Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Jamaica’s status as a holiday destination for rich Americans, and its British colonial legacy, ensured that the Caribbean island maintained a network of luxury hotels and chic nightclubs. Barred from participating in this hedonism, Jamaica’s black inhabitants (few of whom owned radio sets in the 1950s) depended on sound systems for their entertainment. These temples to electrical amplification could be found in the city or the country; in fixed locations or carried on the backs of trucks; anywhere a crowd might gather for music and dancing. They were owned and operated by entrepreneurs who could be showmen, gangsters – or both. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, their fodder was American R&B. Operators would compete to discover the hottest sounds from Louisiana or Texas, and then try to obscure the identity of what they’d found from their competitors. Their shows might incorporate talent contests for local teenagers; or the operator might stamp his authority on the music with the way he would talk over the records, interacting with the recorded sounds like a jazzman jamming with a band.

  To ensure exclusivity, many operators began to experiment with primitive recording studios, where they could cut songs that they knew their rivals would not be able to play. Originally, these R&B sides – soon dubbed Jamaican boogie – were preserved only on acetate discs, for the solitary use of one sound system. But from 1956 onwards, when Laurel Aitken recorded the first in a long series of boogie hits, ‘Roll Jordan Roll’, they were made for commercial exploitation. Raucous and frequently chaotic, as if they’d been cut in a single drunken take at gunpoint, the Jamaican boogie hits added only the slightest hint of a Caribbean rhythm to the formula of New Orleans R&B. Gradually, as the island prepared for independence in 1962, it shed its reliance on the rhythms of America, and determined the pulse of its own future.

  In musical terms, the change was subtle – and revolutionary. Musicians chose to accent the second and fourth beats of every bar; or rather, just behind those beats, adding the merest hint of delay to American syncopation. What emerged was a jerky, convulsive sense of timing, with dance moves to match. As described evocatively by ska performer Ezz Reco, they were reminiscent of Chubby Checker’s account of the twist: ‘It looks like somebody’s14 sufferin’, man. Imagine a man who has terrible tummy ache and a twitch at the same time, and he’s just gotta move around to relieve the pain, and you will get the idea.’ Trying to explain the beat to a British audience, a record company said ska had ‘the insistent thrump15 of a locomotive tackling a gradient’.

  Ska quickly became the common music of West Indian immigrants in Britain, but having shed its imperial rulers, Jamaica no longer needed British approval. Instead, many of its poorest inhabitants chose to identify with Africa. The focus of their adoration was Ras Tafari, alias Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia – identified as a divinity, they believed, in the teachings of the Jamaican-born, pan-African orator and activist, Marcus Garvey. Rastafarian influence was first displayed in ska on the Folkes Brothers’ 1960 hit ‘Oh Carolina’, through the unashamedly African burru drumming of Count Ossie – a style retrieved from slave tradition as an emblem of black solidarity. But the Jamaican folk style of mento (known locally as ‘country music’) had already produced its back-to-Africa anthems, notably Lord Lebby’s ‘Ethiopia’ from 1955.

  Thereafter, politics, religion and the ska tradition were rarely separated – not that most ska records touched overtly on such issues; they merely arose from the same social climate. In the early 1960s, Derrick Morgan’s ‘Forward March’, the Maytals’ ‘Six or Seven Books’, and ‘Judge Not’ by the teenage Bob Marley all evoked spiritual yearning and social upheaval, violent or otherwise. This was an era when ghetto discontent crossed with gang violence in the Kingston suburbs, as country boys who had been lured to the capital by the optimism of the independence crusade found only poverty awaiting them. ‘Consequently’, as Don Letts recounted, these so-called rude boys ‘became outsiders16 and turned to crime to survive, whether on their own or with their street gangs’. Marley’s group, the Wailers, were the first to confront this trend in song, commanding the rudies to ‘Simmer Down’ in a 1964 hit. For the remainder of the decade, Jamaican popular music was both enthralled by the gangsters, and anxious to find salvation without a gun.

