Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time, I wasn’t disappointed, is a great book

A good reminder of what used to be....a long time ago.

Wow, I was blown away all those years ago, and back then I was a monosyllabic ageing Mod. After this book, I became a singer, made records, did tours, made money, produced records, became a manager, and I owe my awakening to Nik Cohn. Thanks man.

One of the great booksWritten with great affection for pop music, warts and all

The sub-title of this book is “Pop from the Beginning”. It’s not that. “Pop” or popular music has been around for longer than the beginning recorded by Cohn, which he puts at the mid-fifties. Actually, what Cohn is presenting is a history of rock music, because his definition of “pop” includes only music derived from the breakthrough of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. It ignores other idioms that were popular during his chosen period, 1954-69, such as modern jazz, country & western, bossa nova, musical theatre and calypso.If the beginning is a little troubling, the ending is worse. The problem is that writing a history of rock that ends in 1969 is a bit like writing a history of the twentieth century that stops in 1925. In other words, it stops just before you get to the interesting bits.Cohn has his reasons for stopping where he does. Born in 1946, he discovered rock as a precocious teenager at the time of the explosion of British rock, when London was swinging and white boys from the UK provinces were recasting rhythm and blues. He became part of the scene and got to know many of the top performers personally, accidentally creating the paradigm for rock journalism as he did so. His thesis is that by 1969, when he sat down to write this book, the music was all played out and had nowhere further to go.Of course, this is the snobbery of the early adopter becoming appalled watching the thing he or she got to first being apparently cheapened and compromised once it attracted a mass following. And the history of rock music is full of similar stories, from those who were in Haight Asbury before the bad kharma hit or the thousands of punks who were among the less than hundred or so who hung out regularly at CBGBs before 1976.Nevertheless, Cohn’s argument is not entirely without justification. Something was happening to rock in 1969. And I do not mean the tired cliché of the bad comedown from the high of Woodstock to Altamont Speedway to be followed shortly by the election of Janis, Jimi and Jim to the wretched 27 Club. What was happening was that rock had picked up a mass following on both sides of the Atlantic and the artists were making a new group of friends who had names like Billy Graham, Robert Stigwood, Peter Grant and Dave Geffen.Through the organisational and logistical skills of men such as Graham and Stigwood, rock musicians were given access to huge audiences in open air venues such as sports stadia. Stadium rock was in the process of being invented. A new breed of record executives, with Geffen only one of many, realised that the smartest thing to do was to give the musicians much more creative freedom, because the artists themselves were more attuned to demands and expectations of the audience than the accountants in back office. And hard nuts like Grant were there to make sure that the musicians got a fairer share of the by now quite massive rewards. Suddenly rock journalists like Cohn were not so interesting or important any more.Rock was becoming professionalised. Of course it still had a long way to go before it got to its almost complete emasculation by corporate sponsorship, massive open air festivals that only the well-off can afford and musicians, like all other celebrities, wanting nothing more than to cash in with their own brands of clothes, perfumes and sports gear. In fact, here in the UK, professionalization has gone so far now that, so far as I can make out, public school careers officers now point the rugby team in the direction of the army, the science and maths nerds in the direction of the City, and the boys who hang around the art department in the direction of the music industry.Nik Cohn saw this coming and bailed out in 1969. Too early really. He missed much of the fun – prog rock, glam rock, David Bowie, reggae, Krautrock, punk, disco, hip hop, etc. etc. ad infinitum.Laudable as Cohn’s suspicion of the forces of commercialisation in popular music is, there is one point in the book where it gets the better of him. Until I read this book, I always wondered where the idea that Tamla Motown Records was a sell-out of black music, because here were black people making music that white people liked and purchased in huge quantities.What sort of misplaced apartheid is it that says to black musicians, “You shouldn’t make music directed at the largest, most lucrative market for recorded music, i.e. white teenagers from the suburbs.”? I suppose that in Cohn’s mind, black musicians were supposed to keep the flame of musical authenticity alight, while white performers could adapt the music for white ears, and thereby make their fortunes to their heart’s content. Isn’t this like the Moslem paterfamilias who wears western clothes, drinks scotch and cannot resist internet porn, but who still expects his wife and daughters to wear the hijab and be dutiful Moslems?I use the word apartheid consideredly, because Cohn criticises another black performer, this one not from the Motown stable. Otis Redding’s crime - performing to a predominantly white audience at the Monterey Pop festival in an attempt to sell his wares to a wider audience. It’s a relief that Cohn’s cut off point comes too early to include Bob Marley in his history. Marley, of course, allowed two versions of his early LPs to be released, the original Jamaican versions and a remix for sensitive white ears.Perhaps, rather than black entrepreneurs like Otis and Berry Gordy, Cohn is happier with Phil Spector, a Jewish boy producing ersatz black music and exploiting a series of black performers who were given minimal credit for their work, either financial or artistic.But all this is Cohn’s loss. He left with a total blind (deaf?) spot for some the finest popular music of his chosen fifteen year period – the outputs of Otis himself, of the entire Tamla Motown stable, including Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson, and of Curtis Mayfield.Finally like any book written in the heat of the battle, recent events are not as well contextualised as earlier events where some form of consensus has been reached. So it is that the early rockers, Little Richard, Elvis, Eddie Cochran, etc. are looked at with the benefit of over ten years of critical appreciation. Bands that arose in the late sixties are given no historical context at all. Worse there were so many of them that the latter chapters read like long lists of recent bands with a hurried opinion or two attached to each. Consequently he spends what in retrospect is a laughable amount of time on PJ Proby and for me The Who get more attention than they deserve. On the other hand the Californian resurgence in the late sixties is covered, but somewhat superficially, so that its importance is not given enough emphasis.Leaving aside the premature ending, the unfair treatment of certain black performers and the structural problem of historical context, there is much to like about this book. It is well informed. The opinions are strongly stated, so even if you disagree with them (and who does not have their particular favourites from the 1960s?), you can have fun doing so. He is spot on with some performers, including black ones. For example, he likes Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin and Love. So, on balance, Cohn got more right than he got wrong, so perhaps it is wrong to criticise him using nearly fifty years of hindsight.Besides, the book was genuinely seminal. It has been followed by many more histories of popular music, too many probably, but as one of the first it helped frame the vision of the rock journo superstars (well superstars in their own lunchtimes at least) of the 1970s.It is unfair to review the book as history; it is more a piece of reportage from the frontline of the cultural wars. Moreover, it was written at a crucial turning point in the war, just as the metropolitan elite was having to surrender definitive control of its treasured new property to the true inheritors, the suburban hordes. There would be later rearguard actions, most notably in 1976 when punk was driven by a small coterie of music journalists and other cognoscenti, but 1969, as recognised by Cohn, was the moment, if there was ever a single moment, where you would say that from here on in the future of rock is further commercialisation, industrialisation and professionalisation.