Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The most notorious of these frat-rock anthems was ‘Louie Louie’, written and recorded in the mid-1950s by teenage R&B singer Richard Berry, and then revived in shambolic, lumbering style by the Kingsmen. Spending six weeks at No. 2 in the US chart after JFK’s assassination, the song became a cause of national outrage, when the governor of Indiana announced that he had been sent the record by a traumatised high-school student, who feared it was obscene. A bunch of college kids obligingly provided a suitably raunchy transcript, supposedly taken verbatim from the Kingsmen’s slurred and unintelligible recording. Even more perverted lyrics were passed from hand to hand across the country, each set claiming to reveal the ultimate taboo-busting reality of the song. Meanwhile the publishers of ‘Louie Louie’ offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the song was obscene. The FBI did its best to solve the mystery, before concluding after more than a year that the exact nature of the song’s lyrics was impossible to ascertain.

  Surf, hot rod, frat rock and manufactured dance crazes continued to pepper the US charts in the wake of the Beatles. Indeed, three of those trends coincided sublimely in the Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’, its complex harmonic blend supporting lyrics of stunning banality, while their diamond-cut ‘Dance Dance Dance’ in late 1964 rendered all other dance records irrelevant. At the other extreme, the Premiers’ ‘Farmer John’ reduced frat rock to its essentials, making the Kingsmen sound baroque by comparison. Surprisingly few American bands in 1964 were capable of echoing the sound of Liverpool, the ironically named Chartbusters coming closest with ‘She’s the One’ (peak position No. 33). For a coherent response to what was already being dubbed ‘the British Invasion’ of 1964, American teenagers had to wait until the final weeks of the year. The Gestures’ ‘Run Run Run’ and the Beau Brummels’ ‘Laugh Laugh’ grabbed the essentials of Merseybeat, and smoothed them into sophisticated fare for the world’s leading consumer economy.

  Then, in March 1965, the leading protagonist of the folk protest movement issued a rock ’n’ roll single which merged beatnik poetry with nihilistic philosophy. Even the title of Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ sounded subversive. It utilised language that had never appeared in any pop song – words such as ‘government’, ‘medicine’ and ‘No-Doz’ (caffeine tablets). Its moral was simple: don’t trust any form of authority except Dylan’s. ‘It’s taken over the radio stations9’, declared Columbia Records. ‘It’s a sellout in record stores from coast to coast.’ As a psychologist noted: ‘[Dylan], as a personality10, has captured a cult and unwittingly made himself a leader. His clothes are copied by thousands, his roving way of life envied. But more important, the message in his songs (against injustice and for the dignity of man) is being embraced by a generation so often accused of indifference by parents. Sorry, parents, but your generation never produced lyrics like these.’ In two minutes, Dylan had exploded all the conventions of popular music, ready to rebuild the edifice in his own mercurial image.

  I reckon the Beatles11 have wider acceptance now. They’re liked by older people. We could never hope for such acceptance.

  Mick Jagger, February 1964

  [The Stones] are probably the coolest12, most undemonstrative bunch who ever got together. And not even with your tongue in your cheek could you call them well dressed. Their clothes are not just casual – they positively don’t care.

  Records magazine, May 1964

  The success of the Beatles, said sociologist David Riesman in February 1964, was ‘a form of protest13 against the adult world’. That month, adults were enjoying the music of Andy Williams, the Singing Nun, Henry Mancini and the original cast album for the show Hello, Dolly!. A week later, ‘March is Mantovani Month14’, declared London Records, while Decca chose to revive the 1930s dance bands. Then: insanity.

  America lost its mind over the Beatles, with politicians vying to be photographed in moptop wigs and celebrities besieging promoters for complimentary tickets to their New York debut. Perhaps symbolically, the week that the Beatles entered the American charts, Elvis Presley was widely reported to have been killed in a car crash. Within weeks, Presley’s one-time rivals Bill Haley & His Comets had donned Beatles hairpieces and filled their stage repertoire with Lennon/McCartney songs.

