16 - Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s

Summary

The story usually goes something like this:

Once upon a time, in the early 1950s, black rhythm and blues and white country music were married in the southern United States and gave birth to rock and roll, a blast of youthful energy that disrupted the stultifying blandness of a self-satisfied and conservative affluent post-war society. Parents were horrified, but the kids were more open-minded and rebellious than previous generations, and the course of musical events was completely and irrevocably changed. After a few short years of revolution, many of the major players were sidelined for various reasons (most of which are open to a reading of conspiracy by the US government afraid of the growing power of teenagers and African-American culture), and music entered a dead zone between 1958 and 1963, during which nothing of any interest or import happened. This all changed with the rise of the Beatles, the British blues boom, and the flowering of real revolution – political, sexual, racial, artistic – which was heralded by the arrival of the rock god in his many guises and reached its pinnacle in the hedonistic festival culture of the late 1960s. Afterwards came decadence and decline, only to be shaken up by a new revolution in which the Bicentennial of American Independence and the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II in England were disrupted by the arrival of punk. The Goths were at the walls.

But that’s a story for another night.

Like most myths and legends, this fairy story tells us more about the culture that tells it than it does about the historical events on which it is based. It is the classic Western tale of rise and fall, whether of the individual or the civilization. How much of the truth of those historical events survives? Are any of these truths recoverable at this late date? These may seem foolish questions about something that happened within living memory,but that is indeed largely where it exists – in the living memory of people who experienced the events along highly personal pathways, in oral histories, in the words of journalists and critics who very often had their own agendas.