pace of touring and production for the burgeoning Jimi Hendrix Experience was unrelenting, and by December Hendrix was preparing to record his third album when he acquired a prerelease copy of Dylan's John Wt:sley Harding from their common publicist, Michael Goldstein. The work impressed him immediately, and he decided to record one of its songs. After considering initially "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," Hendrix setded instead on "All along the Watchtower."

John Wesley Harding John Wt:sley Harding is an austere recordirlg whose sound surprised many at the time. In contrast to contemporary recordirlg trends, which saw the techniques of the recording studio exploited in ever more imaginative ways, Dylan's new album was stripped down to bare essentials. The release earlier that year of albums such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper)s Lonely Hearts Club Band had signaled an unprecedented level of technical sophistication and aesthetic ambition in rock recordirlg, but Dylan was not enthusiastic about the trend. In 1978 he recalled that "the Beades had just released Sgt. Pepper, which I didn't like at all .... I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I didn't think all that production was necessary. "82 He told John Cohen and Happy Traum in an in78. Perry, Electric Ladyland, 25. 79. Chandler, quoted in Shapiro and Glebbeek, ]imi Hendrix, 112. 80. Most of the performance may be seen in the film ]imi Plays Monterey (1967) by D. A. Pennebaker. 81. Hendrix, quoted from the Record Mirror, 12 October 1966, in Shapiro and Glebbeek, ]imiHendrix, 129. 82. Dylan, quoted in Heylin, Bob Dylan, 284.

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terview for Sing Out! in 1968 that while he was aware that the Beatles "work( ed) much more with the studio equipment," he himself didn't "know anything about it. I just do the songs, and sing them and that's all." 83 Still, Dylan's three "electric" albums-Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all recorded between l3 January 1965 and I 0 March 1966---are closer in spirit to Sgt. Pepper's than to John Wesley Harding. They are filled with kaleidoscopic thickets of free-associating imagery and rich instrumental texurres, including electrified instruments, and the opulence of their musical and lyrical inventiveness places them comfortably alongside ostensibly more elaborately produced recordings.S 4 Many of the songs on these albums take the listener on long and winding lyric jomneys, exemplified most extravagantly by Highway 61's "Desolation Row" and Blonde on Blonde's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," both of which last over eleven minutes. By contrast, the songs on John Wesley Harding are realized with a minimum of verbal and musical material. Seven of the twelve tracks are under three minutes in length; the longest, "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," comes in at just over five and a half minutes. In terms of instrumentation, only the bass and, on two tracks, the pedal steel guitar are amplified. Dylan himself plays acoustic guitar, harmonica, and piano. The songs, wrought now in concentrated imagery, are delivered with an unadorned directness; both arrangements and imagery are spare. Commentators and Dylan biographers have put forth various possible reasons for the change of aesthetic direction: Dylan's retreat to Woodstock from the pressmes and demands generated by worldwide fame and growing controversy; his marriage to Sara Lowndes and the birth of their first son; his motorcycle accident on 29 July 1966. Dylan himself addressed the issue as though an artistic plateau had been reached. "I know that the concepts are imbedded now," he said in the Sing Out! interview, "whereas before ... I was just trying to see all of which I could do." Although he would continue to hold Blonde on Blonde among his most 83. John Cohen and Happy Traum, "Conversations with Bob Dylan," Sing Out! 18 (October/November 1968): 11. 84. John Wesley Harding is not, however, quite as radical an aesthetic juxtaposition as it first appeared. During his time in Woodstock, prior to the Harding sessions, Dylan had moved in a retrospective direction, playing old folk songs daily and writing new ones in a similar vein. "I couldn't tell which were the songs that he wrote," recalled Robbie Robertson, "and which were the songs somebody else wrote." Dylan, Robertson, and the other members of the Hawks (later the Band) played and recorded many of these songs in informal recording sessions at a house near Saugerties, New York, nicknamed Big Pink. As Dylan introduced the Hawks to music "from the British Isles and from the mountains of America," they in turn shared with him their deep knowledge of early rock and roll (Sounes, Down the Highway, 222-23). This transitional link between Blonde on Blonde and John Wt:sley Harding became publicly apparent in 1975 when fifteen of the tracks were released as The Basement Tapes (1975 ). Greil Marcus has written a book of reflections on these songs and sessions: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). See also Barney Hoskyns, Acro£5 the Great Divide: The Band and America (New York: Hyperion, 1993).

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successful efforts, perhaps he sensed that it represented, too, the culmination of a particular line of creative development.ss In any case, with john Wesley Harding Dylan's work turned emphatically in a new direction. Dylan also spoke at the time of a new deliberateness in his music. His earlier work had been "spontaneously brought out, all those seven record albums," with a stream-of-consciousness creative flow that moved "from thought to thought." Now he sensed that he could "do it better," in terms of songcraft, by moving "from line to line" in a style that was "more concise. "86 In conversation with Allen Ginsberg, he spoke of "writing shorter lines, vvi.th every line meaning something." In the new work, Ginsberg recalls, "there was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental. " 87 In addition to concision, Dylan sought an emotional distance from the new songs. Responding to a question about the "new approach" on John Wesley Harding, which the interviewer characterized as "clear songs ... as opposed to the psychedelic sounds," Dylan said, "What I do know is that I put myself out of the songs. I'm not in the songs anymore, I'm just there singing them, and I'm not personally connected with them." 88 The detachment is apparent throughout the album-in instrumentation, sound, lyric imagery, and performance style. And "All along the Watchtower," in its extreme distillation of musical resources and narrative, epitomizes the album as a whole. Nothing happens in the song; the fragments of conversation between joker and thief are suggestive, yet enigmatic, as is the description of the song's concluding scene. The song's entire harmonic substance consists of three chords repeated in an unchanging cyclic pattern over the course of its three verses and instrumental interludes (Ex. 1).89 The melodic pitch collection, shared by voice and harmonica, consists almost entirely of the pentatonic C#, E, F#, G#, B, though each part is restricted to a four-note subset. And the declamatory vocal melody gravitates throughout to one of two pitches (first or fourth scale degrees). 90 The song's musical elements, extraordinarily delimited 85. In 1978 Dylan told an interviewer: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands [tracks] in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getring it all the time." He goes on to include the other two mid-sixties "electric" albums in this characterization (Ron Rosenbaum, "Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan," Playboy, March 1978, 69). 86. Cohen and Traum, "Conversations," 10. 87. Ginsberg, quoted in Heylin, Bob Dylan, 287. 88. Cohen and Traum, "Conversations," 13. 89. Mike Marqusee suggests an interpretation that reads the lyrics, too, as circular. "This startlingly concise and deeply mysterious composition begins in media res .... The last verse sets the scene for the first two." "The circularity of the song's structure," he later adds, "continuously btings us back to the same moment, to the fuct that there's no 'way out ofhere' " (Chimes ofFreedom: The Politics ofBob Dylan's Art [New York and London: The New Press, 2003], 236, 238). 90. The stable pitches are, however, augmented by various inflections such as bent notes, slides, and scoops.

