Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As the walls fell, the sonic weapons being employed by young musicians grew ever more inventive. The journalist Ed Ward reflected in 1968, ‘Suddenly popular music30 was faced with an infinite number of new ways of reaching the emotions through the tension/release methods of noise and music.’ The Kinks explored the limits of power and distortion; meanwhile, their leader, Ray Davies, declared his love for the musical drone he’d heard in Indian restaurants, and raced his rivals to place that noise on to vinyl. John Lennon conjured an eerie whine of guitar feedback from his amplifier to open ‘I Feel Fine’ (an effect idiotically explained at the time as a mistake), and Pete Townshend of the Who channelled the howl of feedback into an emotional weapon. The Yardbirds edged closer to a dislocation of the senses on ‘For Your Love’, after which guitarist Eric Clapton left the group. ‘Why is it criminal31 to be successful?’, he had asked rhetorically in November 1964, before deciding that he preferred to be unsuccessful and play the blues. The Beatles toyed with the conventions of pop by fading their US single ‘Eight Days a Week’ in, rather than out, as was the custom. And a group called the Supremes aped this experimentation with the opening seconds of ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’, which sounded like a robot being awakened and then exploding into life. Yet they alone deviated from the nonconformist norm: they were black, American, and had no intention of upsetting anyone’s parents.

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  fn1 ‘This particular decade has not5, as yet, progressed very far,’ one songwriter said, ‘and what with the prevalent “ill will to all men”, nuclear fission, and the industrious piling up of weapons of annihilation, it may not even get beyond the half-way mark.’ This gloom-struck rebel was none other than 64-year-old Noël Coward.

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  ‘WE CALL IT sweet music2,3’, said Diana Ross of the Supremes’ sound in 1965 – presumably ignorant of the pre-war rivalry between ‘sweet’ and ‘hot’ jazz. But definitions were fluid, and confusing. The Supremes’ boss, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, claimed his artists were delivering ‘The Sound of Young America’, black, white, Latin, or Asian. Black stations were playing the work of white ‘blue-eyed soul [brothers]’, such as the Righteous Brothers, whose epic ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ epitomised the genre. One New York R&B station even added the Beatles’ performance of ‘Yesterday’ to its playlist, ‘because Paul McCartney4 puts a lot of soul into the song’. Black listeners were buying Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, while their white counterparts were snapping up Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and the Motown stable.

  Assimilation was the apparent goal of American society in 1965, the year when the Voting Rights Act – following hard on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ostensibly outlawed racial discrimination in America – finally enacted one of the aims of the protest movement that had swept the nation over the previous decade. It gave all black citizens the right to vote (and the right to be able to register to vote, this still being a subject of contention in twenty-first-century America). Assimilation was certainly high on the agenda of Berry Gordy, who had unashamedly established his web of record companies (besides Motown, there was Tamla, Gordy and soon Soul, too) as a black-owned corporation. But he was not afraid to hire white staff, or indeed an occasional white artist.

  By pursuing the whole of American society, and then rolling out that strategy around the world, Gordy was hoping to reach an audience which would even extend beyond that of the Beatles. Hence his concentration on the Supremes, who achieved eleven No. 1 singles on the US pop charts in just over four years. Tellingly, only six of those eleven reached the same heights on the R&B listing, illustrating how quickly African-Americans grew suspicious of the Supremes’ slick, sweetened sound. In interviews, the carefully groomed and chaperoned group consistently stressed the importance of ‘glamour’. Motown insisted that all their acts study etiquette, to avoid upsetting any sector of the market.

  While the mid-1960s hits by the Supremes and other Motown acts were cut from almost identical cloth for Top 40 radio, their albums and concert schedules revealed Gordy’s desire to capture an audience that was not only white, but adult. Almost all of the stable’s best-selling artists recorded albums of standards (it was all Marvin Gaye ever wanted to do); they were booked into plush cabaret venues in Hollywood, New York and London; and on their frequent television appearances they leavened their teen fodder with a song from West Side Story, The Sound of Music or Mame. Gordy was delighted when the Supremes won a review like this in 1965: ‘While the Supremes will probably5 keep their teen-age following for some time, there appears little question that the act will last a lot longer as staple adult fare, not too dependent on the chart position of their latest single.’