  Perhaps subdued by the weight of these problems, perhaps merely responding to the smothering heat of a freak summer, musicians and dancers slowed and refined the ska rhythm in the mid-1960s, into a style known as rocksteady. This emphasised the third beat of every bar with the ‘one-drop’ of a bass drum – creating a sound that allowed artists to be more soulful, more reflective; more sensuous, too, compared to the spasmodic sexuality of ska. It was a music which begged for harmony, as the sweet-soul groups of America (notably the Impressions) were reflected by the Maytals, the Wailers, the Paragons, the Melodians and their peers. Yet at the same time, it increasingly carried a message of civil rights also borrowed from America, preparing for the late 1960s transformation into the faster and often more militant groove of reggae.

  While Jamaica established its musical identity with ska, rocksteady and reggae, many black African musicians chose to retain their allegiance to American R&B. Afrobeat was the name given to the blend of highlife, soul and funk which dominated the West African club scene in the latter half of the 1960s, thanks to pioneers such as Geraldo Pino from Sierra Leone. Fela Kuti from Nigeria mirrored Pino’s example, until he experienced a musical revelation on a trip to Ghana: African musicians needed to make African music. But it was only when he visited New York in 1969, and was introduced to the writings of Malcolm X, that he felt able to step outside of the American tradition. ‘I said to myself, “How do Africans17 sing songs?’’’, he recalled. ‘They sing with chants.’ He channelled this awareness into the creation of ‘My Lady Frustration’, its James Brown structure overlaid with a defiantly African feel: ‘The whole club started jumping18 and everybody started dancing. I knew then I’d found the thing.’ Like Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley in Jamaica, he had hit upon a combination of dance music, cultural pride and political protest: music that would function on every level, reaching the head, the spirit and the body with different messages without ever losing touch with the eternal groove.

  We can make any location19 into a Discotheque in just three hours.

  Seeburg advert, February 1965

  [LSD] is turning discos20 into freakish and often nightmarish places of entertainment … The music is a complex of sounds, all seemingly magnified a hundred times and building up to a climax which some people find brain-shattering.

  Rave magazine on Hollywood discos, June 1966

  When Smokey Robinson and the Miracles hymned ‘a brand new place I’ve found’ as the hottest dance venue in town, it was no accident that their anthem was called ‘Going to a Go-Go’. That suffix – ‘a Go-Go’ – was first attached to a dance club in 1947, when Paul Pacine opened the Whisky à Gogo (which translates as ‘Whisky galore!’, borrowed from Compton Mackenzie’s novel) in Paris. It was an attempt to milk the success of another venue, established under Nazi occupation in 1941 with the prophetic name of La Discothèque (or ‘the record collection’). It played host to zazous, entertaining them in a secluded basement with the forbidden treasures of American swing.

  There were similar clubs across France after the war, many bearing the ‘a Gogo’ name, most famously in the Riviera resort of Juan-les-Pins. As other entrepreneurs imitated Pacine’s formula, he persuaded a Parisian scene-maker and chanteuse to front a club known as Chez Régine – which was frequented both by gamine actresses and ageing existentialists,fn2 and became the Parisian home of the twist. By 1960, establishments that we would recognise today as discotheques were established in the world’s major cities. Indeed, that year, a French emigrant opened an elite nightspot in New York entitled, simply, Le Club; with a door policy and prices designed to attract only Manhattan’s smartest set. The nod to French sophistication seemed obligatory: London’s first such venue, in Wardour Street, was called La Discotheque. But it wa
s the ‘à Gogo’ (or, outside France, ‘a-Go-Go’) brand that spread most quickly, to Chicago, with its Bistro-a-Go-Go and Buccaneer-a-Go-Go, Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, and thence around the world.