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bass

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Dylan, "All along the Watchtower," chord cycle. (All transcriptions by A. Zak.)

tJ= Unllf i

Call

J.

Response

•h j. VII

]1

I J. J; J, J VI

VII

tJ

i

in nwnber and function, combine to create an impression of unrelenting circularity, which accumulates, in turn, to impart a sense not of musical progression, but of a hovering atmosphere.

Signifyin(g) on Ballad and Blues Like many of the other songs on John Wt:sley Harding, "All along the Watchtower" incorporates elements of the folk ballad. Though not as close to traditional exemplars as, for example, Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," it harks back to folk roots with a directed focus absent from the sprawling ballads of the immediately preceding albwns. 91 It has the sort of poetic meter (so-called ballad meter), rhyme scheme (abcb), and third-person narrative that one might find in any number of examples from Francis J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads or one of the Lomax anthologies of American folk songs, collections containing many of the songs that were staples of the folk revival. 92 The aeolian quality of the pitch resources (no leading tone in either melody or harmony), the regularity of the phrasing, the spare harmonic scheme, and the clear and solid metric foundation likewise evoke a familiar folk style resonant with the old songs that Dylan knew well, some of which appear on his debut album. 93 Moreover, both its narrative technique and its poetic imagery tie the song to traditional sources. Its first line-" 'There must be some way out of here'/ Said the joker to the thief"exemplifies a technique common in British popular ballads, where "abrupt, dramatic openings, with a dialogue only partially explained, are characteristic. " 94 The song continues in a narrative style typical, according to James Porter, of 91. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is on The Times They Are a-Changin~ Columbia 8905 (1964). 92. Ballad meter consists of alternating lines of fonr and three stresses. For example, "ln London town there I was born I And where I got my learning I Sweet William Green took to his bed I For love of Barbara Allen" ("Barbara Allen"). See Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (1882-98; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1965); and John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, collectors and compilers, American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934). 93. Among the album's selections then in circulation among folk performers are "Man of Constant Sorrow," "The House Carpenter," and "House of the Risin' Sun." 94. Francis B. Gnrnmere, The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton, Miffiin, 1907), 84.

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"the older traditional ballads [which] are marked by an essential distillation of plot, character and action or dialogue. Often no more than two people are involved, although a third or others may impinge fatefully on their relationship."95 Dylan's minimal yet suggestive story line fits the pattern precisely. The two characters who spealc in the song's first two verses are followed in the final verse by a narrator who hints at dangers-the howling wind, the growling wildcat, the two mysterious riders-that, indeed, "may impinge fatefully." The song's presentation style is that of a situation ballad: "brief, abrupt, springing and pausing ... , and mainly in dialogue form," placing its "stress on situation, rather than on continuity of narrative or on character." And as is common in traditional ballads, the sense of the text is "indeterminate, lacking in inherent fixed meaning. "96 Rather, listeners are left to intuit meanings of their own from Dylan's allusive web, many of whose images are drawn from the Bible and whose characters recall traditional figures of ancient origin and nearly universal provenance.97 Of course, traces of such traditional imagery and musical form are to be found throughout Dylan's earlier recordings; as 95. James Porter, "Ballad," sec. I/4, "Folk and Popular Balladry: Narrative Form and Style," in Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, www.grovemusic.com (accessed 1 September 2004). 96. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, 111 ("brief, abrupt"); Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 4 ("stress"); and David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 8 ("indeterminate"). 97. In 1968 Dylan's mother, Beattie Zimmerman, told interviewer Toby Thompson, "In his house in Woodstock today, there's a huge Bible open on a stand in the middle of his study. Of all the books that crowd his house ... that Bible gets the most attention. He's continually getting up and going over to refer to something" (Thompson, Positively Main Street, [New York: CowardMcCann, 1971]; quoted in Heylin, Bob Dylan, 285). The most obvious biblical references, noted by many commentators, are to be found in Isaiah 21: "5. Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield .... 8. And he cried, A lion: My Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights: 9. And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen." Some writers have also noted a connection to Revelation in the images of the approaching riders (a resonance with the horsemen who appear in chapter 6) and the thief (chapter 3 ), and in the song's admonition that "the hour is getting late." See Nick De Somogyi, ]okermen and Thieves: Bob Dylan and the Ballad Tradition (Bury, Lancashire: Wanted Man, 1986), 7-10; John Herdman, Voice Without Restraint: A Study of Bob Dylan's Lyrics and Their Background (New York: DeWah Books, 1982), 101-3; Bert Cartwright, The Bible in the Lyrics ofBob Dylan (Bury, Lancashire: Wanted Man, 1985); and Michael J. Gilmour, Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture (New York and London: Continuum, 2004). For more on the song's archetypal characters-jokers (tricksters) and thieves (who turn out often to be one and the same )---see Gates, SignifYing Monkey; Robert Pelton, The Trickster in Wcrt Africa: A Study ofMythic Irony and Sacred Delight (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); William J. Hynes and William G. Doty, eds., Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993); and Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken Books, 1972 ). Prominent thieves, of course, are a staple of the folk song repertory from Robin Hood to Jesse James. Dylan's title track for the album, though misspelled, invokes this tradition with its narrative of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin.

