A New and Concise History of Rock and R&B through the Early 1990s. Eric Charry

ten-inch (soon to be twelve-inch) 33% rpm long play (LP) record made of lightweight unbreakable vinyl, which could hold twenty-plus minutes of music. RCA responded in 1949 with its seven-inch 45 rpm single vinyl record holding three minutes. By 1952 their patents were pooled, and jazz and classical music drifted toward LPs and 45s became the format for pop. Stereo record releases date from the mid-1950s, and by 1961 seven million of the thirty million phonographs in U.S. homes could play stereo discs (Sanjek 1996: 363). Vinyl discs remained the standard until the 1970s, when prerecorded cassette tapes (introduced in the early 1960s) started gaining popularity. In 1983 cassette sales ($237 million) passed those of vinyl ($209 million), and digitally recorded compact discs (CD) hit the U.S. market. By 1988 CDs outsold vinyl and by 1992 outsold cassettes. Emotional attachment to the format that birthed and nurtured rock and roll kept vinyl alive (barely), and it has been making a comeback since the early 2000s, hitting its highest point since 1991 again in 2017 at 8.5 percent of all album sales (physical and downloads).¹⁷

      The first electric guitars hit the market in the early 1930s. Gibson Guitar Corporation’s ES (Electric Spanish) series debuted in 1936 with the ES-150, a favorite of jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. The ES series were hollow (later semihollow) body guitars, essentially acoustic jazz guitars with one or more electromagnetic pickups to amplify the strings. T-Bone Walker played an ES-250; B. B. King played a variety of ES models, eventually settling on the ES-335 (issued in 1958), the first semihollow body or thinline model; and Chuck Berry played an ES-350T and later 335.¹⁸

      In the early 1950s a new type of electric guitar, with a completely solid body, came on the market, eliminating the resonance of the hollow sound box and amplifying the strings with pickups that had electromagnetic coils embedded in them (one for each string). The solid body allowed the instrument to be played at a louder volume with more even response and longer sustain. The early guitars became classics and have maintained their reputation to this day.

      Leo Fender’s company issued its first solid-body guitar, with a single pickup in 1950 (the Esquire), adding a second pickup in 1951, which came to be called the Telecaster.¹⁹ In 1954 Fender released the three-pickup Stratocaster, with a different body design. The Telecaster had its proponents in country (Buck Owens), rockabilly (James Burton), and blues (Muddy Waters, Albert Collins).²⁰ The Stratocaster was a favorite in blues and rock, played by Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Dick Dale, and, most famously, Jimi Hendrix. The Fender Precision bass, issued in 1951 became the standard model for most bass players. Gibson introduced its first solid-body model in 1952, the Les Paul, which became a favorite of Jimmy Page and Duane Allman. Eric Clapton played a Les Paul in the mid-1960s and switched to a Stratocaster by the early 1970s. As a result of the rise of rock and roll, surf music (Dick Dale, the Beach Boys), and the Beatles, guitar sales jumped in the first half of the 1960s to 1.5 million in 1965. Guitar Player magazine began publishing two years later.²¹

      Fender led the pack in guitar amplifiers with its Twin model, issued in 1952, with twenty-five watts of power and two twelve-inch speakers. By 1963 it had developed into the eighty-watt Twin Reverb model, which Hendrix had used before he left for England in 1966. The main competition was British Marshall amps, which debuted in 1962, developing into the hundred-watt Marshall Super Lead model 1959 in 1965. Marshall was marked by a separate amplifier head and cabinet holding four twelve-inch speakers, which could be stacked on top of one another to provide a massive wall of sound. Both Marshall and Fender amps rely on vacuum-tube amplification, which, when overdriven at full volume, create an electronic distortion that is one of the most prized and sought-after sounds. By placing the guitar’s pickups close to the speakers, a feedback loop occurs and guitarists in the 1960s discovered how to sustain tones as long as they wanted. This power to control an electrified sound that at any moment could leap above the threshold of pain has given the electric guitar, and those who play it, a special status.

