The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The afternoon concert was a genteel bust. Labelled “The Five Faces of Jazz,” it was devoted to Middle Eastern music, pseudo-ragas, Afro-Cuban funk, the bossa nova, and “Norwegian Wood.” The participants included Herbie Mann, the Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo, Luis Enrique of Brazil, and such ringers as Gillespie and the German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff. It all sounded like a ho-hum day at the U.N.

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  Sunday. More fog, accompanied by snappy winds and low, pressing clouds. The afternoon concert began with half a dozen not at all surprising selections by Nobuo Hara and his Sharps and Flats, an eighteen-piece Japanese band. Swathed in smiles, the group was a formidable cross between late Jimmie Lunceford and early Stan Kenton (it used a shuffle rhythm at one point that had the audience bobbing like a rooster), and its soloists suggested J. J. Johnson, Art Farmer, and Clifford Brown, plus Gene Krupa laced with Louis Bellson. In three numbers, the band accompanied Housan Yamamoto, who played a large wooden flute called the shakuhachi. He gets a husky, pleasing tone on his instrument and a direct, lyrical quality not unlike that of Joe Marsala. He should stay behind when the Sharps and Flats go home. The main event was a vibraphone workshop—Bobby Hutcherson, Gary Burton, Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, and Lionel Hampton. The vibraphone has never struck me as being a true instrument. It suggests a bedspring swinging in the wind, the sound of neon. But there were moments. Burton sent up a ghostly unaccompanied ballad that was all willows and Debussy and moonshafts; Norvo produced a creditable “I Love You” (Cole Porter’s) and then went into his old anthem, “I Surrender, Dear.” He switched to the xylophone after the first chorus, achieving a delicate, piping flow, mostly in the high register, and, returning to the vibraphone, made it clear that he is the only vibraphonist who miraculously transmits emotion through his non-instrument. He ended with a funny “Ida,” for which he turned off his resonator and, using heavy mallets, clumped around the keyboard like a slow-motion tap-dancer. At odd intervals, he shot out his right elbow—clearly a prearranged signal for Roy Haynes, his drummer, to play a rim-shot. Haynes misfired as often as not, and it was good hamming. The rest was predictable. Hampton unloaded his customary two-by-fours, Hutcherson jammed a hundred notes into each measure, and Jackson kept his lyric cool. All five vibraphonists got together for a closing blues; then the rain, floating around the rafters for the past twenty-four hours, came, blending its sound perfectly with the heavy work onstage.

  The rain was still needling in low and hard and cold at eight, when the evening began. Festival Field was tented with umbrellas and preventive do-me-good was plentiful. As it turned out, we could have all gone home and curled up before the telly. Marilyn Maye, a modern nasal Hildegarde, sag and sag and sag; Bill Evans, along with Eddie Gomez (bass) and Philly Joe Jones, swam steadily toward the surface but never reached it; Max Roach and his quintet struck off hard-bop clichés; Woody Herman’s big band dipped into the gospel bag, the blues bag, and the flag-waver bag; Miles Davis, wearing a dinner jacket and an untied bow tie, spent more time offstage than on. The Blues Project, a heavily amplified five-piece group that has been moving from rock and roll toward jazz, opened the evening but was allowed just two numbers before being unplugged to make way for Miss Maye. Its amplifiers were barely warm.

  The various m.c.s, however, have been warming up all weekend. We have had Billy Taylor, Father Norman O’Connor, Del Shields, and George Wein, and when they have not been babbling about the music they have been engaging in mutual admiration (“And now I would like to introduce one of the nicest…”). A printed program (there is one) and a curtain (there is none) dropped at the end of each act would effortlessly put them out of business.

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  Monday. With a couple of exceptions, tonight was a continuation of last night. (The rain, coming in tropical explosions, continued all morning and then subsided into fog.) The Dave Brubeck Quartet showed more candlepower than has been its wont in recent years, and Sarah Vaughan wandered through eight follow-me-if-you-can numbers. The evening and the festival were closed by Lionel Hampton and a big band made up largely of Hampton alumni, among them Milt Buckner, Joe Newman, Frank Foster, Benny Powell, Jerome Richardson, and Snooky Young. The alumni, however, spent most of the dozen numbers sitting on their instruments while Hampton labored at the vibraphone, the drums, and the piano. In “Flying Home,” though, Illinois Jacquet, who had played well earlier in the evening, went through his celebrated calisthenics, and it was like hearing Francis Scott Key sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The other successful numbers in the concert were done by Red Norvo, Ruby Braff, and the Wein-Lesberg-Lamond rhythm section. Norvo floated earnestly over his vibraphone, playing excellent tag in his exchanges with Braff and Lamond, and looked—with his bearded, benign, expectant way of continually lifting his head from his instrument and searching the audience—like God watching out for the Devil.