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he himself acknowledged, even through his mid-1960s electric forays he "was always with the traditional song ... just us[ing] electricity to wrap it up in." 98 But as Nick De Somogyi has argued, the songs on John Wt:sley Harding are, in general, "more directly imitative of balladic technique than those preceding it." 99 In its many deliberate appeals to tradition, "All along the Watchtower" embodies Dylan's dialogue with the ballad in a newly crystallized form. The ballad, however, represents only one of the song's stylistic layers, for Dylan signifies on the British ballad in the voice of a bluesman. The combination imbues the song with a set of associations pointing to another vast song repertory, emphasizing the historical intermingling of ballad and blues in American music while invoking Dylan's twin icons-Woody Guthrie and Robert JohnsonJOO In an essay on Johnson, Greil Marcus includes Dylan's version of "All along the Watchtower" in a list of rock recordings that sound to him "like real Delta blues ... forty years after," music "where Johnson's spirit ha(s) found a home."lOl Marcus's larger point is that, although imitation of the specific contours of Johnson's music may make for poor evocations, rock musicians sometimes have found their own ways of expressing the fear, longing, aggression, and humor so often encountered in his songs. Marcus cites such tracks as Eric Clapton's "Layla" (with his group Derek and the Dominos), Sly Stone's "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa," and "All along the Watchtower" as examples of rock songs infused with the blues, though they are not blues songs in a traditional sense. 102 They partake, rather, of the bluesman's "spirit." If the idea appears idiosyncratic, it reflects the iconic status Johnson acquired in the 1960s. RobertJohnson: King ofthe Delta Blues Singers was released in 1961, twenty-five years after the songs had been recorded, and the album came to represent for many young musicians and fans "a new mythic measure of what rock and roll could be." The album became, "among the cognoscenti ... a badge of hip taste," and appears among the "emblematic pieces of bohemian bric-a-brac" in the cover photograph for Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home.l 03 In the interview accompanying his 1985 retrospective Biograph album, Dylan acknowledged that, in Johnson's music, he heard "a deep reality." The bluesman also represented, along with Guthrie, a mythic emblem for a central strain of Dylan's musical experience. Johnson and 98. Dylan, quoted in Hubert Saal, "Dylan Is Back," Newsweek, 26 February 1968, 92-93; reprinted in Bob Dylan, ed. McGregor, 244. 99. De Somogyi, Jokermen and Thieves, 1. 100. The combination, moreover, is a Dylan habit and a prominent feature of rock generally. See Richard Middleton, Pop Music and the Blues: A Study of the Relationship and Its Significance (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972). 101. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images ofAmerica in Rock 'N' Roll Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 39-40. 102. Ibid. The Clapton ttack is on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Atco 704 ( 1970 ); tbe Stone ttackis on There'saRiotGoin' On, Epic 30986 (1971). 103. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin, 185; emphasis in original.

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Guthrie are the only musicians named in the dedication for his book Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan) standing side by side with Dylan's evocation of a universal musical spirit: "To the magnificent Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson who sparked it off and to the great wondrous melodious spirit which covereth the oneness of us all." Elsewhere, his advice to aspiring songwriters was simply to "listen to Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie." 104 Commenting on Hendrix's version of "All along the Watchtower," Charles Sharr Murray, too, invokes Johnson. Murray finds in the song a connection between Hendrix and Johnson (by way of Dylan), exemplifYing "Hendrix's assumption of Johnson's legacy of existential dread and despair." 105 Murray's characterization of Johnson's legacy is a familiar one, similar, in fact, to Marcus's. But it also speaks to the song's topic and ethos, which according to Dylan pervades the overall album. "John "Wt:sley Hardingwas a fearful album," he told an interviewer in 1978, "just dealing with fear, but dealing with the devil in a fearful way, almost." 106 Johnson's legend includes a deal with the devil in which he exchanges his soul for musical ability, and the common blues theme of fearing yet dealing with the devil recurs frequently in his songs. 107 In "Hellhound on My Trail," Johnson portrays the dark side as a relentless, terrifYing beast requiring the bluesman's constant vigilance: "I got to keep moving I Blues falling down like hail ... And the day keeps on reminding me I There's a hellhound on my trail." On the other hand, in the midst of terror the blues protagonist may express a fatalistic resignation, as in Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues": "Early this morning I When you knocked upon my door ... I said hello Satan I I believe it's time to go." 108 In "All along the Watchtower," through the interplay of lyrics and music, Dylan probes such fearful fatalism by grafting a narrative of alienation and apprehension onto a musical frame of implacable stability. Dylan's engagement with the blues is long-standing and continues to the present. Although his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, seems a world away

104. Cameron Crowe, liner notes to Bob Dylan, Biograph, Columbia 38830 (1985), 31; Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings (London: Granada, 1974), 5; and Dylan, quoted in Shelton, No Direction Home, 497. 105. C. S. Murray, Crosstown Traffic, 68. Murray points specifically to Hendrix's rendition of the song's first line ("There must be some kind of way out of here"): "Entire songs of Hendrix's seem as if they are spun off from that one line of Dylan's; it is the greatest line Hendrix ever sang that he didn't write .... [W]here Hendrix and Johnson fuse most perfectly is in those moments when they both seem to accept that, no, there ain't no kind of way out of here this side of the grave" (p. 150; emphasis in original). 106. Jonathan Cott, "Bob Dylan: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part II," Rolling Stone, 16 November 1978, 60. 107. For an extended treatment of the devil in blues music, see Spencer, Blues and Evi~ 18-34. 108. Both songs appear on Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Columbia 1654 (1961).

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from the land of the blues (despite the proximity of Highway 61, which stretches all the way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a blues town of legend), the blues-inflected sounds that permeated 1950s rhythm and blues and rock and roll found their way to northern Minnesota by way of the radio and recordings. In addition to these urbanized hybrids, Dylan took to rural blueswhich had a resurgent national and international presence as an ancillary to the folk revival-again, recording several blues songs for his first album.l09 The next six albums prior to John Wesley Harding consist almost entirely of Dylan's own material, but there are several blues songs among them. Some of these adhere to traditional blues forms ("The Ballad of Hollis Brown," "Black Crow Blues," "Outlaw Blues"), while others simply invoke the character of the blues in their performance style or the tone of the lyrics ("Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," "Tombstone Blues").l 10 As with these latter tracks, the blues appeal of "All along the Watchtower" lies in its affinities rather than its formal structure.m The blues insinuates itself hereleaving the traces Marcus interprets as evidence of a connection to the mythical Mississippi Delta-but its characteristic musical features are absorbed into a larger dialogue. Its presence suggests Houston Baker's blues "matrix ... a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit."ll2 Baker's characterization of intersecting impulses may be read in terms of both musical elements and broader cultural forces. For in addition to its musical features, which indeed it subsumes, the blues has a considerable history in African American literature and criticism as a symbol evoking consciousness, sensibility, and experience. "The blues," wrote Ralph Ellison in a review of Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy, is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. AB a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Thus, Wright's book is itself a blues,

109. Bukka White, "Fixin' to Die"; Blind Lemon Jefferson, "See that My Grave Is Kept Clean"; Curtis Jones, "Highway 51," Bob Dylan, Columbia 8579 (1962). 110. These songs appear on the following albums: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," The Times They Are a-Changin'; "Black Crow Blues," Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia 8993 (1964); "Outlaw Blues," Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia 9128 (1965 ); "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," Blonde on Blonde, Columbia 841 (1966); "Tombstone Blues," Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia 9189 (1965). 111. The only song on John Wesley Harding that follows a conventional blues form is "Down along the Cove." 112. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3.