  The group’s impact can be measured by the speed with which acts who had previously regarded the teenage market as anathema clamoured to acknowledge the Beatles’ existence. Mantovani managed to hold youth at bay until 1966, when he finally succumbed to the melodic charms of Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’; but by June 1964 Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops Orchestra (‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’) and Stu Phillips’s Hollyridge Strings (‘All My Loving’) were offering up Beatles songs as easy listening. Indeed, Phillips hastily concocted an entire album of such delights. ‘To many, the tunes have never15 sounded so good,’ Billboard exclaimed, ‘in all their majestic string and muted brass splendour.’ The Beatles Song Book sold in such quantities that Phillips prepared a second collection, alongside LP-length tributes to the Four Seasons, Beach Boys and Elvis Presley. Bob Leaper arranged Big Band Beatle Songs later in the year. The Golden Gate Strings were impressively quick to recognise the potential of The Bob Dylan Song Book in 1965, released while ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was still in the charts. Joshua Rifkin and the New Renaissance Society, respectively, shepherded the Beatles and the Rolling Stones into the bygone world of the baroque; jazz guitarist Joe Pass swallowed his pride for an album entitled The Stones Jazz; and by 1967 there were several full-length orchestral tributes to the Monkees, and one to John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful.

  Such projects marked a belated attempt to recreate the one-nation audience of the past: to unify parent and child on vaguely neutral territory. Easy-listening artists were extending their commercial life by widening their repertoire beyond a predictable canon of Broadway standards; they also imagined they were preparing the teenagers of 1964 for the more sedate pleasures of adulthood. The most urgent impulse, however, was naked commercialism: this was a social phenomenon which nobody could afford to ignore. It was a vintage era for exploitation. Elvis Presley had been pop’s first commodity, but the onslaught of ephemeral artefacts aimed at Beatles fans between 1963 and 1969 dwarfed every previous campaign. Once the love-crazed fan had purchased Beatles talcum powder and jewellery, Beatles pillowcases and sheets, Beatles stickers and badges, it was indeed possible that they might recklessly splash out on product as calculating as The Chipmunks Sing the Beatles’ Hits or the pre-karaoke LP, Sing a Song with the Beatles (featuring ‘Instrumental Background Recreations of Their Biggest Hits’).

  There was now a distinct teenage culture stoked by pop magazines and photo books, Top 40 radio stations blanketing the airwaves, even networked television shows on both sides of the Atlantic: Top of the Pops and Shindig!, Ready, Steady, Go! and Hullabaloo. Teenagers felt that they owned these programmes and publications, forgetting that they arrived via adult mediation. The process also worked in reverse, however, as teenage idols infiltrated adult media. The most powerful of these was, of course, television, which had extended its demographic reach (especially in the UK) since the white rock ’n’ roll explosion of the mid-1950s. American audiences had been exposed to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and even Bo Diddley (but not Little Richard or Chuck Berry) via prime-time variety shows. British viewers witnessed Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on their screens. But none of those cameos could match the impact of the Beatles’ appearances on Sunday Night at the London Palladium in October 1963, and The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The first of those shows prompted the British press to coin the term ‘Beatlemania’ (‘It was the last night of the Proms16, and New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square at midnight, all rolled into one’); while the second attracted what was then the biggest audience in US television history. Both were preceded by hyperbolic publicity: young people insisted their parents tune in, entailing that adults were fully exposed for the first time to the men who had kidnapped their childr
en’s minds. The mere fact that the Beatles had been invited on to such prestigious programmes smoothed their path to near-universal acceptance.