  The afternoon was given over almost wholly to big hands. Don Ellis’s nineteen-piece group, outfitted with an eight-man rhythm section (three bassists, four drummers, and a pianist) and a mass of electronic equipment, played five completely absorbing numbers. There were fugues and passacaglias, raga-like passages, time signatures of five/four, three-and-a-half/four, and seven/four, a sterling parody of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?,” and electronic effects that sounded like enormous, windy caves. For all these doodads, the band swings steadily and plays with remarkable precision. The concert ended with an extravaganza called the Milford (Massachusetts) Youth Band. It is, as far as I know, the largest jazz band in history, for it boasts sixteen saxophones, eleven clarinets, five trombones, twelve trumpets, a bass, four woodwinds, a French horn, drums, and three percussion. The band ranges in age from eleven to eighteen and includes nine girls. It played a recent Basie number, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, a blues, a Kentonish avant-garde number, a ballad, and a Near Eastern number, and played them almost as well as any current big band. The soloists were nearly as good. Best of all were the passages in which the brass section, eighteen strong, opened up. It was glory materialized.

  ELLEN WILLIS

  JULY 6, 1968 (PACKAGING ROCK AND POST-ROCK)

  THE SOCIOLOGY OF rock and post-rock has been based on three concepts: the star, the sound, and the scene. That sociology, like most, is firmly rooted in economics. Since the simplicity that gave rock its mass appeal also made it relatively easy to create, performers and the businessmen behind them faced a problem familiar to the makers of cigarettes and cars: How do you outsell a horde of competitors whose products are as good as yours? The solution was equally familiar: attractive packaging. The crucial elements in the package were charisma and sound—the artist’s trademark, the gimmick that unified his work and set it apart (Little Richard’s scream, the Everly Brothers’ close harmonies, the Beatles’ falsetto). If a performer or group did not have a unique sound, it helped to identify with a collective sound—usually that of a subculture (rockabilly, the Mersey sound) or of a creative producer (Phil Spector, Berry Gordy). I do not mean to conjure up the spectre of hucksters sitting around the Brill Building cold-bloodedly inventing salable gimmicks. Sometimes it worked that way. But mostly the process was unconscious: performers whose personal style was naturally gimmicky, or whose managers understood intuitively how to get attention, survived and bred imitators. Actually, before rock and roll became self-conscious, commercial and aesthetic considerations were almost indistinguishable; the geniuses of that period, from Chuck Berry to the early Beatles and Stones, owed their greatness to the same qualities that made them best-sellers. (Presley was an exception, and he ended up in Hollywood singing ballads.)

  The Beatles were transitional figures. For one thing, their charisma was much more interesting than that of any previous rock-and-roll stars. Their image—that androgynous, childlike insouciance, the way they revelled in their fame and wealth without ever taking it or themselves seriously—sold records, which is what Brian Epstein had in mind when he made them wear mop tops and Edwardian sui
ts. But it was also a comment on success, an embodiment of ingenuous youth in the affluent society—and “comments” and “embodiments” are, after all, aesthetic categories. Similarly, the Beatles’ sound—a deliberate attempt not to sound black, contrary to custom—was at once a commercial novelty and an artistic self-assertion. These developments fascinated Pop artists and others for whom the aesthetic significance of commercial phenomena was a major preoccupation—enter the first self-conscious rock fans. The Beatles were also responsible for the bohemianization of rock. The concept of the rock “scene”—a term borrowed from jazz and implying an élite In group as much as a place—originated in Mod London and spread to San Francisco. Rock became identified less with particular superstars or sounds than with a whole life-style; “psychedelic” music was not so much a sound as a spirit. In 1965, the average person, asked to associate to the phrase “rock and roll,” would probably have said “Beatles”; by 1967 the answer would more likely have been “hippies,” “drugs,” or “long hair.” When American bohemians took up rock, they brought along their very un-Beatlish distinctions between art and Mammon, and for the first time people talked about “serious,” as opposed to merely commercial, rock. Yet if such talk was possible, it was only because the Beatles (with a lot of help from Bob Dylan) had paced a miraculous escalation in the quality of pop songs. Since Sgt. Pepper, few people deny that “serious” pop is serious art. And though there is still some overlap, the split between the AM-radio-singles-teenie market and the FM-L.P.-student-hippie-intellectual audience is a fact of life.