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filled with blues-tempered echoes of railroad trains, the names of Southern towns and cities, estrangements, fights and flights, deaths and disappointments, charged with physical and spiritual hungers and pain ... its lyrical prose evok[ing] the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound.l 13

Even as musical sound, however, the blues extends into the realm of symbol. Blues music, Albert Murray tells us, "is the basic and definitive musical idiom" of African Americans.l 14 It is "the product of a sensibility that is completely compatible with the human imperatives of modem times and American life." 11 5 Far from being constrained by conventional stylistic features, "in its most elaborate extensions it includes elements of the spirituals, gospel music, folk song, chants, hollers, popular ditties, plus much of what goes into symphonic and even operatic composition." 116 Murray's assertion ofits pervasiveness paints the blues as something more than a musical genre; it is a force whose slightest traces leave indelible impressions. Thus the blues feeling in "All along the Watchtower" is an evocation not simply of a sound, but of a weighty historical presence looming on the cultural landscape; and even as many of the song's most prominent features point in other directions, its blues affinities identifY its connection to that presence. For Dylan, the blues is among the foundational elements of a deliberately constructed musical persona, a musical self; and its traces may appear in diverse contexts, taking the form of residue from past encounters. 117 113. Ralph Ellison, "Richard Wright's Blues," in his Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 78-79. 114. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of VVhite Supremacy (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 56. 115. Ibid., 60; emphasis in original. 116. Ibid., 56. Other writings by Albert Murray on the blues include The Hero and the Blues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973) and Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976); see also Le Roi Jones [Arniri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in VVhite America (New York: William Morrow, 1963). 117. Nick Bromell has argued that, in its formal aspects, the blues reflects the social situation of African Americans after the Civil War. In blues performance, the conflicted dualism implied by a freedom that failed to confer full citizenship, which manifested itself as what W. E. B. Du Bois characterized famously as "double consciousness," is played out in various ways as "a musical spanning of two social spaces" (p. 198). One of the reasons, he contends, that blues elements, largely in the guise of rock and roll, appealed to white rnidclle-class teenagers of Dylan's generation was that teenagers found themselves in a dualistic predicament of their own. Grappling with an "emerging form of conflicted subjectivity" (p. 211 )-noted by philosophers and critics from the 1920s, and described by the sociologist David Riesman in 1950 as the "changing American character"-they "experience[ d] a dialectical dependence on others as they constructed the 'self' that was supposed to distinguish them from others" (p. 209). Furthermore, with their unprecedented, adultlike power as consumers, yet constrained by their adolescent status, they "inhabit[ ed] a seam between two realities" (p. 212). As a result, "like the original audiences of the blues, white teenagers in this period were both insiders and outsiders, desiring a place in mainstream society, yet also keenly aware of the hypocrisies and inadequacies of that society and

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The blues affinities in "All along the Watchtower," however, are not only thematic or conceptual. There are also elements of specific blues sounds and techniques apparent in two prominent areas: (1) the vocal and harmonica melodies, and (2) the structure of the arrangement. The melodic pitches belong to a core pitch collection common in blues songs, a triadic mode consisting of scale degrees l, 3, 5, and 7 augmented with scale degree 4. The voice uses only four of these pitches in a configuration where C# and F# represent two levels of declamatory intensity, the lines sung on F# taking on greater urgency because of the higher range and the relative dissonance of the pitch. In a performance style reminiscent of Johnson's blues cry, Dylan alternates between these two levels throughout the song, creating a pendular effect that is reinforced by the omission of the fifth scale degree, G#, from the vocal melody (Ex. 2). While the song's structure is generally strophic and symmetrical, each verse consisting of a pair of quatrains delivered in two-measure phrases, the vocal melody varies the declamatory scheme throughout the song. In the first verse, lines 5 and 7 cluster around the F#; in the second verse, lines l and 5; and in third, lines l, 5, and 7. Thus the text's metric balance is overlaid with a signifyin(g) irregularity of melodic design. Of the other two notes used by the voice, E serves both as what Peter Van der Merwe calls a "melodic dissonance" resolving to C# in a dropping third action-characteristic of what he has termed the "two-note minor-third mode," which is "the blues mode in its barest form"-and alternatively as a neighbor note to F#; and B is a neighbor to the tonic C#.l 18 In the instrumental interludes that follow each verse, the harmonica adds the G#, which sounds below the tonic, but leaves out the F#. The harmonica melody, then, both completes the pentatonic collection and suggests an intervallic symmetry in the piece's melodic ambitus, which inscribes a fourth above and below the tonic as the melody moves from voice to harmonica, from verse to interlude (Ex. 3). I shall return to the significance of this observation. The song's musical arrangement bears a more subtle and yet equally important blues affinity. Both its micro- and macro-structural levels exhibit the sort of call-and-response Floyd points to in twelve-bar blues-"in which a two-measure instrumental 'response' answers a two-measure vocal 'call' "--as "a classic example of Signifyin(g)." 119 Though the proportions are halved in "All along the Watchtower," the technique is the same: each measure of text is

determined to hold on to a distinctive culture of their own" (p. 210) (Nick Bromell," 'The Blues and the Veil': The Cultural Work of Musical Form iu Blues and '60s Rock," American Music 18 [2000], 193-221; emphasis iu original). ll8. Vander Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 120-25, at 120, 122, 121. Vander Merwe's term melodic dissonance refers to a pitch continually pulled to a more stable one iu the mode. In blues songs, the third dropping to the tonic provides the "simplest possible illustration of melodic dissonance" (p. 121 ). 119. Floyd, Black Music, 96.

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Example 2 Levels of declamatory emphasis in Dylan's version (a)

~

v ~ r ~ I v r· >

There must be some way out

of here

>

I 'tv v~v~r ~I said the jo-ker to the thief

(b) 17

&~u#g $ v v v r- v r fr 1

Busi-ness men they

drink my wine

Example 3 Melodic ambitus in Dylan's version

&~H#f j

I

voice (verse)

I

r r f

J

harmonica (interlude)

answered by a measure of instrumental response. But unlike the verse structure of a twelve-bar blues song (which is typically end-weighted for both lyrics [aab] and harmonic progression, the punch line at the end of each verse accompanied by a dominant-tonic closure), "All along the Watchtower" is based on the two-measure oscillating chord cycle supporting verses of balanced quatrains. The two halves of the cycle, one with voice, one without, create a calland-response pattern with each iteration. In the first half, the bass descends by step from i to VI in a rhythm that emphasizes the first and third beats (using either half notes or groups of dotted quarter and eighth notes). The bass is loosely doubled by the kick drum, while the snare drum plays on each quarternote pulse. Above this firmly rooted rhythmic articulation, the voice cries out with a melodic call that is both freely syncopated and independent of specific harmonic implications. In the second half of the cycle, while the chords climb back from VI to i, the instruments respond to the voice with a more agitated rhythmic texture: syncopation in the bass, occasional fills on the drums, and emphatic syncopated accents from the acoustic guitar. The track's verse/interlude structure is an expanded call-and-response, each of the three sixteen-measure verses (calls) followed by an eight-measure instrumental interlude (response). Here, formal elements of ballad and blues intersect, for call-and-response technique is also basic to the ballad's verse/ refrain design. But where verse/refrain occurs in ballads, the refrain has words and is the same each time; that is, the response is stylized, not spontaneous. In Dylan's signifyin(g) revision of the traditional form, the interludes are improvisatory comments embodying one-half of a word/music dialogue or, as

