Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In my previous incarnation as a music journalist, I was as guilty as anyone of forcing my taste upon my readership, of using fancy language to justify aesthetic choices which were, ultimately, both arbitrary and entirely personal. But gradually the hypocrisy of my stance became inescapable. Politically, I was a radical (and hardly alone in that, among the rock or jazz critics of the past century). But culturally, I was a snob. One hand held a placard screaming ‘Power to the People’; in the other was a more discreet sign, on which was written ‘Why Do the People Have Such Terrible Taste?’

  So my first task in writing this book was to throw away decades of prejudice, however well argued and intelligently phrased; and to return to a series of deceptively simple questions – what were people listening to? Where did it come from? Why did they like it? And what did it bring to their lives? Approaching music in a spirit approximating genuine democracy offered me something of a blinding revelation. If I removed my blinkers and opened up my ears, I could find pleasure in music which had previously brought me none. For a cynical and opinionated critic (are there any other kinds?), it was something akin to being born again. That is how I found myself, for the first time in my life, hearing (to seize some names at random) Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Mantovani, Queen, Kylie Minogue and Metallica with genuine appreciation, rather than closing my mind as soon as I saw their names.

  It wasn’t enough to adjust my focus. I also had to retreat far enough to be able to view the entire landscape. Various fault lines cut through the history of twentieth-century music, but the widest of them equates the arrival of rock ’n’ roll with a revolution that is musical, social and psychological. The exact co-ordinates of this great divide are open to debate, and refugees from either side of the border are often ushered across enemy lines. But the significance of this moment is apparent from the two rival narratives most commonly employed to explain pop’s progress through the century. The first harks back to the 1930s – the era of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong – as a golden age, and views the teenage cacophony of the mid-1950s as a sorry falling-away from paradise. The second depicts rock ’n’ roll as salvation from years of genteel boredom: a triumph of youthful excitement over decades of parental repression.

  Setting out to chronicle popular music and its eternal quest for modernity, I knew where the story would end, in the here and now, but where should I begin? With Elvis Presley? Frank Sinatra? Louis Armstrong? There was a valid case to be made for each. But the more I listened, and plunged into the strange panorama of the past, the more I realised that the two most revolutionary moments in the life of twentieth-century music actually pre-dated that century. They were the creation of recorded sound as a commercial artefact, and the birth of ragtime; and they coincided in the 1890s. That was the moment when African-American rhythms first seized hold of popular entertainment, and spread across the Atlantic; when the anthems of youth first confronted and appalled older generations; when music was transformed from a kind of entertainment into a business that would eventually touch all of our lives, in ways that would have been unimaginable when ragtime was born. That was where the modern world began: with two concussions so profound that we can still feel their echoes shaking the ground beneath our feet today.

  One final set of prejudices and assumptions had to be discarded, like a rock critic’s uniform. Writing this book, I no longer believed, automatically, that confrontational music is always better than comforting music; that experimental always trumps conventional; that rough beats smooth; that spontaneity towers over contrivance; that elitist counts for more than populist. This doesn’t mean that I have entirely abandoned my aesthetic preferences; merely that, as much as possible, I have tried to excise them from this book, to tell a popular story rather than a personal one. But at the same time, this is a very personal book: it’s based on years of my research, and my intense listening; my mental leaps to make connections between apparently disparate subjects; my experience of more than a century’s music from all our yesterdays.

  The first requirement of popular music, surely, is that it should be popular (and musical, although the precise definition of that quality is buried beneath festering cans of worms). Much as I admire the cunning of the New York rock critic Robert Christgau in identifying the term ‘semi-popular music’ to describe the music he loves, the tastes of a mass audience tell us something about a society that the preferences of an elite may not. So this book is unashamedly about music that has proven to be popular – globally, racially, generationally – rather than that which has since been judged, by critics and other fools, to have the richest aesthetic value.

  This is also, unashamedly, a book with a British perspective, about a world and a history that has increasingly been dominated by the music and culture of the United States of America. The accident of a (mostly) shared language has made it easy for American sounds, images and ideas to infiltrate and then dominate our lives. But one of the themes of this book is that the same process of almost invisible colonialism has been taking place around the world, speeding to its inevitable climax in the final decades of the last century. If you had travelled the world as the First World War broke out, visiting cities selected at random from every continent on earth, you would have been exposed to a multiplicity of sounds and sensations that would have seemed dazzling. Each country begat and cherished its own culture – or cultures, to be exact, as the centuries before the advent of rapid transportation ensured that every region on the planet owned its distinctive vision of the world, with a soundtrack to match.

  Now you can stand on a street corner in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia – and hear Jay-Z, or Rihanna; Elton John or the Rolling Stones; or, perhaps, their local equivalents, sublimating their national traditions in favour of the all-conquering rhythms of hip hop or stadium rock, Broadway musicals or Hollywood theme songs. Religious and cultural differences may be as savage as ever, and the means of transporting them around the world has carried the problems of each continent into all its neighbours. But the global network of multinational marketing, and the worldwide web, ensures that the dominant icons and events of the world’s entertainment headquarters are transmitted instantly across the planet. Almost every nation may be in conflict or at risk; but when it comes to culture, we are finally one world – not the universal brotherhood envisaged by the creators of the United Nations, perhaps, but a race linked by the ubiquity of our heroes, and the rhythm of our lives.