      The first major commercial analog synthesizer, named after its inventor Robert Moog (pronounced mohg), hit the public consciousness in 1968 with keyboardist Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach, an album of works by J. S. Bach played exclusively on the Moog.²² Released on Columbia, it reached #10 on the pop album chart, an unlikely development for a classical or electronic album. Rock groups picked up on it right away, in the studio and in concert with the portable Minimoog (launched in 1969). The Beatles used the Moog on Abbey Road (1969), at the ends of “Because” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and it became a staple of progressive rock bands, such as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (“Lucky Man,” 1970) and Yes (“Excerpts from ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII,’” 1973). Stevie Wonder embraced the new technology from his first album once he renegotiated his contract when he turned twenty-one (“Superwoman,” “Evil,” 1972).²³

      Analog synthesizers utilize voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers to create and shape waveforms based on the overtone series. At first they were monophonic, with the Moog and Arp 2600 (1971) dominating the field. Duophonic (two tones at a time) synthesizers soon came (Arp Odyssey, 1972) followed by polyphonic, which could play up to five tones (Prophet 5, 1978) or eight tones (Yamaha CS-80, 1976) at once. The Casio VL-1, a children’s toy (at $70), was one of the first digital synthesizers to hit the market, in 1979. The Casiotone MT-40, released in 1981 (at $ 150) had a similar low-tech sound, although in 1985 it was used for Jamaican Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng,” moving Jamaican music from reggae to a new electronic dancehall era; its instrumental track was used in many subsequent recordings (called versions in Jamaica).

      The Roland TR-808 drum machine, which hit the market in 1980 (at $1,000), used synthesized drums sounds, which could be programmed in a sequence and endlessly looped. This led to revolutionary changes in the way in which music was conceived and produced (A. Dunn 2015-v). Early examples include Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “1,000 Knives” (1981), Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing (1982), Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982), Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” (1983), and Cybotron’s “Clear” (1983). Boss, a division of Roland, had come out with the DR-55 in 1979 (at $200), making it an easily affordable unit. Depeche Mode used the DR-55 in live performance.²⁴

      Professional quality digital synthesizers used frequency modulation (FM), in which a sound carrier (generally a sine wave, a pure tone with no overtones) is operated on by a modulator (another sine wave), creating a complex waveform, enlivening the sonic spectrum, which can change over time. Adding more carriers and modulators to the mix can create an extraordinary variety of sounds. The first digital FM synthesizer was the Synclavier, which went public in 1978 (at $13,000). Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (1981) helped put the Synclavier onto the 1980s soundscape. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” (1982) opens with sounds created on the Synclavier II (released 1980). Prices soon dropped dramatically, and the Yamaha DX7 digital FM synthesizer released in 1983 (at $2,000) was widely embraced; its sound was pervasive in the 1980s (e.g., the bass line to Kenny Loggins’s 1985 hit “Danger Zone,” which also uses a LinnDrum).²⁵

      Whereas synthesizers create new sounds (whether by analog or digital means), samplers record existing sounds digitally (e.g., a snare drum hit, a one-bar drum pattern, a vocal grunt, a bird chirp), play them (or prerecorded presets) back using a keyboard or programming interface, and can loop the recorded sounds. Samplers were initially marketed either as drum machines or keyboard instruments that could play melodies (monophonic) and soon chords (polyphonic). In 1979 both types went on the market.²⁶

      The first drum machine to use digital samples hit the commercial market in 1979: the Linn LM-1 (at $5,000). It had a store of sampled drums sounds but could not record new ones. Prince used it extensively, including on The Time’s “777–9311” (1982) and his own “1999” (1982) and “When Doves Cry” (1984). The next generation LinnDrum hit the market in 1982 (at $3,000) adding crash and ride cymbal sounds. E-Mu’s Drumulator (also just playing prerecorded samples) debuted in 1983 (at $1,000). The E-Mu SP-12 (for twelve-bit sampling) debuted in 1985, as the first drum machine that could record its own samples (though at half the rate of CD quality), an extraordinary innovation. The first generation of sample-based hip hop producers used it, including Marley Marl (for MC Shan) and Rick Rubin (for the Beastie Boys). The SP-1200, which debuted in 1987, greatly expanded the capability to record samples, which was exactly what hip hop producers