History of Rock n Roll
"How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You"
-1966 -Marvin Gaye -song by H-D-H -singing in new, more sophisticated, less blues-style oriented
"Sunshine of Your Love"
-1967 -song mixes hard rock with psychedelia, centers on a simplistic guitar riff
"The Golden Road"
-1967 -the first local hit by the Dead and a classic of early SF psychedelia -ecstatic. communal, electric, quirky, poppy, passionate, but light hearted and "sunny"
Howl
-Allen Ginsberg's -first successful publication of the Beat Era, often referred to as the "Beat Manifesto" -became one of the most influential books of the 20th century American poetry -obscene -has explicit gay sex and expletives
"Whipping Post"
-Allman Brothers 1971 -one of rocks definitive improvisations; cyclical feel enabled by the odd 11/8 time signature and the double-drummer rhythm in the intro -23 minutes
Live at Fillmore East
-Allman Brothers Band -breakthrough live two album set showing their intensity and their blending of blues roots with jazz influenced improv -displays their way of opening up songs into 20 minute jams
Motown
-American record company specializing in r&b and black soul music -has more widely come to used as a term associated musical style
Paranoid
-Black Sabbath album -their most popular and influential record -album was both against war and against flower-power -music often slow, based on straightforward melodic blues riffs with heavy and distorted guitar sound
Eric Clapton
-British blues guitar "god" -blues central to Clapton's career -with cream, he moved toward a style that came to influence hard rock and progressive rock
"The Gnome"
-ELP
"Crossroads"
-Eric Clapton with Cream -hard rock -opening guitar riff a simplified version of Johnsons guitar line -uses standard 12 bar blues form
musical "assembly line"
-Gordy used this for business/production model
"Star Spangled Banner"
-Jimi Hendrix -Woodstock -an encyclopedia array of guitar and noise effects
"Help Me"
-Joni Mitchell, -the singer helplessly falling for a man she knows is bad news -a straightforward love song that largely sticks to pops verse-chorus forms but with angular and shimmering melodic style
The Velvet Underground
-Lou Reed and John Cale -emerge from the Greenwich Village avant garde Beat scene -NY band presenting a darker side to the 60s hedonism, an antithesis to Californian ethos of love and peace -reed fascinated by street culture and urban amorality -cales classical training experimentalism -the bands loud volumes and and aloof personas -managed by pop artist Andy Wargol who introduced them to singer Nico and added them to his mixed media event
"Stax Records"
-Memphis TN -House Band -racially integrated rhythm section -Otis Redding
"John McLaughlin"
-Miles Davis -Fusion -titled after albums guitar player -features long freedom electric guitar solo
Bitches Brew
-Miles Davis -Pioneering fusion album -typically known for his relaxed, "cool" playing, this album shows a more rock guitar influence, overdriven style from davis
Berry Gordy
-Motown record company founder -founded in Detroit as Tamla Records -began as a songwriter, achieving success in the late 50s by cowriting hits for soul and R&B singers
Fame Studio
-Muscle Shoals, AL -Muscle Shoals SOund and Rhythm Section -all white group -recorded several artists -aretha franklin
"Sitting on the Dock of the Bay"
-Otis Redding-shows influences of Dylan and the Beatles -song thought by many in the soul music industry to be too pop-oriented
concept albums
-Pink Floyd -engineered by ALan Parsons
Modest Mussogsky
-Russian composer -musical at an exhibition -musical expression of an individual walking around an art exhibition -piece in sevral movements, inspired by artworks
Janis Joplin
-SF-area rock and Blues singer -modeled her style after blues and r&b singers like Bessie Smith and Otis Redding, unlike more folk influenced vocal approach of other popular white female singers -coveys extreme emotionalism, gives sense of almost giving up vocal control
"Shop Around"
-Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - 1961 -original "Detroit version" of the song has a heavier blues sound -Gordy orders a poppier recording and that becomes #1
"Signed, Sealed, Delivered"
-Stevie Wonder -1970 -song written and produced by him
Ray Charles
-The Genius of SOul -innovative singer, pianist and bandleader -fostered "a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of blues" -many r&b hits in the 50s but no crossover success until 1959
Aretha Franklin
-The Queen of Soul -exemplifies church gospel tradition -father was a pastor of large church in Detroit -songwriter as well as performer -"precious lord" live at her fathers church -signs with Columbia records from 60-67 -signs with atlantic records in 67
"My Girl"