  That global heritage of popular music is the product of 125 years of artistic and scientific innovation. It represents a constant quest for modernity, which must be endlessly renewed. This is the story of that quest: of the musicians, the generations that they delighted and divided, and the technology which captured their music in the moment of its creation, and preserved it for our collective enjoyment and amazement. This is their story; and ours.

  Two Near-Apologies

  1. Recounting the history of popular music entails the use of language that is, and was, disrespectful and insulting towards African-Americans (and sometimes other races too). Racism has always been as entrenched in popular culture as in any other area of life. But omitting or censoring that language would only obscure that racism, and present a misleading account of our collective past.

  2. It is quite possible that your favourite artists or recordings are not mentioned in the book. Before you rise up in protest, please remember this: neither are most of mine.

  Speaking of the Past

  There are towns1 where one can enjoy all sorts of histrionic spectacles from morning to night. And, we must admit, the more people hear lascivious and pernicious songs, which raise in their souls impure and voluptuous desires, the more they want to hear.

  Fifth-century saint

  Such tunes, although whistled2 and sung by everybody, are erroneously supposed to have taken a deep hold of the popular mind … [but] they are hummed and whistled without musical emotion … they persevere and haunt the morbidly se
nsitive nerves of deeply musical persons, so that they too hum and whistle them voluntarily, hating them even while they hum them … such a melody breaks out every now and then, like a morbid irritation of the skin.

  John S. Dwight, journalist and composer of hymns, 1853

  The California beetle3 cannot stand [recorded] music. It kills him. Three playings of a slow piece like ‘Home Sweet Home’ put him out of misery, but ragtime will kill him in a few bars. The deadly tarantula falls into a stupor. Butterflies are not affected. The bumble-bee flies into a nervous fit. Wasps suffer from wing paralysis and are unable to fly again, though otherwise unaffected. Worms try to crawl nearer the phonograph horn, as though pleased. They evidently want to do the latest wiggle.

  Amateur entomologist, California, 1913

  [The 79-year-old music professor]4 listened for a few minutes to a jazz band playing at furious pace and turned to his nephew, declaring: ‘That isn’t music! Stop it!’ Then he swayed and fell dead.

  Daily Mirror, 1926

  Jazz is born of disorder5 in the nervous system. Heart tests have shown that the original composers of jazz music suffered from irregular heartbeats.

  American neurologist, 1929

  Music begins to atrophy6 when it departs too far from the dance.

  Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934

  2

  1

  IT IS A matter of honour among judges that they should pretend ignorance about all matters of popular culture – even if the oft-repeated remark, ‘Who are the Beatles?’, was never actually uttered in the High Court. Not that such comments were unknown: Mr Justice Bicknill, officiating in a divorce hearing of 1903, enquired of one of Britain’s most celebrated music-hall performers, Miss Vesta Victoria: ‘May I ask what is3 it you do? Do you sing?’

  Judges of the Edwardian era delighted in their disdain for popular entertainment. In May 1904, Mr Justice Darling was called to adjudicate upon the ownership of a long-forgotten song, ‘Oh Charlie, Come to Me’. Miss Gracie Grahame, aged 29, esteemed for her vivacity and golden curls, had applied to the King’s Bench Division of the London courts for an injunction. She wished to prevent a fellow performer – Miss Katie Lawrence, seven years her senior, long linked in the public memory with the song ‘Daisy Bell’, and its bicycle made for two – from singing ‘Oh Charlie’, claiming that it was her own original composition. Mr Justice Darling did not attempt to hide his derision: ‘anything less distinguished 4’ than the song in question ‘I cannot imagine’, he complained. He proceeded to mock the song’s rhyming scheme, scansion and grammar, before pronouncing that ‘it is rather a melancholy state of things that legal copyright should exist in such rubbish’, and finding against Miss Grahame.

  The case had a tragic denouement. A week after her appearance in court, Miss Grahame topped a variety bill at her husband’s theatre, the Empress in Brixton. Her act was brought to an abrupt end when she launched impromptu into the chorus of the disputed song, whereupon her husband called for the curtain to be brought down. It was, Miss Grahame declared later, ‘the worst thing that can happen5 to an artist. I felt they had taken my very livelihood away.’ Gracie then set out with her fellow theatricals for a hostelry near Waterloo Bridge, but broke away from her friends, ran down the steps that led to the mudflats, and jumped headlong into the water. It was low tide, and the Thames was no more than three feet deep; but Miss Grahame’s voluminous skirts helped to drag her beneath the surface – until she was pulled clear by a constable who had witnessed her desperate plunge.