  But Motown had more substantial achievements to trumpet. Gordy had created an entire roster of stars from the black community of Detroit, and encouraged, cajoled and threatened his staff, front-and back-line, to maintain more than a decade of consistent hits and constant, if subtle, innovation. He carried the quality control of the Motor City’s flourishing automobile factories into the music business, subjecting even his most prestigious stars, and brilliant writer/producers, to the same stringent checks and restraints. Nothing escaped his attention, at least until he left Detroit to establish a new Motown empire in Hollywood. Ultimately, by using the same tight-knit group of musicians, composers, arrangers and producers for almost every record, and concentrating his attention on the ‘Hitsville USA’ studio complex on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard, Gordy created an instantly recognisable Motown sound – so distinctive that as early as 1965 his prime creative team, Holland/Dozier/Holland, could satirise themselves on the Four Tops’ ‘It’s the Same Old Song’.

  That creative trio was responsible for the Tops, the Supremes and a dozen other acts during their 1964–7 commercial peak. Their skill – or curse – was to force everyone into the same mould: jazz fan Marvin Gaye, teenage girl groups, the muscular male combinations of the Four Tops and the Temptations, even the doo-wop-rooted Miracles. Each lead voice registered a unique personality, and when Miracles frontman Smokey Robinson, Gordy’s first sidekick, was let loose in the studio, whichever act he handled suddenly found themselves gifted with seductive melodies and intricate, emotionally charged wordplay worthy of Cole Porter. But Smokey’s subtleties were almost excess baggage within a formula so streamlined.

  There was a delicious innocence to Motown’s apprenticeship; a diversity of moods, too, with Brenda Holloway’s ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ coupling the agony of teen romance with bitter adult experience. Then Holland/Dozier/Holland stripped down the corporation to its commercial essentials, with the Supremes’ ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ – percussive and repetitive, like the Dave Clark Five’s early hits. The song repeated the same eight-bar pattern, over and over, but every bar held a hook – handclaps, stamping feet, finger-snaps – and through it all ran the pleading, little-girl-lost keen of Diana Ross’s voice, her cohorts reduced to chirruping ‘baby, baby’ like automatons. And that was it: enough, with continuous refinement, to see the Supremes through several years of hits, and – with Levi Stubbs’s guttural roar replacing Ross’s lost little girl – the Four Tops too. Stubbs had gospel roots, and they showed; plus the Tops were grown men, and could handle something more world-weary and impassioned than the Supremes. But the rationale was the same: a dance beat, a chorus; ceaseless, hypnotic, irresistible.

  Beyond Motown, black America was more open to diversity. In the words of Wilson Pickett’s smash, it was still the ‘Land of 1000 Dances’. There was a place where rhythm and blues met garage rock, and it was where Bob & Earl did the ‘Harlem Shuffle’, the Vibrations courted ‘My Girl Sloopy’, the 5 Du-Tones cried ‘Shake a Tail Feather’ – all black records from 1963, all immediately seized upon by white frat-rockers. After the Animals and the Moody Blues had borrowed contemporary soul hits, and the biracial instrumental unit, Booker T & the MGs, had mixed guitar distortion and R&B on ‘Boot-Leg’, the gulf between pop and soul had virtually disappear
ed. (Which is why trade paper Billboard abandoned its Rhythm and Blues chart for eighteen months from late 1963, believing it to be anachronistic.) While white acts purloined the best of contemporary R&B, soul stars raided the pop pantheon, easily twisting the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ to their own shape.

  There was one African-American doing what white copyists couldn’t (although some tried): James Brown. A blues shouter and pleader in the mid-1950s, he had assembled the hardest, tightest, funkiest (in the new terminology) band in America, and a stage act that was thrillingly alive and impeccably choreographed. With ‘Out of Sight’ (1964), ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (1965) and ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ (1965), he enacted a rhythmic revolution as profound as the invention of syncopation. His new bag entailed locked grooves, wound so tight that it was almost impossible to breathe; a skeletal frame, with the strength of a straitjacket and the sparseness of a bamboo cage; and space, disorderly and disconcerting, between phrases, around phrases, as the beat fell just before and just after the exact parameters of a ‘Harlem Shuffle’ or a ‘Satisfaction’. It was like a magic trick, and it prompted movement that seemed impossible to master and then, with a shake of the hips, felt like the only rhythm that a sentient body could obey. This was funk music: an urgent future rapping at the door.