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Charles Keil characterizes the interplay of voice and instruments in blues songs, "dialectic." 120 In fact, Keil finds in the blues a "double dialectic," one apparent in the word/music call-and-response, the other in the statement/ resolution of the lyrics. The proportions of the statement/resolution in twelve-bar blues-an eight-bar statement (4 + 4) followed by a four-bar resolution-are retained in "All along the Watchtower." Though its verses consist of twin eight-measure quatrains, the following eight-measure interlude fulfills the second of Keil's dialectics. In a revision of blues practice, however, the "resolution" here is a purely instrumental comment. As the verses are called out by the voice, the instruments, even with their responsive flourishes, have a supporting role, while in the interludes they play more freely, filling the rhythmic space with a higher density of attacks. But the interludes' primary response comes from the harmonica, which is never present in the verse. The harmonica provides the interludes with a distinctive foil to the voice that is both timbral and syntactic. Yet even the contrast between verse and interlude serves to reinforce the track's sense of balance. For as the harmonica enters the tetrachordal space below the tonic, balancing the registral articulation of the voice, it suggests a relationship between the verse and interlude resonant, at a higher structural level, with the inertia of the chord cycle. These structural balances in the music tug at the narrative progression of the lyrics. As the atmosphere becomes increasingly apprehensive, the relentlessness of the musical setting seems to suggest that there is indeed something to fear. Alluding to the British folk ballad and to the blues, searnlessly interweaving elements of both, "All along the Watchtower" exemplifies Floyd's intercultural fusion: one that "keeps the cultural integrity of both intact and viable." Unlike the so-called blues ballad, which casts a narrative in the musical form of blues, Dylan's song is in a ballad form deeply infused with call-and-response and laced with bluesy melodic inflections. 121 It is a clear example of what Benjamin Filene calls Dylan's "negotiat[ion of] the relationship between past and present," borrowing and recombining elements at will to forge an utterance grounded in American roots music, yet wholly original-"at the same time ... evolutionary and firmly rooted." 122 The result is a minimalist drama comprising a matrix of binary relationships which, in one way or another, account for the song's dramatic force: the "joker" and the "thief," "us" and "them," verse and interlude, voice and harmonica, upper and lower tetrachords, harmonic stasis and narrative progression. In Dylan's ascetic version, these dualisms are presented with a measured introspection, but their inherent tensions are potentially dynamic. The apparently contradictory coexistence of elements suggesting both stasis and progression is a paradox from which the 120. Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 51. 121. "Frankie and Johnny" and "Railroad Bill" are good examples of blues ballads. 122. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2000), 232.

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song derives much of its subliminal power, and which offers Hendrix, in his own signif)rin(g) project, the key to his recomposition of the song.

The "Intrusive I" Among the Dylan songs that Hendrix recorded and/or performed live, none touched him more than "All along the Watchtower. " 123 He once remarked, "I felt like 'Watchtower' was something I had written but could never get together. I often feel like that about Dylan." 124 Indeed, Hendrix makes the song his own, unleashing the latent power of the dualisms suggested by Dylan's recording to create a sweeping musical drama of an entirely different character from the original. With strong opposing musical characters, Hendrix transforms what might have appeared a musical still life in Dylan's version into a motion picture. While he intensifies both the song's blues elements and its foundational chord cycle, his signif)rin(g) transformation also introduces elements to contradict them, initiating a dramatic conflict whose force is apparent from the first sound that meets the ear. In the midst of the turmoil appears Hendrix himself, the self-proclaimed "Voodoo Child," raging and defiant in the guise of the lead guitar. If the two approaching riders in the song's lyrics represent uncertainty, if the wind and the wildcat represent danger, if the businessmen are the world's agents of betrayal, and if claustrophobic confusion threatens to undermine his will, Hendrix boldly pits his musical power against it all. His guitar and vocal utterances have an intense urgency about them in their aggressive articulation and rhythmic drive. And unlike the sonic reserve of Dylan's recording, here the frequency space teems with dynamic activity. From the highs of the cymbals and tambourines to the lows of the bass guitar and kick drum, the ongoing agitation of the frequency space heightens the track's sense of tumult. Further, the track presents the ear with striking uses of echo and ambience (reverb), which play on our sonic consciousness as impressionistic reflections of the song's lyrics. The echoes that trail behind their sources as they move across the stereo space overlay the song's controlled structure with a sense of swirling confusion and untamed defiance. And among the track's many reverberant images, that of the wood block in the track's introduction stands out immediately, casting a prominent shadow that disappears into the depths of the track, an allusive premonition of the "cold distance" from which the two mysterious riders approach at the end of the song. Hendrix's transformation of the song's dramatic sense, however, goes beyond intensifYing the sound and performance style. By recasting its gestural, 123. Hendrix's public performances included at least two other Dylan songs: "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window." 124. Hendrix, quoted in Shapiro and Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix, 529.

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formal, and conceptual elements, Hendrix revises Dylan's matrix of dualistic tensions. In the process, he probes the song's dramatic potential and transforms the sense of musical time from a hovering oscillation to a forwardsweeping progression. There are three basic strategies apparent in this transformation: ( l) the intensification of essential musical gestures and formal divisions; (2) the introduction of pitch material dissonant with the pentatonic collection of the original; and (3) the tracing of a long-range, goal-directed melodic line over the call-and-response structure of the arrangement. It is in the latter that Hendrix asserts most forcefully his protagonistic claim. For the line etched by the lead guitar in its steady climb across the span of the track, reaching a climactic peak in the final interlude, seems to represent a struggle against, and eventual mastery over, the song's foreboding atrnosphere. 125 In addition to their propulsive force on the musical surface, Hendrix's transformational strategies--each of which I shall discuss in turn-represent something of a conceptual dissonance with the balance that characterizes Dylan's original version. The resulting tension gives Hendrix's recomposition an irresistible urgency, one that emanates from the track's deeper structure and further intensifies the storms on its surface. As we have seen, in Dylan's version the insistent nature of the chord cycle becomes apparent only gradually. Through sheer repetition, it develops from a simple accompaniment into an element of dramatic tension. In Hendrix's recording, on the other hand, the gesture makes a forceful entrance at the outset. In the track's first four bars it commands full attention, presented by tightly compressed acoustic twelve-string guitars and bass (pitched now in C minor) in an emphatic rhythmic unison punctuated by the responses of the wood block and its tailing reverb. 126 The tempo is slower than Dylan's, and the absence of any melodic material puts the focus squarely on what is apparently an independent musical entity of some weight. As if to delineate the chord cycle even further as a distinct individual character, the opening four measures are set off metrically from the rest of the introduction by a persistent displacement of accent-making all of the beats appear as upbeats-which precludes a smooth transition into the following phrase. The move is suggested by Dylan's syncopated guitar. Hendrix's chord changes come at the same points as Dylan's, but in a clear example of Gates's "homonymic pun," the shifted accent inverts the rhythmic sense. In its aggressive, unadorned 125. For another perspective on the interplay of blues and linear structure in Hendrix's work, see Matthew Brown, " 'Little Wing': A Study in Musical Cognition," in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme M. Boone (New York: Oxford Univer· sity Press, 1997), 155-69. 126. Compression is an electronic process whereby a sound's dynamic range is reduced, in ef. feet packing the sonic information into a tighter space and making for a louder overall impression. Regarding the change of key, Hendrix commonly tuned his guitars down a half step. This allowed for easier string bending and gave him the ability to play in guitar-friendly keys without straining his voice.

