An Alternative History of American Popular Music
By Elijah Wald
Oxford University Press, 323 pages, $24.95US
When Elvis Presley made his first appearance on Milton Berle's then-must-see-TV variety show in April, 1956, the other guests were Harry James and Buddy Rich, two big-band musicians. Berle remembered later that, when Elvis started strumming, Rich looked wryly across at James and “made a ‘square' sign with his fingers.”
This is one of my favourites of the countless tidbits that seize the standard back-of-a-napkin sketch of pop history and twist it into a Möbius strip in Elijah Wald's chronicle of the 20th-century American ear in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n' Roll .
Most rock books would say James and Rich were being musical reactionaries, blind to the revolution grinding its hips in front of them. But you could also say they were two hip jazz musicians who had no respect for a typical backwoods blues shouter. In truth, both views are correct, says Wald, a Los Angeles-based musician and author of six previous books on blues and folk music, plus one on hitchhiking.
Buddy Rich, a foul-mouthed thunder-demon of a drummer, might even have been justified in feeling he could out-rock Elvis. But history didn't care how Rich felt. And it doesn't care how you feel, either, even if (like Wald, or me) you're the sort of bookish, white male connoisseur who typically takes it on himself to arbitrate pop history while disdaining the audience that almost always drives it: young women on dance floors.
As Wald says, what makes music timely is often very different from what renders it timeless, and if you look only at the latter, you get a distorted picture of music's development. We don't revise political history to suit our tastes, no matter how much we disapprove of Mussolini having been elected or the romantic Spanish Republicans losing the civil war.
Yet few music histories ever offer more than a quick dismissal of the fact that Pat Boone outsold Little Richard in the 1950s. Or that the pervasively influential figure in 1920s and 1930s jazz was not Louis Armstrong, as jazz critics tend to suggest: It was the aptly named Paul Whiteman, the king of early radio dance-band shows, who is often damned for orchestrating, formalizing and “making a lady” out of a black art form, and was also the one who commissioned a little George Gershwin number called Rhapsody in Blue .
One of the launching points for Wald's investigation was his realization that in making symphonic “art” out of dance music, in many ways Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the 1960s version of Rhapsody in Blue .
If you blame racism for Whiteman or Boone out-earning black musicians, he asks, where do you stand on the Beatles versus James Brown?
However, the moptop-bashing title (which, I can assure you, makes other music writers sigh in envy) may mislead readers into expecting quite another book: Wald's tome starts and ends with them, but in between there are 16 chapters, hundreds of pages, without so much as a mention of the Fab Four.
It's a book about the whole scope of American pop, from ragtime, swing and foxtrots to teen idols, disco and the Twist – not to mention how nightclubs replaced balls and barn dances; how radio ruined the sheet-music business; how small combos and DJs replaced dance orchestras; and particularly how records slowly became a bigger business than live music.
That switch took most of the 20th century; it was not really complete until the Beatles retired from touring into the studio. (And it might be reversing itself again now.) While dance bands were somewhat interchangeable, records are marketed on novelty and uniqueness, so a pop mentality that once centred on songs (which would often become hits in multiple versions) evolved to focus on individual musicians as artists and celebrities.