-The Temptations -1964 -song by Robinson and White
Talking Book
-Wonder -starting experimenting with the synthesizer and widened his lyrical themes to racial problems and spiritual questions
heavy metal
-a subgenre of hard rock -developed a more distorted sound and heavier drums and bass that started separating heavy metal from other blues based rock -heavy riffs -wailing vocals
Jimi Hendrix
-after him, guitar playing would never be the same -an American but brought a firm grounding in electric blues guitar traditions to England where he formed The Experience with British sidemen
The Velvet Underground and Nico
-album -songs about drugs, sadomasochism, and sublimation are remarkable for their subjects, but also as vibrant pieces of pop music
Bob Dylan
-also moving toward more sentimental country sounds Nashville Skyline -abandons much of the social criticism that characterized his earlier music
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
-another British progressive rock group -formed in 1970, from the trio released a top-ten live album Pictures at an exhibition -a more or less verbatim "cover" of classical work by Modest Mussorgsky
The Fugs
-band composed of Greenwich Village Beat poets -DIY, anti-commercial, garage band aesthetic; proto-punk, but with the hope for political change
Marvin Gaye
-became Motown's best selling male vocalist -recordings demonstrated the changes in black American music from raw r&b, through sophisticated soul to the political awareness of the early 70s and then personal and sexual politics
Weather Report
-begun by Wayne Shorter (sax) and Joe Zawinul (keys) who also played with Davis on Brew
Yes
-british art rock band, commercially very successful between 1970 and 1977 -known for its complicated arrangements -instrumental virtuosity and ambitious scope -string of studio albums with complex and extended tracks, many up to 20 minutes -Rick Wakeman joined for album Fragile
Led Zeppelin
-british hard rock -progenitors of heavy metal -influenced by blues and british isles folk music and traditional Arabic and indian music -sledgehammer style of virtuosic guitar-focused rock, heavy textures and extremely loud
Black Sabbath
-british metal band -the darker side of heavy metal -helped define heavy metal topics by moving away from love, sex, and masculinity and toward metallic topics of evil, war and pain
Robert Crumb
-cartoonist -created Mr. Natural -a hippie icon
Ray Charles Style
-developed an eclectic style, combining R&B, Soul, Country, Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Blues -raspy singing style with whoops, cries, bent notes, shouts -accompanied by his gospel-styled piano and call and response patterns either with the horns or a female backing group -control in his signing made him acceptable to wide audiences
Pink Floyd
-far reaching, fluctuating BRitish band -moved from avant-garde psychedelia to quintessential album-oriented progressive rock -dark, dystopian themes of war, madness, greed, psychological isolation -cinematic conceptions that culminate in The Wall
the Grateful Dead
-featured at Kesey's famous acid tests in SF area -inspired by Joan Baez, Dylan, folk revival festival scene -exemplified the communal idea (as band and as audience) -live experience crucial -improvised and open-ended performances
Jefferson Airplane
-first nationally successful band from SF psychedelic scene -helped redefine "acid rock" style -loud, open and improvised forms -spacey, visionary lyrics -qausi-distorted sound
Stevie Wonder
-first signed to Motown as a child prodigy -singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist -first Motown sides combine gospel influences with r&b of Ray Charles and Same Cooke
"Venus in Furs"
-from velvet underground & nico -text, inspired by Sacher-Masoch, about sex bondage, S & M and submission -inspired by composer La Monte Young, Cale and Reed explore pitch drones and strange tunings -Cale plays viola drones and strange tunings, while Reed plays guitar in all- D "ostrich tuning: -slow, plodding, emphatic beat
Miles Davis and (jazz-rock)
-fusion -davis key player in most major movements in jazz -inspired by Jimi Hendrix -makes increasing use of guitar experimentation -develops more of a guitar focuses improvisational style
"Purple Haze"
-heavy metal -Jimi Hendrix -sounds that few suspected the electric guitar could ever make -opens with tritone interval in guitar melody-long understood as the most dissonant interval in guitar melody -obvious blues roots -a strophic tune serving as a scaffold for instrumental passages -sped up guitar and violent distortion at the end -psychedelic words/text
"Purple Haze"
