The Dark Ages (so called…)

Thomas Hart Benton - The Twist, 1964.jpg 

In Friday’s post, our friend Danny Alexander examined some connections between the music of Bruce Springsteen and the music Bruce grew up with in the late 50s and early 60s. That reminded me of a piece I wrote for the “Sittin’ & Thinkin’” column in No Depression (September/October, 2005). I’ve included that below, along with a few mp3s sprinkled throughout as aural evidence–including Hank Ballard’s 1959 version of “The Twist” (also the title of the 1964 Thomas Hart Benton painting above). Consider this one response to Danny’s call, the first of many he’s likely to get around here.

Reconsidering Rock’s “Dark Ages”

One of pop music’s most beloved myths is the one about how the Beatles brought rock and roll back from the dead. It goes a little something like this…

Rock and roll passed away on or around February 2, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in an Iowa plane crash. As the legend has it, the upstart genre was by then already on life support: Elvis was in the Army, Little Richard had spurned Miss Molly for Jesus Christ, and Jerry Lee had married his barely teenage cousin. So when the Holly crash was followed quickly by two more casualties—Chuck Berry’s arrest on an alleged Mann Act violation and Eddie Cochran’s death by car-crash—it pretty much nailed the coffin shut.

In this version of the rock story, what followed The Year The Music Died was “The Dark Ages” (per Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll). During this dreary interlude, real rock ‘n’ rollers were replaced by pretty facsimiles like Frankie Avalon and Fabian.  If the Fab Four hadn’t led a British Invasion of America in 1964, then “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” that prescient 1958 hit by Danny & the Juniors, might just as well have been entitled “Charleston Crazy” or “Ragtime Uber Alles.”

The only problem with this story is that it didn’t happen. Rock and roll wasn’t even sick in the years before the Beatles’ arrival, let alone dead. Let’s think about this thing a minute. The  “Dark Ages” included a series of classic singles that still thrill today and that need no more introduction than their opening notes: “Blue Moon,” “Little Sister,” “The Loco-Motion,” “Stay,” “One Fine Day,” “Quarter to Three,” “Surf City,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Louie, Louie,” “Twist and Shout,” and “The Twist” to cite just a few.

Many first generation rockers produced some of their best work in the early 60s, too—The Everly Brothers and the Drifters leap to mind. What’s more, the period debuted the music that eventually landed each of the following acts in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The Beach Boys, Booker T. & the MG’s, Dion and the Belmonts, the Four Seasons, Brenda Lee, Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, the Shirelles, and Phil Specter.

And then there was Motown.

Berry Gordy launched his label in 1959, the dawn of the Dark Ages, and by the time the Beatles showed up, Motown had released indelible singles such as “Money (That’s What I Want),” “Please Mister Postman,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Do You Love Me.” The label had also seen the successful starts to the careers of four more Hall of Famers: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.

Some Dark Age.

I’ve been thinking about all this because Hip-O-Select has just launched one of the most ambitious reissue efforts in the history of reissuing. The Motown Select series includes many never-before-on-disc Motown albums, but the project’s showcase is the (limited edition) release of twelve boxes that will collect every Motown single, B-sides included. The first two volumes of The Complete Motown Singles are out now—Vol. 1 covers 1959 to 1961 over six cd’s; Vol. 2 covers 1962 in four—and they’re amazing. [The series is now at four volumes, taking the story up through 1964. –DC] For starters, the packaging is heirloom quality: each volume comes in a 45-sized version of s 78 r.p.m. “album” and includes insightful liner notes, tons of great color photos—and an actual 45.

But it’s the music that matters, even when, by Motown standards, it’s sub-par. Covering the years before Motown earned the nickname “Hitsville U.S.A.,” Vols. 1 and 2 include a lot of chasing trends and mimicking styles, of solid but generic attempts to land a hit, as Gordy and company searched for what exactly this Sound of Young America was going to be. And, predictably, some of it is awful. (Henceforth, there can be no serious discussion of the worst record ever made that doesn’t consider Popcorn and the Mohawks’ “Custer’s Last Man,” a 1960 answer record to the novelty hit “Mr. Custer.” It lasts four interminable minutes and is so un-hilarious it turns Carrot Top into Richard Pryor.)

That said, what most surprised me listening to all of the misses surrounding the early Motown hits was how often the producers, musicians, songwriters and singers made fun, listenable, very good records. (Just about everything Eddie Holland ever released, for instance, should’ve been a hit, and might’ve been on a label with more resources). A surprisingly high percentage of Motown’s youthful misses are still better than way too many of today’s pop hits.  

Why? These time capsules from the Dark Ages reveal some of what rock and roll has misplaced along its way. Much of this comes down to the color line and its consequences in community. Today rock is guitar-centric “white music” for white people. In the day, it was rhythm-centric (Motown records were dance records), played by white and/or black people for anyone listening to pop radio, which was just about everyone. This distinction helps explain why the Elvis, Motown and Beatles eras include so many more answer and cover records than today; people were listening often to the same thing then and, therefore, listening to one another. Ditto for why there were once so many more instrumentals and novelties. Rock music is so dreadfully serious today, so lyric-focused. It’s no fun and, adding insult to injury, it’s usually less emotionally complex to boot.

It’s telling, too, that most of today’s exceptions come from hip-hop—and there aren’t enough even there—where Dark Ages virtues of rhythm and humor, covering and answering (now done as sampling) still provide a lightness, and a light, that we’d do well to follow. We could use another Dark Age about now.  

