6 / 10
PREVIEW
6
But this was a little trickier. Cover records
now had to cross into unfamiliar territory.
Could you ask big band musicians and
arrangers to write and play stripped down
charts? Brassy horn arrangements, a staple of
pop music for over a decade, were no longer
what the kids wanted to hear. What to do?
A major label’s music directors could
wonder:
“We’ve got successful popular
singers recording for us. Can they do this
new music successfully too? Or is rock ‘n’
roll so different that we need totally new
personnel to make covers?”
And those same
questions arose for performers as well.
“Can I sing rock ‘n’roll and still sound like
myself, or do I need to change my style?”
Worse yet, can I change my style and be
successful? Will I seem like a square old
guy trying to sound like one of the kids or
their new musical heroes? It was a scary
and sobering thought.
For songwriters, there was a similar but
obvious choice.
“If this kind of music is
becoming popular, then it’s what we’ll
learn to write. We’re adaptable. We’ll create
songs targeted at this new teenage market.”
This choice contained more than a germ of
arrogance. It assumed a Tin PanAlley writer
who had created successful tunes for an
adult generation could suddenly shift gears
and still turn out hits. Just because rock ‘n’
roll was ‘simpler’ music didn’t mean it was
simpler to write.
We’ll hear a lot of singers, musicians,
arrangers and writers struggle with exactly
those questions here. As you’ll see, some
of those struggles were a lot more
successful than others. In this collection
we will hear how the industry evolved
(sometimes smoothly, sometimes awk-
wardly) and how rock ‘n’ roll came to be a
central part of popular music of the mid-
1950s and after. It’s a story with heroes but,
really, no villains. There are wise and
unwise people in the story, as is true in
most stories. But we shouldn’t feel smug
just because our hindsight is 20/20. Things
were changing fast and it was hard to know
what to do.