Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Presumably reckoning that this approach would not inspire impressionable teens, the United Presbyterian Church’s Division of Mass Media (American religious organisations are nothing if not prepared) set out in late 1967 to create a more subtle path to the Gospel. They presented two songwriters with a theological treatise, and asked them to convert it into pop. One of them was Dickie Goodman, who with his friend Bill Buchanan had invented a surreal form of 1950s comedy record, the ‘cut-in’, whereby short clips from current hit singles were used to tell a humorous story.fn3 Goodman returned with two suitably spiritual but doctrinally vague pop songs, which were duly recorded by a group called the Astrakan Sleeve, without any ensuing rush of teenagers to Presbyterian services.

  Slowly, the influence of modern pop music began to seep into the Christian churches. Evangelical groups were the most willing to welcome guitars and drums into their Communion, but eventually all but the highest of congregations would become acclimatised to seeing a rock band at the head of the service, setting the Gospel to a gentle Beatles beat. More ambitious composers elected to tackle the Christian Mass, a traditional form of worship which had inspired some of the greatest composers of the millennium. Duke Ellington and Vince Guaraldi wrote gospel suites for performance at the newly opened Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Lalo Schifrin composed Jazz Suite on the Mass Text in 1967. Most striking of all these ventures was Mass in F Minor by the Electric Prunes, in which arranger/composer David Axelrod borrowed the name of a successful garage-punk band to create a rock setting of the liturgy. ‘I’ve played dubs of this Mass9 for kids who had said that if the Mass sounded like this, they would attend church every Sunday’, Axelrod claimed.

  Yet the kids who were most fervent about their love of the Lord in the latter half of the 1960s were not attending a conventional church. The Jesus Movement (or Jesus People Movement) was an offshoot of the hippie counter-culture which arose, inevitably, in California, and spread rapidly around the Western world. It emphasised Christ the rebel and Christ the bringer of love; no hint here of Old Testament anger and retribution. Something of the movement’s spirit was caught, ironically, in the joyous chorales of the Broadway musical Hair, though it treated Christianity as a fit object for satire.

  The burgeoning Jesus People were served by coffee houses and concerts, and ultimately – at Explo ’72, in Detroit – by a festival equivalent to the great gatherings of hippie rock. Approximately 200,000 fans assembled there to witness the power of a genre known variously as Jesus rock, Jesus music or Christian rock. Its creation could be traced back to a New York DJ named Scott Ross, who around 1967 dared to add contemporary rock and pop flavours to the Christian Broadcasting Network. There were misgivings from the elders about the possible repercussions of introducing these devilish rhythms to innocent youth. As Christian rock historian John J. Thompson noted, evangelists such as Bill Gothard ‘actually preached that the syncopated10 4/4 beat of rock and roll collided with the natural rhythm of the human heart and would therefore make listeners sick … Minor keys, loud drums and non-specific lyrics were strictly of the evil one.’

  Those 1950s rock ’n’ rollers who had been raised as Southern Baptists had already proved that it was possible for avowed Christians to be acclaimed as rock stars (although it helped if they were backsliders as flagrant as Jerry Lee Lewis). To avoid the taint of godliness which had afflicted the likes of Pat Boone and Cliff Richard in the 1960s, however, the Jesus People created an alternative rock culture: a web of independent labels and a circuit of venues that existed not only outside the rock mainstream, but unnoticed by its mass media.

  At the core of this movement, as musician, songwriter and label boss, was the messianic figure of Larry Norman. Briefly a pop star in mid-1960s America with his band People (their name a reclaiming of humanity from the Animals, Byrds and Turtles), Norman launched his solo career in 1969 with the unashamedly religious Upon This Rock. It showcased him as a talent comparable to Leon Russell, albeit with a maverick streak more reminiscent of David Ackles at his most eclectic (as on ‘The Last Supper’). By the early 1970s, Norman was issuing albums as coherent and contemporary as I Wish We’d All Been Ready and So Long Ago the Garden, which would have fitted on to FM radio alongside Carole King and Neil Young. Both highlighted Norman’s occasionally Dylanesque writing style, heard at its most dramatic on ‘Nightmare #71’.

  Norman proceeded to sign many of America’s most talented Christian performers, such as Randy Stonehill and the band Daniel Amos, to his Solid Rock label, eventually antagonising almost all of them with business practices that they believed were underhand. His own career was dogged by illness (he claimed to have suffered brain damage in an air crash) and controversy, although not before he had issued dozens of albums and performed in both arenas and small church halls around the world. He was effectively a superstar in a milieu that survived the dissipation of the Jesus People Movement, and which existed in invisible parallel to commercial rock. Artists such as Love Song and Randy Matthews secured vast followings without ever coming to the attention of the Billboard charts or Rolling Stone magazine.