  Among the first to answer the call, bizarrely, was Della Reese, a supper-club jazz singer. She borrowed ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ – a song first crooned by the Kingston Trio in 1961, then adopted as grizzled autobiography by Frank Sinatra in 1965 – and took it up to Harlem, with chattering percussion, and a defiant vocal which suggested the best years were still to come. As indeed they were for James Brown, with ‘Get it Together’ in late 1967 pushing the polyrhythmic potential of his band to its edge. Over the next four years, he stripped decoration away from his music, subjugating everything to the groove.

  There were other ways of extending the reach of black American music in the mid-1960s. Joe Tex (and later Isaac Hayes and Bobby Womack) brought the rap of the preacher – the preacher of love – into the heart of the music with ‘Hold What You’ve Got’; this at a time when the only spoken voices on pop records were right-wing ideologues protesting against the sins of the young.fn1 Shirley Ellis took the rhythm of playground games on to the dance floor, astounding the audience of TV’s Merv Griffin Show by improvising her tongue-twisting verses. Sorrow enduring longer than joy, however, what lingered in the mid-1960s was the music known retrospectively as Southern or deep soul. Its territory was loss and heartache, often with a melody descending as fast as the singer’s spirit. Once, the blues would have sufficed to contain that darkness; B. B. King’s ‘How Blue Can You Get’ in 1963 was a last gasp of that tradition. But blues had become so stylised (as would deep soul itself) that it was difficult for it to convey anything beyond nostalgia. With the desolate landscape of ‘I’ve Been Lovin’ You Too Long’ from 1965, Otis Redding retrieved the essence of the mid-1950s blues ballad and filled it with tense, brittle despair. Its knack of suspension – keeping time and destiny at a standstill – was repeated by Percy Sledge on ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, and then turned on its head by Aretha Franklin in 1967, whose ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)’ offered the strongest female voice heard on record since the golden age of classic blues.

  Three months later, she remodelled Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’ as a proud demand for her dues – as a woman, naturally, but inescapably as an African-American too. There were urban riots in America every summer of the mid-1960s, almost always stoked by antagonism between the black community and the police. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr were at odds over how to secure respect for their people; soon the Black Panther Party for Self-Determination proposed their own, more confrontational solution. Black singers refused to be silenced. Lena Horne’s ‘Now’ (a cry for freedom set to the tune of ‘Hava Negilah’) was blacklisted in the weeks before JFK’s assassination, and ignored afterwards. ‘The lyrics are offensive6’, was one complaint; the song was ‘too aggressive’, because it demanded civil rights now, not in some fantasy land of the future; in any case, her record was ‘out of the realm of entertainment’. Equally outspoken was another jazz-inspired singer, Nina Simone, to the extent that the magazine Negro Digest was perturbed: ‘the introduction of what can7 only be called “militant soul music” comes as a shock … Fine, for civil rights – and we’re all for civil rights, you bet! – but after a hard day’s struggle, we like to have Nina to soothe us.’ As the folk protest tradition surged into the pop mainstream during that summer of 1965, this would become a familiar call: keep music and politics apart.

  There were civil-rights soul anthems which aroused less disquiet, because they were more subtle, to the point of disguise. Curtis Mayfield’s songs for the Impressions, including ‘Keep on Pushing’ and ‘People Get Ready’, mentioned no crusade by name – just as Sam Cooke’s final testament before his murder in late 1964, ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, could be interpreted as a cry of one man’s heart, rather than an entire race. Stevie Wonder, just 16 years old, stepped closer than any other Motown act to the front line by recording Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 1966, at a time when both Joe Tex and Mike Williams were singing about the plight of the black soldier sent to fight in Vietnam. Every note squealed or played by James Brown screamed for black civil rights, but his most political statement that year was a gentle warning to schoolkids: ‘Don’t Be a Drop-Out’. This was a popular theme for black singers who wanted to prove their worth to white society, demonstrating that they could be principled without being militant. In 1968, after the assassination of Dr King, after shootings of activists and Black Panthers, after it became obvious that African-Americans were being selected for Vietnam ahead of their white contemporaries, James Brown finally came clean. ‘Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)’ was a sonic as well as a political landmark. ‘We won’t quit moving till we get what we deserve’, he promised; and however you interpreted that phrase, he kept to his word.