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presentation, the chord cycle appears a powerful, harmonically inert force set forth as a dramatic foil to any sense of forward motion that may follow (Ex. 4). In response to the call of the first half of the introduction, the second halfwhich begins in measure 5-brings the meter into focus as the track settles into its groove. The acoustic guitars and the bass become more active with sixteenth-note subdivisions while the snare drum pmmds out a steady quarternote pulse. The stark chordal texture of the opening measures is answered now by a melody played by the electric guitar, which replaces the harmonica and continues to shift the timbral association from folk to cutting-edge rock. But if the track to this point has signaled a sonic departure from the original version, now the syntactic frame becomes stretched as well. The lead electric guitar immediately introduces the second scale degree, D, which is played five times in succession. Whereas Dylan's version accumulates much of its tension from its constrained pitch vocabulary-which, again, only becomes apparent as the track progresses-Hendrix's prominent iteration at the beginning of the track of a pitch that falls outside the song's basic pentatonic mode sets forth yet another dualism. Although it is followed by a flourish of pentatonic inflection, the dissonant pitch announces that the track means not simply to intensifY the blues-isms of the song, but also to extend the stylistic frame and to explore another thematic prospect. With the entrance of the voice, the textural richness of the introduction subsides. For the first half of each chord cycle, the chords are strummed by the acoustic guitars once on the downbeat and again on the third beat, each chord sustained for two beats. Similarly, the drums-their prominence in the mix now significantly reduced-and the bass articulate a steady pulse, freer than Dylan's version but still providing a firm underpinning for the descent from ito VI and leaving space for the voice's call. The ascent back to i, like Dylan's, is filled with instrumental responses-sharp interjections from acoustic guitar and melodic fills in the bass.l 27 Unlike Dylan's version, however, these responses also involve the electric guitar, which plays fragmentary riffi heavily laced with pitches of the pentatonic blues collection (Ex. 5 ). Unlike Dylan's, too, is Hendrix's treatment of the vocal melody. While Hendrix retains Dylan's basic pattern of declamatory emphasis, he uses a richer set of pitch resources, and his delivery is peppered with spontaneous interjections in the manner of a blues shout. In addition to added ornamentation, Hendrix intensifies the blues quality of the melody by repeatedly singing the flatted fifth (G~) as an upper neighbor to the F. If Dylan's crying blues is reminiscent of Robert Johnson, Hendrix's shout calls to mind Muddy Waters and his "deep tone with a heavy beat."l28 127. Hendrix also provides a brief moment of respite from the chord cycle with a substitute of iv for VI at the end of the first quatrain. 128. James Rooney, Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 122. This is Waters's own characterization.

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Example 4

633

Hendrix, "All along the Watchtower," introduction

Lead Guitar

12-string Guitars I

I

I

>>I

Cymbal Snare Drum

>>I

(w.b.)

(t.t.)

Example 5 Hendrix, "All along the Watchtower," verse l

There must be some kind of way

out

At the instrumental interlude that follows the first verse, it is as if the music explodes. The lead guitar surges forth amidst a thick and threatening textural cloud reminiscent of the track's introduction, but with even more force. The articulation of pulse and meter is less distinct as the drum part becomes dense (both rhythmically and texturally), loud, and freely syncopated. Likewise, the tambourine and acoustic guitar, joined once again by the wood block, thicken the rhythmic texture with a move from basic pulse articulation to sixteenthnote subdivisions and accented syncopations. In addition to the intense rhythmic commotion, the reverberations from the wood block and acoustic guitar,

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together with the dense cymbal textures, add a haze to the textural middleground which further intensifies an impression of disorientation ("too much confusion") and claustrophobia ("there must be some kind of way out of here"). 129 In the midst of the rhythmic outbursts, the bass line shifts to a steady eighth-note articulation of the chord cycle, holding it in place with some effort against the surrounding fury. The pattern thus set of alternating sonic characters--one associated with the call of the voice in the verse, the other with the response of the guitar in the interlude-continues throughout the course of the track. Even in the extended guitar solo (following the second verse/interlude) the pattern continues: for the first sixteen bars, the guitar emulates the voice (with the use first of a slide and then a wah-wah pedal), wandering across the stereo spectrum accompanied by the restrained verse texture; in the last eight bars of the solo, the interlude texture erupts once more, while the solo guitar breaks off its melody and plays instead a dry, cleanly articulated chordal passage. Whereas in Dylan's version, the call-and-response frames a complementary balance, Hendrix capitalizes on the dramatic potential of the Call-Response dualism by setting the two structural mlits sharply against one another. Interludes follow verses in a series of disjunct textural contrasts whose abrupt juxtaposition both sharpens the piece's formal articulation and provides a propulsive dramatic force. Further, in each of the interludes the lead guitar once again features the dissonant D prominently (Ex. 6). This in itself distinguishes the guitar response from the voice's bluesy call far more sharply than anything in Dylan's version. While Dylan's harmonica interludes complement the verses, filling out the pentatonic pitch collection, Hendrix's responses introduce a contrasting character whose relation to the pentatonic represents something of a subplot. The character's ultimate fate, however, is tied to a larger gesture, the tllird of the transformational strategies listed above. For in addition to the pitch contrast, the guitar also introduces a concept of musical form quite distinct from both the strophic units of folk or blues songs and the circularity of the chord cycle: the long-range, goal-directed musical line. For all its textural and pitch contrast, the verse/interlude relationship propels Hendrix's track primarily at the local level; from a higher structural view it remains, as in Dylan's version, arepeating call-and-response. The lead guitar in the interludes, however, presents an altogether different kind of narrative gesture. Onto the track's repeating structural elements-chord cycle, verse/interlude, strophic song formHendrix overlays a through -composed (or through-improvised) musical line inscribing an octave ascent that unfolds across the span of the piece in a series of melodic pealG reached in successive interludes. In the introduction, the 129. My use of the term middleground has no intended Schenkerian implication. One dimension of sonic texture on a recording is depth, relations of which are determined by a sound's relative prominence. Similar to visual perspective, the most prominent sounds appear as fore· ground, the least prominent as background. See Zak, Poetics ofRock, 155~60.