  With this evolution has come a shift in the way the music is perceived. There is, for example, an unprecedented demand for technical virtuosity. Good musicianship was once as irrelevant to rock as it was rare; the whole point of electric guitars and dubbing and echo chambers was that kids with no special talent could make nice noises. But now the music has enough scope to attract excellent instrumentalists, as well as an audience interested in traditional criteria of quality. Not that this audience’s taste necessarily lives up to its pretensions; often flash is mistaken for skill. Still, a few years ago it would have been impossible for an Eric Clapton or a Mike Bloomfield to make it in pop music on the strength of fine guitar playing. The new audience also favors complex music and lyrics—a trend that threatened to get totally out of hand until Dylan’s John Wesley Harding provided some timely propaganda for simplicity. What all this adds up to is an increasing tendency to judge pop music intrinsically, the way poetry or jazz is judged. Social context is still important, as it is for most art. But although social and economic factors were once an integral part of the rock aesthetic—indeed, defined that aesthetic—they are now subordinate to the “music itself.”

  On balance, in spite of all the good music that would never have happened otherwise, I think this tendency is regrettable. What it means is that rock has been co-opted by high culture, forced to adopt its standards—chief of which is the integrity of the art object. It means the end of rock as a radical experiment in creating mass culture on its own terms, ignoring élite definitions of what is or is not intrinsic to aesthetic experience. The reason the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan are the unchallenged—and probably unchallengeable—giants of pop is that through and beyond their work their personalities have a continuing impact on the public consciousness that, if it is not aesthetic, is something just as good. (This is especially true of Dylan, an indifferent musician who never bothered to become a studio expert.) The new standards are bound to inhibit further exploration in this area. In addition, lack of a compelling image puts the new performer at an almost insuperable disadvantage in trying to make an impression on a public whose imagination is deeply involved with established artists. At best, new performers are taking longer to be recognized, and fewer and fewer will attain that special relationship to the public psyche that is so often uncomprehendingly dismissed as “mere celebrity.” I’m thinking, for example, of the Sweet Inspirations, a Gospel-oriented quartet whose first album came out a while ago. They’re great, and by all rights should take over the position of preeminent girl group last held by the Supremes and before that by the Shirelles. But though they have a hit single (“Sweet Inspiration”), I doubt that they will make that pinnacle. So what? Well, part of the fun of listening to the Supremes was that they were the Supremes.

  A related problem is the loss of the mass audience. Whether the upgrading of the music is in itself responsible for that loss is questionable. The Beatles held the loyalty of their original teen-age fans long after they had stopped making simple, happy dance music; when the kids finally turned off, it was less because the Beatles were esoteric than because they were old hat. More recently, the Doors and Jefferson Airplane have done very well outside the coterie. Jimi Hendrix, on the other hand, has not, though he has all the accoutrements of the superstar—a distinctive personality (he’s the only expatriate black hippie around), a distinctive sound (achieved by choke-neck playing on the electric guitar), and a spectacular live act (he plucks his guitar with his teeth, sets fire to it, and breaks it up). What is certain is that the new music has thoroughly confused the record industry; no one can figure out how to promote it. Since the beginning of this year, the sheer quantity of serious pop, as well as its immense variety, has defied sloganeering. Most of the new musicians are not interested in gimmickry or image-making; they just want to make music. It’s no longer possible to attract notice with a fancy album cover and a way-out name. And the scenes are dying. The Small Faces are the only interesting British group to break since Cream. The best first albums of this year’s San Francisco crop come from two of the original underground groups, the Loading Zone and Quicksilver Messenger Service; except for a little-known group called Serpent Power, and Blue Cheer, which has a certain crude energy going for it (what I mean is, it’s loud), the “second generation” San Francisco groups are a disaster. Early this year, MGM Records, out of naïveté or desperation, tried to invent a new scene, and a few other companies went along. It was called the Boston Sound (though there was no special sound involved) and was promoted as anti-drug and anti-exotic—rather negative premises on which to build a scene. The groups themselves were a dreary lot, ranging from the competently frenetic Beacon Street Union to the sublimely ridiculous Earth Opera. (By the time the E.O. album was released, the vibrations were pretty bad, so the group was billed as a Cambridge product. It didn’t help.) Moral: scenes may be made, but they have to be born first.