  Such tactics convinced American parents and children alike that the only music worth hearing in 1964 was by British artists. First to benefit were the Dave Clark Five, whose foot-stomping, anthemic style was a throwback to the energy of the mid-1950s, packaged with contemporary finesse. The musical abilities of the group’s drummer, and leader, have been questioned; but Dave Clark’s skill as a businessman and publicist were incomparable. As early as March 1963, seven months before their first UK chart appearance, they won national attention when thousands of fans signed a petition demanding that the Mecca chain of ballrooms return the group to their home-town residency in Tottenham, after they had been transferred to Basildon. It was like the Beatles suddenly being exiled from the Cavern in Liverpool to the Black Cat Club in Sheffield – with the difference that Clark’s quintet were regularly performing to several thousand people, not the 500 who squeezed into the Cavern basement. Once the DC5 began scoring hits, all of them featuring the thrillingly raw vocals of Mike Smith, and a percussive punch of which Phil Spector would have been proud, Clark’s acumen came to the fore. He effectively managed his group, owned his publishing, oversaw the production of his records, won composer credit on almost all their songs, and secured an independent producer’s deal with EMI whereby all rights to his recordings reverted to him after three years. Nobody in 1960s rock achieved such masterful control of all the mechanisms of fame. That grip extended to teenage girls: as one fan remarked of Clark, ‘He’s dreamy and has that little17-boy look which makes me want to take him by the hand and walk him home.’

  Once the Beatles and the DC5 had established a bridgehead, it was easy for other British acts to cross the Atlantic. Even groups who weren’t successful at home, such as the Hullaballoos, could find a stateside audience. (Other avenues were open: the Scorpions, from Manchester, became huge stars in Holland.) America’s frail grasp of British geography freed publicists to make wildly inaccurate claims, with the Beatles being credited for spreading the ‘Thames beat18’ and London’s DC5 offering ‘The Mersey Sound19 with the Liverpool Beat’. In the era of James Bond and the Beatles, being English was suddenly very sexy, and independent producer Mickie Most capitalised with Herman’s Hermits, fronted by a goofy 16-year-old singer. ‘I thought Peter Noone20 looked very much like President Kennedy, and they’d make it big in the States because of that’, Most recalled, and his instinct was unerring. Noone’s cheeky-little-boy image quickly won over fans in Britain (‘He’s the sort of boy21 a girl could fall head over heels in love with, and find herself looking after’) and America (where he was ‘everybody’s dream in the whole world22’). The Hermits struck a golden vein of hit singles by reviving cockney music-hall tunes, which allowed them to show off their penchant for comedy. The same impulse saw the even more cartoon-like Freddie & the Dreamers transformed from lightweight British R&B band into pre-teen American heroes, with a level of success far beyond what they could achieve in Britain.

  While Freddie Garrity was effectively the Norman Wisdom of pop, Noone and Clark extended the teen-idol syndrome that had existed since the late 1950s. When the Monkees were formed in 1966 to pose as a pop group for a US TV series, Davy Jones – like Noone, a baby-faced Mancunian of limited vocal means – was groomed to capture the hearts of young girls. This was an inexhaustible market, each new arrival sparking a renewed rush of hysteria. In 1970, for example, Bobby Sherman – who had been making records since 1964 – was suddenly reinvented as the heart-throb of every 12-year-girl in the United States, thanks to a combination of fresh-faced looks and a lead role on TV’s comedy western series, Here Come the Brides. Whilst relishing his fame, Sherman expressed bemusement at the hysterical behaviour he was inspiring amongst girls barely out of kindergarten: ‘When you see a six-year-old23 sitting in the front row, screaming and flashing the peace sign, it kind of scares you.’ Or worse: Sherman suffered permanent hearing impairment from exposure to his shrieking fans.

  Of all these acts, only the Beatles were able to sustain and even extend their audience as they progressed. The others enjoyed their year or three of intense fame, and were then thrown aside as easily as a broken toy. This even applied to the Monkees, whose intelligence and musical prowess were more substantial and subversive than their handlers had bargained for. Emerging just as the Beatles cast off their image as teen idols in preference for more adult preoccupations, the Monkees briefly made Beatlemania seem staid. The intensity of their success inspired a cartel of American businessmen to secure the rights to franchise teenage discotheques (or ‘soft-drink nightclubs’), known as Monkees Clubs, across the nation. For $15,000, you could buy into a guaranteed money-machine, which would ‘win you the devotion24 of the teenage market in your community … the possibilities for your growth as star-builder and successful nightclub owner are tremendous’. Fans were sure to flock to your venue for ‘an evening’s live entertainment in an atmosphere that is “groovey”, one where they feel “in”, “together”, “with it” … a place where they’re treated right, enjoying kooky soft-drink and ice-cream concoctions’. Sadly, this scheme never extended beyond a single short-lived venue in New Jersey. Against all predictions, the Monkees themselves outlasted their spasm of TV-enhanced popularity, even surviving their self-destructive joy in satirising their own fame as it dissipated. Their 1968 movie Head was a masterpiece of psychedelic incoherence and ruthless self-sabotage. Together with their willingness to experiment with the Moog synthesiser and country rock, it won them retrospective acclaim, which would never be awarded to Herman’s Hermits or Freddie & the Dreamers.

