As eager as most artists were to take advantage of television’s unprecedented capacity for creating “overnight sensations,” the promotional power was offset by various restrictions and injunctions. Appearing on television required a near-total surrender of control over artist’s presentations. In exchange for their moment in the spotlight, rock musicians were subjected to numerous indignities, being hustled to and fro, told what to wear, where to stand, what to say, and how to say it. Since the popularity of these artists was due in part to their physical movement as well as their sound, this straight-jacketing was often counterproductive, making most television appearances static, pale imitations of the bands’ live performances.
Perhaps the most obvious and annoying practice demanded by television was that of lip-syncing. Although it is difficult to be certain when this technique was used for the first time, Los Angeles disc jockey Al Jarvis is often credited as the pioneer. Listeners had become accustomed to music in recorded form, which made them less tolerant of the inconsistency and unreliability of the live performances they saw on television. They wanted to hear the same polished version of songs they had heard on the radio. Jarvis solved this problem by asking artists to do what must have at first seemed a curious thing: pretend to sing the words as he played their records. Thus was born the technique of lip-syncing, which became a favored practice in television and movies.
When he was first booked to appear on American Bandstand, Chuck Berry refused to lip-sync the words to “Sweet Little Sixteen” and his appearance was cancelled. Although Dick Clark characterized Berry’s reluctance as a matter of inability, Berry says that he was simply unaware of the costs involved in live←68 | 69→ singing and unwilling “to try something for the first time in front of a nationwide television audience” (Berry 185). Berry’s record sales were so strong and his performances so engaging that both parties relented; Clark hosted him on Bandstand numerous times and Berry mastered the art of lip-syncing and faux guitar. On a 1957 appearance singing his hit “School Days,” Berry agreed to perform in front of a cheesy backdrop of a school, wearing someone’s idea of a professor’s gown.
Figure 3.2: “Professor” Chuck Berry sings “School Days” on American Bandstand.
Source: American Bandstand. Aired November 8, 1957, on ABC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmOdtG9ymMA
Chuck Berry was hardly the last rock ‘n’ roll artist to express displeasure with the absurdity of being invited to perform music on television only to be required to fake it. According to Clark, “We used lip-sync primarily because it was cheaper, but also because it was impossible to duplicate the sound of the record—and it was the record that kids wanted to hear” (71). This was true to a point, but conveniently ignores how the issue of liveness is different for television than music. As Simon Frith indicates, both television and rock ‘n’ roll promise their audiences “a←69 | 70→ sense of something happening here and now” (“Look! Hear!” 284), but on television liveness is self-evident; even if the performance is taped, people are shown in the act of doing something that had been captured in real time. With rock ‘n’ roll, liveness is equated with authenticity, and the effect is undercut by lip-syncing and other televisual effects. The notion that Clark did not understand this distinction is belied by the fact that he made a few exceptions to his lip-sync policy, notably the estimable bluesman B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Sam Cooke, a gospel singer with The Soul Stirrers before he got his first national exposure as a pop/R&B artist on The Guy Mitchell Show (ABC 1957–58), is another case-in-point. According to biographer Daniel Wolf, Cooke appeared at the end of The Ed Sullivan Show in November 1957 and had just begun to lip-sync his big hit, “You Send Me,” when the recording was cut short, leaving Cooke mouthing the words before a national audience with no music. “Cooke’s disastrous [appearance] exemplified the desultory manner in which rock ‘n’ roll artists were treated on adult-oriented TV shows in the 1950s” (Jackson 75).8 Beyond any single mishap, the reliance on lip-syncing was another indication to the rock ‘n’ roll fans that what they were being fed on television was counterfeit.
The rock ‘n’ roll artists who have fared well on television are those who understood that music was secondary. They knew how to be dynamic without becoming histrionic, accentuating visual trademarks such as Chuck Berry’s duck-walk, Elvis Presley’s hip-swivel, and The Beatles’s mop-top hair. The small screen adored these charismatic individuals, but the limited scope of television cannot contain a band. Most successful rock groups constitute an organic whole greater than the sum of its parts. In the 1950s, television had a limited palette, and wide shots were too distant to capture energy or personality, so teen dance shows relied heavily on close-ups that isolated fragments—fingers on a fret board, flailing drumsticks, or, most commonly, a singer emoting—but missed the whole. The effect was kaleidoscopic rather than integral. This televisual predilection for an individual rather than a group put pressure on singers to set themselves apart from their bands, and was part of the impetus for Buddy Holly getting star billing in front of The Crickets and singling out Paul Revere from The Raiders.
One might think that rock ‘n’ roll musicians would have benefited as television production values became more sophisticated but, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, techniques such as the use of multiple cameras often served to further undermine the immediacy and authenticity of rock ‘n’ roll on television. As Gary Burns and Robert Thompson relate, the single camera used on most variety shows allowed the lip-sync and other contrivances to be concealed, but on shows like American Bandstand the use of two or more cameras to create kinesis9 left singers←70 | 71→ and musicians no place to hide. “In such a case, sometimes it is obvious that the musicians are not playing their instruments, and occasionally electric instruments are not even plugged in. These pseudo-concerts are touted as high points of the show, even though the celebrity musicians may not do anything musical” (“Music, Television, and Video” 14). Only in the 1960s, with Shindig!, and on 1970s late-night shows such as In Concert (ABC 1972–75) and Midnight Special (NBC 1972–81), did producers make greater efforts to preserve the plausibility of “live” performance.
One rare instance of symbiotic alignment of television product and rock ‘n’ roll came on July 23, 1962 when the first international satellite broadcast was made via Telstar. In addition to predicable news coverage, producers played “Telstar,” an instrumental by the British rock band The Tornados. This exposure helped to make “Telstar” the first British record to become a #1 hit in the United States (the proverbial British invasion would come two years later).
Inherent Conflicts between Television and Rock ‘n’ Roll
For the majority of end-users, television and popular music are simply thought of as entertainment alternatives, two heads of a common media animal, one audio-visual, and the other strictly auditory. On the face of it, the affinity and synergy of rock ‘n’ roll on television seemed natural, the mutual benefit a foregone conclusion. Like the popular music of Tin Pan Alley, which generally fared well on television, rock ‘n’ roll comes in a short form ideal for sequencing and programming. Even more centrally, the baby boom generation was the first to grow up watching television and listening to rock, and a larger cohort was having its attitudes and opinions shaped by both media. When the Music Television channel (MTV) was established, one of the newly minted executives declared that they had “integrated the most powerful forces in our two decades, TV and rock ‘n’