  For the sake of completeness, I ought to note that there are two areas of pop music in which sociology still dominates. First, negative charisma is very potent. A group that is thought of as a teenybopper band won’t be accepted by most serious rock fans no matter how good it is. Ask someone in the audience at the Fillmore East what he thinks of the Hollies or the Young Rascals. Second, there is a minor cult of sensitive adolescent folkies like Tim Buckley and Steve Noonan, for no reason I can discern except that they are probably just like the kids who idolize them. In the case of Richie Havens, the attraction must be that he is black and friendly—an irresistible combination these days.

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1969 (WOODSTOCK)

  YOU HAVE TO give the producers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair this much credit: they are pulling off a great public-relations coup. They have apparently succeeded in creating the impression that the crisis in Bethel was a capricious natural disaster rather than a product of human incompetence, that the huge turnout was completely unexpected (and, in fact, could not have been foreseen by reasonable men), and that they have lost more than a million dollars in the process of being good guys who did everything possible to transform an incipient fiasco into a groovy weekend. Incredibly, instead of hiding from the wrath of disappointed ticket-buyers and creditors they are bragging that the festival was a landmark in the development of youth culture and have announced that they plan to hold it again next year. But before history is completely rewritten, a few facts, semi-facts, and strong inferences are in order.

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nbsp; For at least a month before the festival, it was obvious to everyone involved in the music scene—industry people, writers for both the straight and the underground press, radicals, and hippies—and also to the city fathers of Wallkill, New York, that the crowd was going to be enormous and the facilities inadequate. The four under-thirty backers of Woodstock Ventures seemed to be motivated less by greed than by sheer hubris: the ambitiousness of the project was meant to establish them as the pop producers, kingpins of the youth market. Their promotion was pervasive. On July 18th, a month before the festival, the Times reported that the management expected as many as two hundred thousand people and had already sold fifty thousand tickets. At that time, they were planning to hold the festival in Wallkill, on a three-hundred-acre site—half the size of the grounds in Bethel—linked to civilization by three country roads. When a Concerned Citizens Committee warned that Wallkill’s water supply could not accommodate the anticipated influx and that festival officials had not made realistic plans to cope with traffic, health, or security, the producers vowed to fight the town’s attempt to exclude them and implied that the opposition came from anti-youth rednecks. When the change of site was announced, just twenty-four days before the scheduled opening of the Fair, there was a lot of speculation that it would never come off at all. An experienced promoter told me, “It’ll happen, but only because they’ve got so much money tied up in it. They can’t afford to back out. But they’ll never finish their preparations in three weeks. Monterey took three months. It’s going to be complete chaos.” Alfred G. Aronowitz, of the Post, one of the few journalists to cast a consistently cold eye on the four young entrepreneurs, wrote witty on-location reports giving them the needle and adding to the general pessimism. Meanwhile, back on St. Marks Place, Woodstock was rapidly evolving into this year’s thing to do. A “Woodstock Special” issue of the underground weekly Rat, published the week of the festival, featured a page of survival advice that began, “The call has been put out across the country for hundreds of thousands to attend a three-day orgy of music and dope and communal experience.” I left for Bethel in much the same spirit that I had gone to Chicago at the time of the Democratic Convention. I was emotionally prepared for a breakdown in services and a major riot. If I enjoyed the festival, that would be incidental to participating in a historic event. The actual number of people who showed up was a surprise. The only other real surprise was that there was no riot. The extra numbers could not excuse the flimsiness of the water pipes (they broke down almost immediately), the paucity of latrines (about eight hundred for an expected two hundred thousand people) and garbage cans, or the makeshift medical facilities (the press tent had to be converted into a hospital). One kid reportedly died of a burst appendix—an incident that in 1969 should at least inspire some questions.