-heavy metal -sounds that few suspected the electric guitar could ever make -opens with tritone interval in guitar melody-long understood as the most dissonant interval in guitar melody -obvious blues roots -a strophic tune serving as a scaffold for instrumental passages -sped up guitar and violent distortion at the end -psychedelic words/text
"power trio"
-heavy metal based on the amplified rock -a format change where the rhythm guitarist is replaced by turning up the bass, close miking the drums and adding signal distortion effects to the lead guitar
The Beat Writers
-inspired, surreal, post Whitmanesque babble -aesthetic was a "sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately a soul, a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness
Blood Sweat and Tears
-jazz meets rock -elements of big band jazz (horn heavy), psychedelia, jazz improvisation but with a rock backbeat and pop/rock chord progressions and singing
Guitars Rapid Evolution
-late 40s -a fairly mild-mannered accompanying instrument becomes a fully electric, aggressive, heavily amplified solo instrument -distortion and feedback not only accepted, but manipulated as part of the new sound -new playing techniques and modifications
"Dazed and Confused"
-led zeppelin -a definitive statement of heavy blues rock -a slow folk-blues by the Yardbirds
"stairway to heaven"
-led zeppelin -has cryptic-mystical lyrics by Plant -mythological beings, rural images -mood of mystery and enchantment -complex form in three sections -acoustic guitar and double tracked recorders -slow electric section -faster crashing hard rock section -elements of progressive rock complexity
"Time"
-lyrics by Roger Waters -Pink Floyd -a song about morality and times passage -some jazz harmonies, low key vocals from Gilmour and wright -harmonies often from jazz more than previous rock -synthesized sounds and sequencers -slow, with resonant, uncluttered guitar work -this theme ever more present in Waters's writing
Holland-Dozier-Holland
-many hits for the Supremes -showed their command of sweet soul idiom -great hooklines combined with a vibrant rhythm section, establishing wonderful dance groove
Brown compared to Ray Charles
-more obviously about dancing than church worship -focus on rhythm and tone color (few chord changes, little melodic variety) -stylistic trademark: insistent repetition of a single phrase resulting in a kind of ecstatic trance -style became to be known as funk later
heavy metal musical characteristics
-power trio -thick sound through amplification -vocals guttural, blues-based -intricate solos and riffs -powered up, extremely loud urban blues
Counterculture
-rock essential to defining the 60s counterculture and its advocacy of hedonism and peace -political unrest, civil rights movement, Vietnam, campus unrest, assassinations -liberated sexuality: intro to birth control, stonewall and gay rights -more visible drug use
The Band
-rock group's attempt to recapture a sense of community -communal, star ego free R&B group with collaborative songwriting
the Doors
-the darker side of psychedelic: poetics of existential angst, aligned more with the 60s countercultures hedonism and self indulgence than with its ideas of peace -atmospheric but austere music -despairing and defiant lyrics focusing on sex and death
progressive rock bands
-usually shunned the three-minute pop single format -cultivated art music connections -integrated free jazz techniques -displayed showy, quasi-mystical qualities in lyrics
Allman Brothers Band
-young southern blues rock band with two guitar virtuosos and a highly expressive singer in organist Gregg Allman
"Break on Through (To the Other Side)"
1967 -first song on The Doors' first album, first single -trademark keyboard sounds -bossa nova drum groove
Woodstock
1969 -a kind of came to symbolize "what was right and good" about the hippie movement -that the movement was short-lived -the violence at the Altamont concert in California came only three months later and 1970 Kent State shooting deflates student mvts
"Ramblin Man"
Allman Brothers Band goes soft and sweet -less interest in hard driving blues
"Iron Man"
Black Sabbath (1970) -Osbourne: against peace, love, rock n roll -wanted to create music that put a "horror vibe" reflecting human despair "doom music" -themes of alienation, unfeeling, non humanity -osbournes voice recorded through a metal fan
crossing color lines
Gordy trained all early Motown songwriters and producers to try and reach black and white audiences
Cholly Atkins
House choreographer
"Papas Got A Brand New Bag"
James Brown -transition towards funk -1965 -began celebrating black slang and emphasizing racial pride and self determination -emblematic of black pride mvt emerging in the mid to late 60s
Court and Spark
Joni Mitchell -documents her transition from folk artist to sophisticated rock auteur
important for heavy metal
Marshal amps, stacks of them create loudness
"You Cant Hurry Love"