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409 Bob Dylan and Jirni Hendrix

Example 6

635

Hendrix, "All along the Watchtower," interlude 1 27

Guitar '

~1'1, j

)I

IJ

peak is D; in the first interlude, it rises to H; the second and third interludes (recalling that the third interlude is part of the extended guitar solo) both rise as far as G; and finally, at the end of the last interlude, the guitar makes it up to a high C, which repeats throughout the track's fade (Ex. 7).1 30 The implicit sense of effort required for the ascent-an expansion of the effort suggested by the second half of the chord cycle as it climbs back up to iis magnified by pausing at the G, beyond which the guitar seems unable to rise after the pitch's initial utterance in the second interlude. Hendrix reprises the long-range ascent to G twice in scale passages at the end of the guitar solo and then again at the end of the final interlude. At that point, with a last cadential push, the guitar makes it up to the high C, the instrument's highest fretted pitch, at once reaching its apex and displacing for good the dissonant D. With the high C panning continuously across the stereo spectrum, the sense of transcendent arrival is unmistakable. As it claims the entire stereo space, the track's stage as it were, the guitar revels in a triumphant moment even as the song's lyrics are at their most apprehensive-"Outside in the cold distance I A wildcat did growl I Two riders were approaching I And the wind began to howl." The "Voodoo Child" has traversed the song's haunted landscape propelled by his musical skill, and has arrived heroically at the journey's end. In a way, the journey stretches all the way back to the beginning of Electric Lady/and. After far-ranging musical explorations grounded in the blues, "All along the Watchtower" is positioned as the album's finale, followed only by the brief reprise Hendrix called "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," which sounds like a confirming coda, or a victory lap. Having proven his musical prowess, he now takes the opportunity to add to the boasts of "Voodoo Chile" a new one: "Well, I stand up next to a mountain I And I chop it down with the edge of my hand." The musical character represented by the lead guitar in the interludes is a signifyin(g) protagonist similar to the "narrative persona" Roger Abrahams labels the "intrusive I." The term refers to the "creation of a narrative persona" where a narrator "allow[ s] the hero some attribute by which one can identifY him with the narrator." 131 Hendrix assumes the narrator role as he sings Dylan's 130. At measures 65-66, a high B~ makes an appearance, but two things mitigate against its consideration in the scheme I'm suggesting: ( 1) it is heard primarily as an octave doubling, and (2) it is in the section of the guitar solo corresponding to the verse's second quatrain, not the interlude. Similarly, the A~ trill at the end of the guitar solo is heard as an ornament to the G. 131. Abrahams, Deep Down In the Jungle, 58.

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Example 7 Hendrix's progressive melodic peaks

#''')}zs ]49I ~ ~" ,~, ~ I

J---57-------------------]--97------------------]rJ

Introduction Interlude I Interlude 2

I

• • • ;= I

Guitar solo (Interlude 3)

• • • := Interlude 4

II

song, but by injecting a new character into the narrative (the lead guitar) with an "attribute" clearly identified with Hendrix himself, he becomes in effect "two personae at the same time," narrator and hero. Furthermore, in the subplot unfolding in the interludes, the guitar itself, like much else in the song and track, exhibits a dual nature. Its repeated iteration of the D is both the mark of a distinctive musical character and, ultimately, something to be overcome, resolved. The guitar's rising line, then, represents a self-transformation by heroic measures. By emphasizing the song's elemental componentschord cycle, call-and-response, blues-in the outsized sonic form of electrified rock, Hendrix sharpens its dramatic profile, unpacking its implications. At the same time, however, he injects into the song's fearful landscape a transcendence barely apparent in Dylan's version. In his guitar responses to the song's verses, Hendrix performs an act of courage and optimism in answer to the song's general unease. In effect, Hendrix identifies himself with the character of the thief in the song, who admonishes, "No reason to get excited." Placid in the face of existential peril, the thief argues against cynicism and falsehood, yet remains bounded by the music's relentless circularity.l 32 Hendrix, however, in his guitar's dual gesture of self-transformation and mastery over the static chord cycle, offers a decisive way forward. If, as Gates suggests, there is an element of power reversal in signif)rin(g), we might read Hendrix's boldly assertive musical act as a reversal of the song's implied fatalism.

Hobo, Gypsy, and the Talking Machine Whereas John VVt:sley Harding was completed in three days, Electric Ladyland took months. Coming after a period of seclusion and reflection, and an eighteen-month absence from the public eye and ear, Dylan's album, recorded in Nashville, was a surprising change in direction pointing the way to a rootsy, countrified rock style that would soon become a sub genre in itself 133 Hendrix's album, by contrast, was the apex of a creative torrent; it was his third album in less than two years, a period that also included hundreds of 132. Marqusee suggests this interpretation of the thief's character (Chimes ofFreedom, 237). 133. Contemporary examples of country-rock include Dylan's Nashville Skyline, Columbia 9825 (1969); the Band's Music from Big Pink, Capitol2955 (1968); and the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Columbia 9670 (1968).

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performances. 134 Electric Ladyland exemplifies the eclectic, experimental spirit of the time, its elaborate, electronically processed soundscapes evoking psychedelia and demonstrating an affinity for contemporary studio techniques. In their differences, the two albums illustrate the breadth of rock's aesthetic spectrum illl968. Yet both albums have a common attitude as well, emblematized ill the song they share. For Hendrix and Dylan were fundamentally traditionalists. That is, their work was grounded ill dialogue with rock's musical roots, especially folk song and blues. Their contributions to the dialogue were facilitated and informed by the recordirlg culture that pervaded the musical landscape from the later 1940s on. Although both artists served apprenticeships ill nightclubs, playirlg with and among many other musicians, they gamed much of their musical experience from listenirlg to records, expandirlg their vocabulary with pieces of disembodied sound. Records circulate ill unpredictable ways and lend a durability to the utterances of popular entertairlers. Encountered at some historical, geographic, or social remove from their origirl, records offer sonic experiences whose context may be personalized, irnagirled by the listener; and the result, for listenirlg musicians, may be a kind of virtual collaboration with others remote from themselves. Such free-rangirlg musical interaction exemplifies both terms of Floyd's Call-Response principle. A recordirlg is, among other thirlgs, a response to experiences impressed on the recordist's memory and irnagirlation; and then, at the moment it is released illto the public sphere, the recordirlg becomes a call to anyone listenirlg. For Hendrix and Dylan, recordirlgs were totems of enduring value ill the midst of rootless illternational celebrity. "I never saw him. I only heard his records," said Dylan ill an admiring assessment ofJirnmie Rodgers, who, by comparison to other entertairlers he may have shared a stage with, had ill Dylan's estimation "outlasted them all." 135 And for all Dylan's averred empathy with Guthrie and Johnson, they, too, were recorded apparitions. Similarly, on concert tours with Hendrix, Billy Cox traveled with blues recordirlgs, which were played, he recalled, "ill the limos while we were goillg from the airports to the hotels." In this way, amidst the often capricious demands of pop stardom, the musicians ''were constantly covered with the masters. " 136 Paul Gilroy has written that Hendrix, followirlg the breakup of the origirlal Jirni Hendrix Experience, "rationalis[ed] his ambivalence towards both blackness and America through the nomadic ideology of the gypsy. " 137 In fact, the gypsy image foregrounded in Hendrix's post-Experience group, Band of 134. In 1967 alone, Hendrix played 255 concerts. For a complete listing of performance dates, see Shapiro and Glebbeek,Jimi Hendrix, 700-744. 135. Crowe, liner notes to Biograph, 31. 136. Billy Cox, "Jimi Hendrix's 'Red House,'" Guitar Player, May 1989,47. 137. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 94. Band of Gypsys was short-lived, its output consisting of a single live album made quickly and cheaply to satisfY a contractual commitment. As bassist Billy Cox remembers it, the fact that the band members were all black was merely a matter oflogistics:

