Figure 12.2: Chuck Berry on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Figure 12.3: The Monkees were made for TV.
Figure 13.2: Michael Jackson in all innocence on the MTV Video Music Awards.
Figure 14.1: Frank Zappa: “I hate to see anyone with a closed mind on any topic.”←x | xi→
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Heartfelt thanks to friends and mentors: Stephen Mantin (and clan), Anneke Corbett, The Mad Peck (a.k.a. Dr. Oldie, the Dean of the University of Musical Perversity); I. C. Lotz (a.k.a. Vicky Hollmann), Sol Jacobs, Thomas Berry, Steve Sumerford & Evelyn Smith, Bill Adler & Sarah Moulton, Larry & Claire Morse, Marnie Thompson & Stephen Johnson, Ken & Mary Alice Knight, John & Robin Davis, Nick Divitci, Terry Austin, David Marc, Ben Gerson, Ken Emerson, Robert A. Hull, Lenny Kaye, Earl Kirmser, Roswell & Holly Sue Angier, John Clayton & Sharon Dunn, Robert Somma, Andy Schwartz, Chris Capece, David Unger, Paul Mills, Tom Miller, Harry Duncan, David Smyth, Alan Betrock, Charlie Gillett, Danny Schechter, Nick Tosches, Molly Mullin, and Tim Jurgens. I want to single out Richard Meltzer, who bro\oes to Simon Frith, the first scholar to pay close attention to the interplay of rock ‘n’ roll and television.
Gratitude to my academic mentors/colleagues: Lance Strate, Phil Rose, Tom McCourt, Thom Gencarelli, Robert Barry Francos, Michael Grabowski, Andrew Chrystal, Brian Cogan, Jeff Einstein, and the entire Media Ecology Association, an intellectual community worthy of both names. Thanks to my editors, Susan Barnes, Kathryn Harrison, Janell Harris, Jackie Pavlovic, and Erika Hendrix at Peter Lang for making the book better and ushering it through the publishing process.←xi | xii→
And lastly, a shout-out to a few of those who have provided consistent nourishment for my rock ‘n’ roll soul: Ray Davies, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Hank Williams, Lowman Pauling, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Captain Beefheart, Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Ray Charles, Graham Parker, Bo Diddley, Leonard Cohen, John Hiatt, Nick Lowe, Peter Schickele, Loudon Wainwright III, George Clinton, and Lou Reed.←xii | 1→
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Many factors contributed to the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but none were more significant than the near-simultaneous emergence of both television and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. One element that is seldom considered in studies of the counterculture is how the inherent incompatibility between TV and rock music both reflected and contributed to the social fissures that would become known as the generation gap.
The phrase “generation gap” came into popular use in the 1960s, but the roots of the generational culture wars can be traced to the previous decade. A closer look at the 1950s, when television and rock music came into prominence, suggests that many of the social and cultural conflicts that surfaced in the 1960s had been percolating for years. An examination of the interplay of rock ‘n’ roll and television calls into question common assumptions about that time period.
Each generation tends to see its past in rosy hues, requiring later historians to provide more objective analyses. By virtue of sheer numbers and the communication technologies available to them, the baby boom generation has dominated discourses regarding the era in which they came of age. Even many academic portraits of the 1950s have looked past undercurrents of anxiety and disaffection, adopting a geniality and quiescence bordering on nostalgia. The purpose here is not revisionist history, but a close examination of the effects of television on rock ‘n’ roll and its audience and how that dispels the view of the 1950s as placid and carefree.←1 | 2→
The advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s inspired equal parts popularity and paranoia. The new music was, according to Robert Albrecht, “the most tangible symbol of a newly erupting techno-consumer culture of the post-World War II era, [which] became both the knife that sliced the generations apart and the glue that welded all the disparate elements together into a peculiar nationhood of young people” (160). The enthusiasm of young people for rock ‘n’ roll music was immediate and unequivocal but, as the beat grew louder and more insistent, mainstream resistance became so intense and disproportionate that the term “rockaphobia” may be used to describe it. The interplay between rock ‘n’ roll and television in the 1950s did not, in itself, create sociopolitical dividing lines, but this mass media interaction brought those conflicts into the foreground. Many of the baby boomers who witnessed the early presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on TV became less likely to embrace traditional ideas or institutions and were increasingly motivated to create their own counter-cultural identity. This social migration delineated the boundaries that would later be identified as the generation gap.
One reason that the early interaction between rock ‘n’ roll and television has been under-studied is that, despite its prominence as a cultural force, it took almost 15 years after rock ‘n’ roll emerged for a distinct literary sub-genre of rock criticism to evolve. To a great extent, it was an act of self-invention on the part of a small set of entrepreneurial publishers and writers who launched publications such as Crawdaddy! (New York 1965), Mojo Navigator (Los Angeles 1966), Fusion (Boston 1967), and Rolling Stone (San Francisco 1967). In combination with a greater sophistication in the music, reflected most prominently in the evolution in the music of The Beatles, these magazines demanded that rock ‘n’ roll be given the same critical attention as other forms of music and art. In the 1970s, accredited scholars (e.g., Charlie Gillett, Simon Frith, Carl Belz, Greil Marcus, Lawrence Grossberg) began to apply academic scrutiny to the subject, approaching this musical genre as something other than a temporary symptom of the “social disease” of juvenile delinquency. Despite their efforts, the do-it-yourself rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic was ingrained, and the ranks of writers who cover rock music have continued to be dominated more by fans and gadflies (e.g., Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs) than by “experts.”
While rock music has received more scholarly treatment in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the intersection and interaction between rock ‘n’ roll and television before the emergence of the Music Television channel (MTV) in 1981. Even within the thin body of literature that does consider television and rock ‘n’ roll co-jointly, only a small handful of scholars have adequately utilized communication theory to inform an analytical (synchronic) as well as an historical (diachronic) perspective. One reason for this paucity of analysis is that the paradoxes that were manifested when rock ‘n’ roll was presented on←2 | 3→ TV in the 1950s and 1960s were subsumed by the spectacle. The performances might have been stilted, but they were sufficiently new and rare to be fascinating for their very existence. Consequently, there was little attention paid to why the televised version of rock ‘n’ roll was so patently contrived or to the cultural effects of this interplay.
It would overstate the case to claim that there is a direct causal relationship between the presentation of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and the broader social, cultural, and political upheavals that followed. Clearly, there are too many other factors involved to draw reductive, deterministic conclusions about how television policies and attitudes towards rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s impacted social upheavals in the 1960s. But when their beloved rock ‘n’ roll was presented on television in the 1950s in a manufactured and mutilated