  The French connection added a certain mystique to the formula of playing records while people consumed alcohol and danced. In 1965, jukebox manufacturers Seeburg set out to franchise the French discotheque across America, offering to supply an ‘Instant Dance Club’ package, complete with decorative wall panels. The music would be supplied by ‘New Rec-O-Dance Albums’ containing ‘the most danceable tunes ever21 … to give the illusion of a live name band playing on the dance floor’. Some of these records featured anonymous covers of recent hits – by the Beatles, for example – alongside written-by-numbers dance material. Others, reflecting the expected age of the patrons, concentrated on familiar swing tunes, such as ‘Moonlight Serenade’ and ‘Little Brown Jug’. Each record provided seven or eight minutes of continuous music per side. Professional bandleaders were quick to copy this approach, with The Peter Duchin Discotheque Dance Party LP from January 1965 setting adult hits such as ‘Hello, Dolly!’ to ‘popular modern dances’.

  One of Seeburg’s chief rivals, Roure, countered the Instant Dance Club by hiring Killer Joe Piro, Atlantic recording artist and dance teacher to one of President Johnson’s daughters, as their discotheque guru. ‘Frug, Watusi, Mule22 – Suddenly Easy’, promised his advertisements. ‘Give Killer Joe Piro an evening, and he’ll make you a Discotheque Dance Sensation!’ Just as pre-war records had been classified by their dance step, so dancers were now informed that the Miracles’ ‘Going to a Go-Go’ demanded the jerk and the Beatles’ ‘We Can Work it Out’ the slop. The record business continued to turn out new dance crazes by the week. Chubby Checker mimicked Freddie Garrity’s madcap stage movements with ‘Do the Freddie’, prompting Freddie & the Dreamers to reply with a song of the same name, which topped the US charts: this was the age of ‘Freddie Beat’, Americans were assured. Brazil was anxious to export its latest invention, the jequibau. In Europe, the dance sensation was the letkiss, alias the jenka, to which half a dozen countries laid claim. Stig Anderson of Polar Music in Sweden (better known in the 1970s as the manager of Abba) said that only his artists’ records could provide the genuine jenka–letkiss sound, which was strikingly similar to the polka. France, ever willing to assert its individuality, responded with its own derivation, the monkiss. In West Germany, the prevailing dance of 1964 was still the twist. Here the government was so concerned about vandalism on the country’s railway service that it experimented with running ‘twist trains’ for young people, with a section of each coach prepared as a dance floor, and twist music piped through the carriages. Mexico invented a dance called the go-go, and visiting rock ’n’ rollers Bill Haley & His Comets were persuaded to concoct an album to file alongside their earlier Mexican twist records. An American band called the Warlocks tried without success to promote the temper tantrum: ‘Stamp your feet, and claw the air, temper tantrum, anywhere’, went the instructions, as if catering for all those who were overwhelmed by the rapid turnover in dance steps.

  On the Sunset Strip, spiritual home of Los Angeles teenagers, California’s hottest new bands inspired fans to frug or slop. The hippest joint on the Strip was Ciro’s, where (as Byrds press agent Derek Taylor declared) ‘There were queues up and down23 Sunset Strip of desperate teenagers, clamouring to get in. The dance floor was a madhouse. A hard core of Byrds followers – wayward painters, disinherited sons and heirs, bearded sculptors, misty-eyed nymphs and assorted oddballs – suddenly taught Hollywood to dance again.’ Billboard magazine noted approvingly that ‘The Byrds’ sound combines24 falsetto voicings with blaring guitar chords and a rock bottom drum beat, all applicable for dancing’; while Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was also, it claimed, ‘aimed at the teen market25 with dance beat to boot’. The Lovin’ Spoonful, a New York band, were soon rivalling the Byrds on the Strip, prompting industry insiders such as Phil Spector to boogaloo and jerk. Concerned that they might be missing out on a commercial bonanza, MGM Records ordered their rock band Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs to take dancing lessons, warning England’s Animals and Herman’s Hermits that they would be next in line.