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Gypsys, encapsulates Hendrix's entire career and is perhaps also a symbol for his mixed racial and ethnic heritage, which, according to his father, included African, European, and Native American strains.l 38 His musical nomadism, in part a reflection of a restless musical imagination, was also an assertion of independence from expectations both social and musical. "Music is stronger than politics," Hendrix told an interviewer for the Charleston Gazette. "Every man is an island and music is about the only way we can really communicate. "139 In Dylan, Hendrix recognized a kindred traveler, another musical itinerant who rationalized his own ambivalent identity through music. Like Dylan with his retreat to Woodstock, Hendrix sought relief from celebrity pressures, among which was what Gilroy has characterized as the "conflict ... between the contending definitions of authenticity that are appropriate to black cultural creation on its passage into international pop commodification. "140 If, early in his career, Hendrix had resisted the existing strictures of black show business, in the end he traded them for another set of oppressive expectations, repeating a spectacle whose theatrical elements had become, for Hendrix, tiresome cliche. As Steve Waksman has written, at the height of his fame Hendrix wanted to "escape tl1e burdens of performing according to a set of expectations that he had helped to foster and yet had no ability to manage, expectations that came with the position of being a black hipster artist playing amidst the predominantly white counterculture of the late 1960s." Sanctuary would take the form of the "sound-buffered underground laboratory of Electric Lady studios," the recording facility he built in New York City in the last year of his life. 141 Hendrix and Dylan-gypsy and hobo-navigated a musical passage of selfinvention that led them into borderlands where musical styles, idioms, and traditions overlap. Here, music may function as what Nadine Hubbs has called a kind of "solvent," softening the lines of demarcation between identifYing categories-racial, ethnic, sexual, geographic, economic-and enabling processes of identity construction with unpredictable musical results.l 42

"[Mitch Mitchell] was asked to do it, but I think he wanted to stay in England. Buddy [Miles] was easily available. So me, Buddy and Jimi ... rehearsed for a couple of weeks and that was the Band ofGypsys" (Cox, quoted from the Jnly 1987 issue of Rock Scene, in Shapiro and Glebbeek, ]imi Hendrix, 401). Hendrix's last group-the Experience once again-was a combination of the two previous bands, with Cox on bass and Mitch Mitchell, from the original Experience, on drums. 138. For a discussion of Hendrix family genealogy, see Hendrix and Obrecht, My Son ]imi, 12-13. Shapiro and Glebbeek attempt a detailed genealogy dating from the early nineteenth centnry; see Jim Hendrix, 746-47. 139. Ray Brack, Charleston Gazette, 17 May 1969; quoted in Shapiro and Glebbeek, ]imi Hendrix, 362. 140. Paul Gilroy, "Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a Changing Same," Black Music Research ]ournalll (1991 ): 121. 141. Waksman, "Black Sound, Black Body," 76. 142. Commenting on specnlations by Suzanne Cusick and T. S. Eliot on music's power to subsume individual identity as one "becomes" the music, Hubbs writes: "What Cusick and Eliot

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Familiar musical elements are filtered and shape-shifted according to the needs and desires of individual musicians, whose signifyin(g) commentary lingers in the form of recordings. Dylan's signifyin(g) response to the traditions he invoked was for Hendrix a call. And in responding with his recomposition, Hendrix in turn called forth. Dylan, among others, responded to Hendrix's "All along the Watchtower" in the 1970s with his own electrified live versions.143 "SignifYing," Susan McClary writes, "thus ensures the continuity of community, at the same time that it celebrates the imagination and skill of each particular practitioner." 144 Situated at what Floyd calls "the intercultural crossroads of black and white in the United States," the two versions of "All along the Watchtower" illustrate the workings of Call-Response in the terms suggested by Ralph Ellison in this essay's epigraph. 145 The juxtaposed elements of the interchange remain recognizable even as they are transformed and merged in the frame oflate 1960s rock. Appendix All along the Watchtower "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relie£ Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth." "No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late." All along the watchtower, princes kept the view While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, rl1e wind began to howl. Copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

describe here is an experience and a perception of music as a potent, pleasure-giving solvent, capable of dispersing and thus subverting identity" ("A French Connection: Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet," Gay and Lesbian Quarterly6 [2000]: 392). 143. Listen, for example, to the version on the live album Before the Flood, Asylum 201 (1974 ), recorded with the Band. 144. Susan McClary, Conventional ~sdom: The Content ofMusical Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 36. 145. Floyd, Black Music, 270.

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Discography (Catalog nwnbers are those of the original releases.) Band. Music from Big Pink. Capitol2955 (1968). Beach Boys. Pet Sounds. Capitol2458 (1966). Beatles. Sgt. Pepper)s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone 7027 ( 1967). Byrds. Sweetheart ofthe Rodeo. Columbia 96 70 (1968). Derek and the Dominos. Laylaand Other Assorted Love Songs. Atco 704 (1970). Dylan, Bob. Bob Dylan. Columbia 8579 (1962). --.The Freewheelin) Bob Dylan. Columbia 8786 (1963). - - . The Times They Are a-Changin). Columbia 8905 (1964). --.Another Side ofBob Dylan. Columbia 8993 (1964). --.Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia 9128 (1965). --.Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia 9189 (1965). - - . Blonde on Blonde. Columbia 841 ( 1966 ). --.John Wesley Harding. Columbia 9604 (1967). --.Nashville Skyline. Columbia 9825 (1969). - - . Bob Dylan Live 1966: The