  Other teen movies lacked the surrealism and iconoclasm of Head. They might be painfully idiotic (like the Dreamers’ appearance in Seaside Swingers, or the Hermits’ vehicle, Hold On!) or, almost by accident, capture the spirit of the age (as with the pop and pop-art pastiche of the Beatles’ films, and the Dave Clark Five’s Catch Us If You Can, with its satire on the advertising industry). The Rolling Stones would have been counted among their number, had any of their cinematic plans come to fruition. The most substantial would have involved the group starring in Only Lovers Left Alive, based on a 1964 fantasy novel in which teenagers were required to run the world. Later variants on the same theme, portraying the pop star as political messiah, included Privilege (1966) and Wild in the Streets (1968): perfect time capsules, but aesthetic disasters. By escaping this fate, the Rolling Stones kept their mystique intact, enabling Mick Jagger to subvert the messianic role in Performance (also shot in 1968).

  As Brian Jones noted in early 1964, parents would change the TV channel to let their children watch the Beatles, but not the Rolling Stones. ‘When they are accepted by adults25, the Rolling Stones should start worrying’, advised Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman. ‘Young fans, who make up the bulk of the pop market for beat groups, could react against them if their elders condone them.’ The Stones’ US record company reinforced this image: ‘They’re great!26 They’re outrageous! They’re rebels!’, before adding a note to record stores: ‘They sell!’ (But not immediately in America, where their first tour was near-shambolic.) Even in Britain, pundits predicted their imminent demise. Their appearance on BBC TV’s Juke Box Jury, on which the Beatles had shone several months earlier, was dismissed as ‘inarticulate’, ‘childish’271, ‘incoherent’ and ‘a disgusting exhibition’. ‘Elvis has proved he has real28 lasting power, but where will the Stones be in five years’ time?’, asked the pop paper Disc in 1964. A measure of compensation came from an insightful Melody Maker report, which concluded that although the Stones could not match the parental appeal of the Beatles, ‘they have caught the imagination29 and minds of a huge section of Britain’s fans. For the Stones have become a way of life, not just a beat group.’

  What did that way of life encompass? Adult derision, teenage alienation, a refusal to conform to societal expectations, outlandish appearance �
� every badge worn proudly by James Dean, multiplied by five, and then exploded into new dimensions by the visceral punch of their music. If the Dave Clark Five’s ‘Do You Love Me’ and ‘Glad All Over’ forced a teenager’s body to move, then the Rolling Stones’ ‘Not Fade Away’ – arguably, as of February 1964, the most aggressive hit in the history of popular music – encouraged a ritualistic shedding of inhibitions. Its sexual message was scarcely veiled, and brazenly rapacious. The erotic urges of pubescent boys were now being expressed openly, in the thrust of an electric guitar and the swaggering egotism of a voice: alternately frantic and controlled, with the artfulness of the practised tease, on the Mojos’ ‘Everything’s Alright’; pulsating with spasms of sexual ecstasy, on the Kinks’ primeval ‘You Really Got Me’; ultimately, as the year ended, near-psychopathic, with Them’s ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and the Pretty Things’ ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’. There was no respite in 1965, as the adolescent confusion of the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ led inexorably to the Rolling Stones’ taboo-shattering ‘Satisfaction’, which stared morality, decency and convention square in the face – and knocked them all aside. And every one of these records reached the British Top 10, aided by airplay from the so-called pirate radio stations moored precariously offshore, whose playlists were markedly more youthful and adventurous than the BBC’s.