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “The Dark Ages (so called…)”

  1. Charles Hughes Says:
    June 12th, 2006 at 11:52 pm

    Pardon me while I plug myself (smile)…my paper at the Springsteen symposium (though nowhere near as good as Danny’s, or Lauren Onkey’s on a similar topic) dealt specifically with Bruce’s willingness and ability to engage - and, say amen, *celebrate* - the music of the “Dark Ages.” Assuming the conference directors find a way to get the symposium anthology published, my paper will be included in that anthology.

    As usual, you’re absolutely right on everything here, David.

  2. Danny Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 2:23 am

    I’m sure Lauren and I would both beg to differ (not about Cantwell being right but about Charles’s characterization of his paper). His extemporaneous presentation was a big hit in a big room (that included me) and gave me all kinds of fresh insight into these themes, including where they fit into the broader pop culture. I look forward to seeing it in print.

    Danny

  3. Larry Grogan Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    Outstanding post. The idea that somehow the period between 1959 and 1964 was dead has long been “conventional wisdom”, often with folks that should have known better. The more I hear, the more I realize how untrue that is.

  4. Chris Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 4:13 pm

    David, I also agree that the “dark ages” theory is pretty much bunk, and that much of the music from the 1959-63 is phenomenal and still overlooked. (I still hate Frank Valli, though).

    But just to play devil’s advocate, I would argue that the perception isn’t just one of rock critics–some people at the time thought so too. I draw as an example my dad, who was 14 in 1964, and who would later say to me “The Beatles changed everything–you have no idea how dull–how pointless and corny–music was before them”. Classic boomer nostalgia, I suppose, but the man has not read a word of rock criticism in his life. Or that part in Lucas’ “American Graffiti”, set in 1963, in which the one teenage kid is driving along with his younger sister and gripes that rock and roll is dead, to which the sister replies she loves the Beach Boys–the kid responds with a withering sneer.

    So I’m not sure what I’m arguing, except maybe that the “Dark Ages” theory justified what some people (mainly white teenage kids at the time, who knows) already thought.

  5. Joel Says:
    June 14th, 2006 at 7:17 am

    I was just thinking about this article yesterday, and then I come home and you’ve reposted it. Weird coincidence.

    I agree with everything you’ve said, but I also look at it as a conflict in mode of authorship. The rock canon is built around supposed singular geniuses or groups of geniuses. When a self-contained rock band writes and performs its own material, it is easy to ascribe artistic vision and authorship. But when a record come out with one writer (or writing team), another performer, and a strong producer, it is hard to assign authorship. And if it lacks a clear author, how can it be assigned the status of “art”? And if it’s not art, what place does it have in the canon of rock and roll, which is designed to justify rock as more than “mere” pop music.

    Look at film theory. It’s no coincidence that the first school in academic film theory was auteur theory. Movies have the similar problem of having no clear author due to the assembly line nature of making a feature. So, in order to lift film to the status of art, an artist had to be found.

    This doesn’t explain all of the examples you gave, but I think it’s a salient point.

    Also, thanks for the blogroll link. I added you to mine. (Not that that’s as helpful to you as your link to me is to me.)

  6. livingin Says:
    June 14th, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    Thanks to all the people who are turning this into a conversation. More dialogue is one of the big reasons I wanted to do this site in the first place.

    Joel, I think your observations really help make sense of why this period has been slighted so badly. That is not to say, however, that I think the reason you point to makes sense. As you note, film making, like record making, is a largely collaborative activity–and that remains true even when we assign an author primary responsibilty for a work of art. So this idea that so many people have (though not you and me, it sounds like) that art must have a single author is a common perception but one that often–probably even usually-doesn’t reflect the way people really make art.

    For instance, I think one of the great insights of Dave Marsh’s Heart of Rock & Soul, and it’s one my cowriter Bill Friskics-Warren and I tried to emphasize in our own Heartaches by the Number, is this focus upon record making as collaborative–and an insistence that collaborative art is still art. It’s telling that the Dark Ages coincides with the peak of the Nashville Sound, when some of the greatest country records of all time were being made via a collaboration between producers, songwriters, singers, engineers and session musicians. And fans!

    (And an emphasis on the collaborative rather than the individual creation has obvious political implications, too, in addition to the aesthetic ones…)

    Chris, that’s a good point you make about the Dark Ages being considered dark even at the time. Why is that, do you suppose? I mean, given that there is so much evidence to suggest that music wasn’t just boring and lame during the period? Why did the Beach Boys reference earn a sneer?

    Brainstorming now…the Beach Boys were middle class; the Beach Boys were not obviously rebellious in the way, say, Jerry Lee was; and the Beach Boys not only rocked, they many times sounded sweet–that is, they were about wanting to fit in as much as they were about resisting conformity. Now, all of these elements were present in rock and roll from note one–of course they were, because they are present in human beings–but the rebellious and loud single author has been lionized to the exclusion of the reconiling and soft collaboration.

    This brings us back, I guess, to the rockist versus poptimist debate…

  7. Nina Says:
    June 14th, 2006 at 6:27 pm

    American Graffiti can’t tell you anything about what people were thinking in 1962, though. It can only tell you what ideas one guy in 1973 decided to ascribe to people in 1962.

  8. Chris Says:
    June 14th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

    Well, true, but it’s a fairly autobiographical film written & directed by someone–George Lucas–who was the same age in 1963 as the characters are in the fictional 1963 of the movie, so possibly there would be some insight into at least Lucas’ mindset at the time. Esp. as Lucas has described the movie as a sort of anthropolgical study of a culture (California hot-rod culture) that was already looking obsolete by ‘73.

Leave a Reply