  There were now dance halls on both American coasts which offered a steady diet of rock: the Happiness, the Cheetah, Ondine’s and Murray the K’s Place in New York; the Avalon and the Fillmore in San Francisco; more, soon, in every major city of the land. Some acts were so famous that they could fill theatres, arenas or even, after the Beatles appeared at New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, giant sports venues; the rest performed solely for dancers. Drugs were in the air, literally in the case of marijuana; and on small tabs of blotting paper, which could deliver a dose of a powerful hallucinogenic known as LSD. As the nascent hippie movement took flight, veteran beatniks and rock bands cohered in the West Coast’s nightclubs and ballrooms, while the music expanded to mirror the enhanced psychological state of the audience. From two-minute R&B covers, the San Francisco bands were suddenly stretching ‘Turn on Your Love Light’ or ‘Dancin’ in the Street’ out to ten, twelve minutes or more. This was a happening, indeed, the birth of an alternative culture, labelled with a word which came to encapsulate the acidic, liberated, chaotic vibe of the late 1960s: psychedelia.

  * * *

  fn1 Tex may have been inspired by Clarence Ashe’s 1964 side ‘Trouble I’ve Had’, a lengthy blues narration about bad luck and hard times.

  fn2 There were unexpected liaisons between the two categories. For example, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre penned songs for the actress and chanteuse Juliette Greco.

  1, 2

  ALTHOUGH THE BEATLES’ music grew more sophisticated during 1964, their lyrical approach barely altered. They offered, as a reviewer of their A Hard Day’s Night album complained, ‘a complete banality3 of sentiment. Throughout this set of lyrics, a two-syllable word is a rarity and any reference to real life is completely excluded.’ As another critic adjudged the entire pop oeuvre of 1964, ‘They all start with strumming4 guitars, and they all end with a fade-out. In between, people sing about love.’

  Popular music did not have to be that way. Issued alongside A Hard Day’s Night was an album by Bob Dylan, the title of which, The Times They Are A-Changin’, signalled his willingness to delve beneath the vicissitudes of teenage romance. It confronted racism, injustice, poverty, patriotism and hypocrisy, employing both political rhetoric and flamboyant lyricism to widen the vocabulary of the popular song. The pop paper Disc was entranced: Dylan, it proclaimed in July 1964, ‘could be the biggest thing yet5 in show biz’.

  The Beatles were admirers of Dylan and his work. ‘I like his whole attitude6,’ George Harrison explained in January 1965, ‘the way he dresses, the way he doesn’t give a damn. The way he sings discords and plays discords.’ John Lennon admitted that the title song for their movie was originally intended to sound like Dylan (by which he meant it was performed with acoustic guitars and harmonica), ‘but we Beatle-ified it7’.

  One fan declared that ‘The average pop-minded teenager8 hasn’t the patience to listen to or understand Dylan. Dylan has no beat or party appeal, and he is best appreciated in solitude.’ Yet in March, as the title song of The Times They Are A-Changin’ was issued as a UK single, tickets for his British concerts quickly sold out. By May, that single had been joined in the charts by the taboo-busting ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, and four of his LPs: the bard of folk solipsism and, so it seemed, radical activism was now a genuine pop star. So popular was Dylan’s material with other artists that his American record label launched an advertising campaign to insist: ‘No One Sings Dylan Like Dylan’. All of those parents who compared Dylan’s voice to (for example) ‘a dying sheep’ would not have disagreed.

  The songwriter was now moving so quickly that his record company could not keep pace. No sooner had they released his Bringing It All Back Home LP, with its imagistic ballads and rock ’n’ roll instrumenta
tion, than he was ready to surpass ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ with arguably the most influential record in rock history: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. ‘A six-minute single9? Why not!’, Columbia crowed, ‘When you have six minutes of Bob Dylan.’ Yet the song’s duration – it was the longest single since the ‘symphonic jazz’ suites of the 1920s – was the least of its innovations. There was the sound, a mesh of instruments slightly at odds with each other, boasting the consistency of molasses. The performance began with the whip-crack of a snare drum which immediately snagged the listener’s attention. Then the vocal: intolerably weary yet driven with a strange (chemical) life; simultaneously hectoring and exuberant, defeated and urgent. And the words: well, they were enigmatic, surreal, designed to scuff up a cloud of confusion, but there were hooks to grab hold of – references to school, and a chorus that called out to every alienated adolescent, everyone who understood more than their parents, everyone who wanted nothing more than to imagine themselves a Rolling Stone. Six minutes? Why not, when it felt like the baptism of a new world?