BillLindau

Rock 'n' Roll here to stay

Here, there & everywhere with Bill
Pop music -- a truly American product
“Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay.”
-- Title, lyrics to 1958 song by Danny and the Juniors
By Bill Lindau
July is a great month for all of us Americans, as we remind ourselves of the good things about this huge bit of real estate: The Constitution with its Four Freedoms, baseball, mom and apple pie, barbecue. And last but definitely not least, our music.
No drum-beating speech I’ve heard all weekend warms the red, white and blue cockles of my heart as much as a Rolling Stone piece about a Swedish rock band called Mando Diao. It said two of the band members had “plundered their parents’ Beatles and Motown records” when they were in their teens, and that was how their band got started, said the June 30-July 14 issue of Rolling Stone.
As a teenager, I had never realized just how much people on the other ends of the globe enjoyed Motown.
Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, Beyonce, 50 Cent, Wyclef Jean and other American music stars continue to draw huge crowds in London, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris and even Moscow, Tokyo, Sydney and Beijing. The people who listen to them might have a stereotype of all Americans as a bunch of wealthy, spoiled cowboys and gangsters, but at least they have no problem with those Americans they see in front of them with guitars and mikes and drums. Maybe they don’t like Bush and what we’re doing in Iraq, and maybe the British musicians are giving us a run for our money, but Filipinos, Italians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Japanese, Ukrainians and Brits still go for American-made music.
Besides, if it weren’t for Elvis, Little Richard, Benny Goodman, the 1960s black girl bands, what kind of music would the Beatles, Cream, U2, Spandau Ballet and Coldplay sound like? Still singing 500-year-old ballads about knights and fair ladies, I guess.
The Rolling Stone article further cooled me out when it tells how Mando Daio first got started. When they were 16, members Gustaf Noren and Bjorn Dixgard (now both 24) got together with two other friends and played anywhere they could.
“’We played Chuck Berry songs for hours out in the woods for some woman’s 70th-birthday party,’ says Noren, ’then helped her in the kitchen.’”
Years ago, when I spent some time in England, I’d tell some of the Brits I came from North Carolina, and they’d say, “Oh, you live near Elvis.” I honestly believe I had more conversations about Elvis than I did the Beatles or Led Zeppelin (at the risk of dating myself, nobody in Coldplay was even old enough to start school during my trip over there).
No matter what people think of the atrocious way the president is dealing with Iraq, American pop music is something nobody has any quarrel with. At the end of the First World War, our doughboys turned the people in France, Germany and England on to jazz, blues and later rock ‘n’ roll, and the world continues to fall in love with our musicians, from the Duke Ellington and Billie Holliday to Elvis, to Jimi Hendrix, to Bob Dylan, to Joan Baez, to Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow and a slew of hip-hop artists.
If you were born way after the British invasion, you ought to get out some of your parents’ old LPs by the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and a couple of others, and listen to their vocalists. Not one of them sounds English. That’s because these British youths got into American blues, the sounds of B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon etc., and they got it down pat, even down to the American accent. About all they added were the electric guitars and keyboards.
You had college students from Cambridge, and working-class kids from Leeds, Manchester and Blackpool sounding as if they’d never come any closer to England than New Orleans. (Listen to the Animals’ rendition of a century old folk song, “House of the Rising Sun,” for example).
Now an international coalition of musicians all over the world have gotten together to help raise millions and millions of dollars for the poverty-stricken continent of Africa. The brainchild of Irish rocker Bob Geldof, the Live 8 concert series kicked off last weekend with a show in Philadelphia. Their lineup included the Dave Matthews Band, Bon Jovi, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, P. Diddy, Maroon 5, Rob Thomas, Stevie Wonder, the Kaiser Chiefs, Sarah McLachlan, Will Smith and Keith Urban. They played at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other groups will get together and play in London, Berlin, Paris and Rome. They include Coldplay, Elton John, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Mariah Carey, Andrea Bocelli, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw and Crosby, Stills and Nash, among others -- man, these concerts are like all-star games!
Recently I splurged on a T-shirt that had the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine on the front. As I was washing it, I spotted something on the tag:
“Made in U.S.A.”
I almost burst out laughing. Of all the garments I have that come from India, China and Honduras, my shirt with an English cartoon vessel on the front is more American-made than some of them.
And when it comes to the Beatles -- with all the music by Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry and Dylan that influenced them -- that shirt’s “Made in U.S.A.” in more ways than one!
Keep on rockin’
It recently dawned on me why people tend to get old-fogified as they grow older. They keep on listening to the same music they did before they turned 21 and think everything that came along after that has just gone to the dogs.
I can tell you this because I was one of those people myself.
I became convinced rock ‘n’ roll went down the toilet after the Beatles broke up and Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. I’ve never even listened to U2, and I’ve heard more of Bono’s spoken comments than any of his lyrics, but judging from what he says, I’m sure that 40-something Irishman has a lot on the ball, and soon I’m going to pick out one of their albums.
I have within the past decade or so “discovered” musicians young enough to be my children who sound amazingly good. This includes Jewel, Alanis Morissette and Coldplay. I have recently purchased two of Coldplay’s latest C.D.s, “A Rush of Blood to the Head” (2003) and their new release, “X&Y”. I had never heard any of their tracks before, and only knew of Chris Martin as Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband, but I got so cooled out.
Hard to describe their music except as perhaps a combination of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, with space-agey instrumentals and songs that range from gentle love ballads to killer guitar-heavy pieces.
Plus -- you parents will especially love this -- none of the tracks on either of Coldplay’s CDs has a single foul word in the lyrics. I can tell because -- another blessing -- you can actually understand the lyrics, without all the instruments drowning out the words.
I am utterly tired of hearing how awful people think their kids’ music is today. One person told me of hearing a song by 50-Cent on MTV, with a string of rather adult-ey words on it. “Pete” said he promptly switched the channels and said he didn’t want to hear anymore.
This is where you could nail him logically. I mean, if he didn’t listen to anything else after that one single piece, how could he know the other tunes he could’ve heard had the same content? Oh, no, he’d say. “They’re all that way.”
I hope what I said about Coldplay shows people you can’t tar all pop music with a single brush. I’m not the only baby boomer who likes a lot of today’s rock music. My 46-year-old friend Mark is a big Coldplay fan, too.
I find out the key to preventing premature old-fogyitis is to update your tastes in popular music. If you don’t like what you hear at first, schlep it out and try the next sample. You’re bound to find something that jacks you up. There’s a lot of new stuff that I think is trash, but I don’t make that kind of judgment before I listen to it first. Then look for something better.
There’s nothing wrong with listening to older music. I like Frank Sinatra and a lot of the Big Bands as well as the oldies I grew up listening to. But waking up one day and realizing all your teen idols are very old or very dead can leave an awfully weird taste in your mouth. That’s when it’s time to try out somebody with a bit more life left to them and a vast musical career ahead of them.
That brings me to the other cool thing about this distinctly red, white and blue art form. When I was 14, I never dared to tell any of my classmates that I liked Frank Sinatra as well as the Beatles.
But now, we have grandparents, parents and grandchildren going to Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney concerts. And you don’t have to take the youngest ones kicking and screaming. The 14-year-olds like those 60-something rockers just as much as their elders do.
That group who sang “Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Stay” 47 years ago didn’t know how prophetic they were. Nobody wears ducktails or saddle shoes anymore, but they certainly still listen to rock ‘n’ roll.
Rock on, America!
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Contact reporter Bill Lindau at blindau52@yahoo.com or (910) 975-3073.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 5:34 PM