  Miss Grahame was removed to a local infirmary, where she was found to have suffered no ill effects. She spent the night awaiting an inevitable court appearance on the charge of attempted suicide. Perhaps magistrates looked more kindly upon the music hall than did their senior legal peers, as Mr Fenwick examined the pathetic circumstances of the case, and declined to impose the standard prison sentence. Instead he demanded £20 (equivalent of £2,000 today) from the accused, to be held against proof of her good behaviour for six months, and required her to promise that she would not venture on to the mudflats again.

  The copyright dispute left its mark upon the victor, too. Within days of the press reporting upon Miss Grahame’s vain efforts at self-harm, Miss Katie Lawrence took the stage of the Bedford Music Hall in Camden. She was greeted as the villainess of the affair, with a chorus of boos so prolonged that she was unable to begin her act. She could, she felt, have won the audience round had she been able to state the facts of the case, but the show’s producer had strictly forbidden her from speaking. Miss Lawrence died less than a decade later, remembered today only as the subject of a portrait by Walter Sickert in 1887.

  Only the most celebrated or notorious entertainers could hope to survive in the collective memory beyond their lifetime. Likewise the material stuff of their performances. It is safe to assume, for example, that neither ‘Good Morning Carrie’ nor ‘It’s Up To You Babe’ is remembered today. They were the subject of another copyright dispute, heard by Judge Lacombe in the New York Circuit Court in 1902. The two songs were both described as ‘ragtime’, about which a New York Times editorial declared: ‘Its systematic lack of harmonic6 coincidence suggests to the musical ear that this way madness lies … as a habit, it ranks with cocaine and morphine.’ The paper added that ragtime songs should be restricted to ‘the banjo, and other parodies of musical instruments’. This would ensure that anyone carrying a banjo could, like the possessor of burglar’s tools, be treated as offering ‘prima facie evidence of the intent to commit crime’.

  What differentiated this case from all previous legal rulings on the subject of musical copying was the evidence offered to the court. Lawyers brought forward phonograph records of both songs, to prove the similarity – or dissimilarity, as it might be – between them. Judge Lacombe laughed these artefacts aside, declaring that his time was too precious to be wasted by a ‘musical concert, however good7’. When a legal clerk offered to provide a violin on which the melodies could be demonstrated, Lacombe packed away his papers and scampered from the court.

  The New York Times heartily congratulated the judge on his actions: nobody whose nerves were comprised of a substance less than steel, it declared, would be able to tolerate a ragtime song on a phonograph. In its cynicism, the newspaper overlooked the significance of the phonograph and its rivals. These machines not only offered an instant solution to a debate about musical copyright, but ensured that both performers and their compositions would endure beyond their natural lifespans. More important still was their role in democratising the distribution of music, which was now available in the home of anyone – regardless of their musical ability – who could afford to purchase a phonograph record or cylinder.

  You can study the great8 artistes. It is not mere mechanical music – it is the living voice of the singer.

  Gramophone advertisement, 1904

  In your own home9, miles and miles away from London, during the long dark evenings that are with us now, for a small outlay, you can be seated comfortably round your fire listening to the Best Songs, the Best Bands, and the best of the World’s Musical Talent.

  Anglophone advertisement, 1904

  The birth of recorded sound, no matter how crude its early manifestations, represented a profound shift in the nature of human existence; as profound, it could be argued, as the representation of human speech and thought on papyrus, parchment, paper or, in due course, computer screen. Thomas Edison intended his invention as a means of documenting conversation or debate, or preserving the speeches and bons mots of great men, or as a vehicle for education of the young. He might have been amused to learn that his phonograph was used in 1903 by a suspicious wife to record conversations between her husband and another woman, which were introduced as evidence during their divorce proceedings.

  Even before his device reached the public, an American scientist anticipated its ability to conjure up the past: ‘How startling it will be10 to reproduce and hear at pleasure the voice of the
dead!’ Edison himself believed that ‘The Phonograph will undoubtedly11 be liberally devoted to music. A song sung on the Phonograph is reproduced with marvellous accuracy and power.’ Yet he appears not to have considered a more philosophical consequence of his machine: that a musical performance would not only be captured and held, but would thereby be changed in essence and in form.

  The composer Claude Debussy reflected upon the strangeness of this transformation in 1913: ‘In a time like ours12, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed of proportions, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. It only costs ten centimes, too, just like the automatic weighing scale! Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminution of the secret forces of art, which until now have been considered indestructible?’ Instead, it was performances that were now indestructible, as long as the artefact on which they were stored remained undamaged.

  Those artefacts were often fragile, and assumed many forms. Edison’s first phonograph, invented in 1877, was exhibited across the United States as ‘The Miracle of the 19th Century … The Talking Wonder’. At its heart was a metal cylinder, wrapped in a layer of tin foil, which was ‘inscribed’ as a recording was made. A stylus was then used to retrieve the sound from the cylinder as it was turned by hand. Audiences flocked to see it in action, but the novelty was soon exhausted, and Edison abandoned the device to concentrate on the electric light. Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter contrived a rival machine, the graphophone, in 1887, substituting wax for the tin foil. Edison countered by adding an electric motor; and in 1888 a company was formed to market both models.