The Supremes 1966 song by H-D-H
"What'd I Say"
_Ray Charles -first golf record, a crossover hit into the growing of rock n roll -typically eclectic in style -gospel elements in a 12 bar blues structure -latin conga rhythm -elements of boogie woogie
Berry Gordy's simple idea:
a label name encompasses a free combination of musical styles (r&b, soul, pop music) that's designed to appeal to everyone
Black Sabbath sound
a large, bottom heavy sound anchored by Bonhams drumming with Jones's bass guitar -bass line often mirrored by electric guitar, sometimes distorted, playing an octave higher
Gordy's musical program
a response to racist portrayals of African Americans as lazy, intelligent, less capable than whites -"we can win at your game" attitude
blues shouter
a rough-voiced male who shouts rather than sings blues lyrics
Acid (psychedelic) Rock
a style growing from the hippie scene in the mid 60s connected with the use of LSD or 'acid'; the music featured long blues-based improvisations, surrealist lyrics, loud volumes, and lavish light shows, intended to evoke or support a drug induced state
Southern Rock
a subgenre of country rock, blues, and country based styles, typically aggressive in sound and centered on electric guitars and vocals -white musicians reclaiming electric blues and a reconciliation of southern regional pride with progressive racial views
JOni Mitchell
acclaimed both as a performer and as songwriter -rooted in folk music -style had harmonic skill. a visual imagination, a sense of place and landscape, and deep and personal lyrics that explore the self
soul
black popular music of the 60s using elements of gospel music and blues "soul music" an umbrella term, covers many singing styles -equated with African American pride -styles from church music
Frank Zappa
composer, rock musician, guitarist,bitterly satirized mainstream culture and counterculture -aspired to a high art music while working subversively from within the popular music industry -saw the music business as manipulating music and its consumers and dedicated to profit
"Funky Drummer"
drummer Clyde Stubblefield's drum break served as the backbeat for hundreds of hip hop tracks
Chicago
group that found commercial success with pop-oriented, de-politicized jazz-rock music
themes in heavy metal
hedonistic subject matter, often from fantasy -focus on death/mortality -celebration of life -anger/aggression -inversion of mainstream symbolism -fan appeal
"Roundabout"
hugely varied and often complex textures, recorded on 16 track -very active electric guitar intro and outro, Rick Wakeman supplying a variety of keyboard sounds
Album-Oriented Rock
marketing term to describe American stadium acts who catered to those in their 20s and 30s
John McLaughlin
part of British blues scene -forms Mahavishnu Orchestra in 71
Country Rock
pioneered by Bob Dylan and The Band -gospel and country influenced song -style trends toward more personal sentimentality -nostalgic depictions of simple rural life] -typically a pleasing heterogeneous mix of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano
Robert Plant
remarkable flexibility, conveys wide range of emotion with his control of volume, timbre and dissonance -his powerful, exaggerated blues-shouter style was especially influential
progressive rock
rockers begin to take inspiration from classical, jazz and other "art" music to expanding rock's boundaries through new techniques and add prestige to the genre -experimental, often thematic approaches enabled by new studio sophistications and by a general shift from a working class, dancing market to a student, listening market
Otis Redding
soul singer and songwriter -important figure at Stax Records -crosses over mainstream white listenership
Browns Style:
stage performance, dancing and call and response interactions with the audience convey the fervor of a preacher
James Brown
the "Godfather of Soul" -Soul Brother Number One -greatly influenced Black styles: disco, rap- -chugging, push-pull rhythms -repetitive, riff based and quasi-improvised melodies -complex, interlocking polyrhythms -tight backup band
The Motown Artists Development Department
the Motown "finishing school" run by Maxine Powell
Pan-Africanism
the idea that black Americans and Africans share aspects of the same political and cultural identity and destiny
Black Pride
the ideas that black Americans should reject dominant (white standards) of beauty and culture and embrace their own
psychedelic
the style that emerged with brilliant colors and hallucinogenic images
Hippies
venerated what they imagined to be eastern or Native American aesthetics as alternatives to corporate fashion
"White Rabbit"
written by Grace Slick -Jefferson airplane -psychedelic lyrics inspired by Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland
