Rock Music

There is not one single history of rock music. There are several.

There is the history of the hits. Most books on rock music are histories of the hits. The charts decide, i.e. the masses decide. Marx would have loved it, except there is a catch: the masses tend to buy what is publicized by the media, which is what corporations pay money to publicize. Marketing decides the charts. Invest a few million dollars on me and even I, regardless of my musical talent, will break into the charts, i.e. will become part of "that" history of rock music. Most books on the subject are, in fact, books about the music industry. Very often, the profile of a musician is simply a list of her/his successes in the Billboard charts ("that album broke into the charts", "that album hit #5", "that album sold one million copies"). In other words, books on rock music tend to treat musicians like corporations or start-ups, judging them by their revenues, profits and marketing strategy.

Then there are national versions of the history of rock music. Italians have been more exposed to British music than USA music. The Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival are hardly known, whereas the Moody Blues and David Bowie are almost household names. The history of rock music viewed from Italy is sharply different from the history of rock music viewed from, say, Boston.

Finally, there are the individual histories of rock music. Each person grew up with a different set of idols, and tends to center the history of rock music around those idols, whether Led Zeppelin or Doobie Brothers.

My history of rock music is not a history of the charts (which I consider an aberration), it is not a national version (I grew up in two continents and have traveled to some 70 countries), and it is not an individual version (I grew up with classical music, literature and science, not with rock music).

I simply listened to a lot of music, researched the origins of the various styles, and drew my conclusions. Very often, I was unaware of how many records an artist sold (I learned it later, when thousands of fans sent me nasty complaints). Very often, I am unaware of what was popular in Italy or Boston.

Also, I feel no particular sympathy for any rock musician. My "idols" are Ernst, Shostakovic, Pessoa, Coltrane... not rock musicians.

This is the most subjective history of rock music that one could possibly write. But also the most impartial, independent, and balanced.

It ends up being mostly a history of "alternative" rock music. While this is a gross approximation, it has become customary to separate "mainstream" music and "alternative" music. If you do what I did (listen to the music without letting marketing & sales influence you), it is very unlikely that you will end up selecting the musicians who topped the charts, and very likely that you will be impressed by countless obscure recordings that were twenty years ahead of their time even though nobody heard them.

Fans of mainstream music will claim that it all boils down to personal taste. I beg to disagree. There is an absolute factor that bestows a form of primacy on alternative music. Tell anyone (alternative or mainstream musician) that s/he is playing mainstream music and s/he will get upset. Tell anyone (alternative or mainstream musician) that s/he is playing alternative music and s/he will be flattered. Fans may buy according to the media and to marketing campaigns, but they, too, implicitly recognize the primacy of alternative music. If you tell a Beatles fan that the Beatles were mainstream, you risk your life. The evidence is just overwhelming: even the most mainstream musicians tacitly agree that alternative music is more important, and even the masses that buy mainstream music tacitly agree that alternative music is more important.

In every day's life, people tend to talk about what people tend to talk about. In a sense, people think they are talking, but, in reality, they are only quoting (other people). Alternative music is an attempt to break this endless loop, to talk about something not because everybody is talking about it but because we actually have something to say.

At the same time, rediscovering alternative rock and giving it its dues is also a way to restore the reputation of rock music among the more sophisticated audiences. Too many rock critics blindly follow the instructions from the major record companies and hail whichever "next big thing" happens to get a larger marketing budget. Rock critics who cannot break free from this commercial slavery have done a huge disservice to rock music. Anyone who is into Beethoven's symphonies or Wagner's operas and is told that the Beatles' catchy three-minute tunes are the masterpieces of rock music will simply smile and politely nod, but never listen to rock music again; and will thus never learn that rock music has also produced 20-minute avantgarde suites and hour-long electronic poems that are easily as complex and as futuristic as contemporary classical music. If the Beatles are at the top of the pyramid, who in heaven wants to listen to the rest of the pyramid? But if the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, etc. are at the "bottom" of the pyramid (and in my opinion they are closer to the bottom than to the top), then it makes a lot of sense for anyone into serious music to investigate the rest of the pyramid.

From this "alternative" point of view (one that puts creativity before sales) there were four watershed years in the history of rock music: 1955, when Chuck Berry "invented" rock'n'roll as we know it; 1966, when Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, the Doors, the Velvet Underground and others caused a massive revolution in a slumbering music scene; 1976, when the "new wave" and punk-rock caused a similar revolution in a similarly slumbering scene; and 1987-88, the years when Pixies, Fugazi, etc invented indie-pop. Each of these creative ages was followed by an era of "re-alignment" in which creativity was replaced by sell-out, as the record industry (and commercial bands) capitalized on the innovations of the previous years.

This book is divided in five parts that roughly mirror those periods. (My main regret is that I did not end the "Eighties" in 1988. That is the year when a number of new paradigm shifts emerged. It was just too convenient for me to use 1990 as the watershed year. But it is not. If I ever revise this book, I will move all bands born after 1988 into the "Nineties").

Traditionally, books on the history of rock music begin by defining rock music as the meeting of country music and rhythm'n'blues, which is roughly correct (I believe that the rhythm'n'blues component was much stronger than the country component but, of course, it all depends on whether you consider Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley as the founding father of rock'n'roll). However, this definition is out of touch with today's rock music. Today, rock music is a genre that employs sampling techniques, electronic instruments, digital/computer technology, cacophony, and ethnic sources (beyond African-American and Anglo-Irish). The roots of today's rock music lie in the technical and stylistic innovations brought about in the first half of the 20th century. Rock music is also part of a stream of "popular music", whose beginnings can be dated even further back, to the end of the 19th century. In fact, it would be more accurate to define today's rock music as the meeting of avantgarde music and popular music. Therefore, my "alternative" history of rock music begins much earlier than most books on the origins of rock'n'roll.

Having embarked in such a monumental effort, it was inevitable that I would feel the urge to rate the music, and to guide the readers towards an essential discography. The number in parentheses after the name of a group or musician is a way to rate their/her/his career. It is a three digit number that summarizes how many albums I have rated 9/10, 8/10 and 7/10. So, for example, Captain Beefheart is a 214, the highest rating in the book (2 of his albums are worth 9/10, one is an 8/10, and 4 are 7/10). When the number is only two digits, it means that the musician has no album worth 9/10; when it is only one digit, there is no album worth 8/10. (Needless to say, this system of rating is unfair to musicians who lived before the age of the album: sorry, I couldn't come up with a better system). In rating the albums, I was totally indifferent to whether the album had sold ten million copies or only two copies (neither piece of information says much about the quality of the music). There are many many more fans of famous stars than of obscure musicians, so I imagine that my ratings for famous albums will shock many more readers than my ratings for obscure albums. That, too, does not say much about the quality of the music.

For each album I indicate in parenthesis the year of release. Unlike classical music (in which what counts is the date of composition) and jazz music (that cares about the date of the recording), rock music uses release dates (and thus, sometimes, a song is credited to a date when the composer was already dead). I feel that the year of composition/recording is more important, but I didn't have the time to research the year of composition/recording for all albums. Even the year of release is often contentious: I used the dates that you can find at www.scaruffi.com -> Music -> Chronology of Albums.

My bias is towards the music, not the lyrics: it is called "rock music", not "rock literature". And there's a reason: as literature, it is worth very little. Even the greatest rock lyricists are, at best, mediocre poets. No surprise, therefore, that I rarely mention the lyrics of a song. The overall feeling is, in general, much more important than the literal message.

I have routinely changed the spelling of foreign words whenever they use a character that is not part of the English keyboard. We have been doing this for centuries to the Chinese, Arabic and Indian languages, so I don't see why we shouldn't do it for to French, Spanish, German, etc. For example, accented vowels are rendered in my book with the closest English vowel.

For further reading, my website "www.scaruffi.com" has thousands of pages on the musicians mentioned in this book. It also contains a much more detailed bibliography and a list of music magazines.

Piero Scaruffi

P.S. of 2006: It is obvious that my ratings have been decreasing throughout the first decade of the new century. Many readers ask me if there is a reason why the quality of music has worsened. I think it is an unfair question. The quality that we are referring to when we rate an album is about... albums. The album of the Sixties collected the best material of the artist (sometimes the best of many years). Today CDs are so cheap to make that sometimes musicians don't even rehearse before making a CD. I feel that it is unfair to compare two media that are actually very different: the album of the 1960s that went through a painful selection process and that cost a lot of money to make, and the album of the 2000s that goes through no selection process because it's so cheap to make. Needless to say, the former tends to be of higher quality than the latter. It's like asking if there has been a decrease in the quality of shoes. In the old days only rich people could afford shoes (poor people only had sandals) and those shoes were handmade with the best material. Now everybody has shoes but they are cheap crap that breaks after one year. Bottom line: i doubt anyone will ever make a 9/10 album again. We are living the transition to a new medium. Then we will have to change the way we rate music. Sometimes i think i should have done so a long time ago, instead of contributing to the industry of albums, which has become one of the biggest swindles of all times.
Main Bibliography

Bertoncelli Riccardo & Rizzi Cesare: Enciclopedia Rock (1987)
Christgau, Robert: Christgau's Record Guide (1981)
Clarke, Donald: Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1989)
Erlewine, Michael: All Music guide (1994)
Gillett, Charlie: The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (1970)
Hardy, Phil & Laing Dave: Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music (1990)
Pareles, Jon: The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (1983)
Prenderast, Mark: The Ambient Century (2000)
Robbins, Ira: Trouser Press Record Guide (1985)
Robbins, Ira: Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock (1997)
Scaruffi, Piero: Storia della Musica Rock (1991)
Southern, Eileen: The Music of Black Americans (1971)