  We have found that the African8 is pathetically incapable of defending his own culture, and indeed is largely indifferent to its fate.

  English folklorist Hugh Tracey, 1954

  I said to myself9, ‘I have to be very original and clear myself from shit … I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.’

  Fela Anikulapo Kuti, 1966

  In the early 1950s, ethnomusicologists from Britain and Europe ventured into the heart of Africa to recover its native music. Just like their predecessors in North America and rural England, they found that traditional cultures had been infiltrated and mutated by outside influences. Hugh Tracey believed the music of the Bantu-speaking tribes was ‘in decay10’; while Ulli Beier lamented that among the Yoruba of Nigeria, ‘In January 195511, all children aged 6 will be sent to school compulsorily; and the talking drum is not on the new curriculum.’

  Instead, much of Africa was in thrall to the electric guitar and the rhythms of Latin America and the Caribbean. One of the unforeseen consequences of colonialism was the migration of cultural influences, which carried the Cuban rumba to Africa, while bringing the highlife sound of West Africa to London’s R&B clubs. The very term ‘highlife’ had satirical and political connotations: it was a way of claiming a sense of class for ordinary people, who could only watch from outside as government officials mingled with European visitors at state banquets and garden parties. The rhythms of the Caribbean and Africa mingled to produce a music that moved with a gentle lyricism at odds with the beat of the American continents. There were regional and national variations, each country spawning its own brand of popular music and its local heroes. But the hypnotic, repeated patterns of an electric guitar, changing chord with timekeeping that was constantly surprising to the First World ear, was distinctively African, whether it hailed from Nigeria, the Congo (Africa’s pop powerhouse, because it boasted the largest concentration of recording studios) or South Africa.


  Highlife itself crossed many borders, as the music of parties and dance halls. Besides Latin imports, it reflected the lilt of calypso; even, on occasions, a hint of jazz in its constant use of horns. Songs might be sung in French or English, or more often in the tongues of African tribes. Nigeria also spawned a hybrid style named juju; while South Africa produced kwela, with rhythmic similarities to the American twist. From Congo came soukous, introducing political and social commentary to the dance. As each nation secured independence during the 1950s and 60s, there would be a spark of enthusiasm for deep-rooted musical traditions, and a desire to rid their music of any Western influences. Aside from an occasional novelty hit, however, such as 1958’s ‘Tom Hark’, none of this constant reinvention of African popular music was visible in Britain or America. Regional stars such as Jean Bosco Mwenda, Tabu Ley Rochereau, E. T. Mensah, I. K. Dairo and Edouard Masengo were unknown outside Africa. On the rare occasions when Africans travelled to the West, their audience was restricted to other emigrants from the continent; or, as when the young Fela Kuti formed a London band named the Koola Lobitos with Caribbean newcomers, the West Indian community. Only one black African succeeded in infiltrating the British beat scene: percussionist Speedy Acquaye, who spent four years with Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, playing for both white and black audiences at clubs such as the Flamingo.

  The Flamingo was also a hotbed of Jamaican ska – another music which proudly displayed its working-class origins. ‘Ska was typically frowned12 upon by the middle-and upper-class elite,’ wrote David Katz, ‘due to its uncouth ghetto connotations.’ As bandleader and entrepreneur Byron Lee remembered, ‘It was not played on the radio13 stations, because they wouldn’t accept the quality – the guitars were out of tune, the records were hop, skip and jump.’ In 1962, Lee staged a presentation called Ska Goes Uptown at the Glass Bucket Club in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. The same year, Lee and his Dragonaires took part in the filming of the first James Bond movie, Dr No. By 1964, after Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ had become a global hit, she joined Lee and other ska pioneers at the World’s Fair in New York. Madison Avenue advertising agencies thought that they had spotted a second bossa nova: an ethnic musical craze which could be translated into a lifestyle choice for wealthy Americans. But they misunderstood the rationale behind a genre that was rooted in Jamaican independence, black pride, and a spiritual connection with Africa.