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 Pan Alley 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 awkwardly) 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.