  The mainstream rock exposure that might have been theirs went instead to projects such as George Harrison’s harshly moralistic (albeit inspiringly tuneful) Living in the Material World, and a concept album by a group of pop idols in their teens and early 20s. This was The Plan, inspired by the Mormon faith shared by the Osmonds. Its overtly religious design – and the ambiguous relationship between orthodox Christianity and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – scared away many of their fans, particularly in America. But in Britain, where their following was at its peak, it became their best-selling record, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of homes were treated to a series of songs about the Osmonds’ desire to follow the road to exaltation. By comparison, Larry Norman’s albums exploring the trials of evangelical Christianity sounded positively conventional.

  A racy, rollicking11, black-hippie message to the Establishment.

  Ebony magazine on Hair, 1970

  It has nothing to do with Black people12.

  Black activist and author Amiri Baraka on Hair, 1970

  Rock was seeking ever more grandiose canvases for its creations. Broadway desperately required a connection with the modern world. The inevitable result was Hair, ‘a tribal rock musical’ which premiered off-Broadway in 1967 as a folk-rock piece and then graduated to the Great White Way as a hippie-rock-soul-gospel contrivance. With its drug references, outlandish costumes and climactic nude scene, Hair attracted an enormous audience, although not amongst the communities it pretended to portray.

  While the Beatles’ plans to create the first Merseybeat musical had been thwarted by Lionel Bart, other groups pursued the dream of a multi-segmented, coherent, long-form song suite: the elusive ‘rock opera’. The Who’s Pete Townshend, an eternal self-educator, engineered arguably its most convincing sighting with ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’, a nine-minute tale of adultery and repentance which borrowed the Wagnerian model of repeated motifs as it playfully satirised operatic musical conventions. Not satisfied with a perfect miniature, he set out on an altogether more expansive, and less cohesive, epic: Tommy.fn4 In time, this became a double album, a stage show, a gloriously grotesque Ken Russell movie (perhaps the most perfect rock film of all time, both celebrating and ridiculing the genre’s messianic myths) and then a Broadway musical again. By its final incarnation, Tommy had been neutered, its ending changed, any cultural significance long since erased. After Tommy, there were rock musicals galore, and a wildly successful rock band (Queen) who leant heavily on the conceptual and aesthetic traditions of opera. But for a fully-fledged stage opera by a major figure working, at least ostensibly, in the field of rock, the world had to wait for Rufus Wainwright’s Verdi-inspired Prima Donna, premiered in 2009.

  Even if opera proved too complex or alienating a form to be translated into rock, the late 1960s introduced a generation of classically trained musicians who shared the
ambition of turning rock into ‘serious’ music. There had been jazz suites as early as the 1920s, and Duke Ellington wrote pieces on an epic scale throughout his long career. But in 1968, rock embarked on a strand of monumental composition which would (depending on one’s viewpoint) enrich or deface its catalogue over the next decade. Stan Kenton had utilised the term ‘progressive jazz’ to describe his own voyages into the musical unknown. By the end of the decade, the term ‘progressive rock’ was being bandied around the music industry. It referred initially to a new American radio format, which concentrated on playing material from outside the Top 40, especially album tracks. This had been prompted not by commercial demand but by a ruling from the Federal Communications Commission. In an effort to provide more diversified listening for the public, the FCC insisted that by January 1967 any station broadcasting to a population of more than 100,000 had to offer ‘split’ programming: different shows, in other words, on its AM and FM wavebands. Most radios could only pick up AM stations, and so they continued to offer the most commercial programmes (principally the Top 40 format). On FM stations such as WOR in New York and KMPX in San Francisco, however, far-sighted programme directors allowed disc jockeys to play material that would never have been aired on the Top 40.

  The first beneficiaries of ‘progressive rock’ radio included Big Brother & the Holding Company, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly and Ten Years After, who were (said a startled analyst) ‘even becoming superstars13 without the aid of the Top 40 stations’. Programme directors discovered that listeners did not expect, or even desire, constant rotation of the week’s hit singles. Once they had tuned into a ‘progressive’ station, they would stay there, the only requirement being that the music was tailored exactly to the audience: late teens and early 20s, for the most part, predominantly male, with a high proportion of students. For the first time, rock radio had the space in which to broadcast songs that stepped way beyond the three-minute limit of the Top 40.

  ‘Progressive’ stations could now broadcast entire albums or such epic compositions as Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ or Procol Harum’s ‘In Held Twas In I’ (seventeen minutes apiece). The archetype was the Moody Blues’ 1967 album, Days of Future Passed, a song cycle devoted to what the Beatles called ‘A Day in the Life’. It moved from ‘The Day Begins’ to ‘Night’ (the latter containing the global hit single ‘Nights in White Satin’). Besides zealous employment of the Mellotron, the album incorporated the tonal range of the London Festival Orchestra.

  Here, then, were most of the ingredients required to produce ‘progressive rock’: composition on a grand scale, portentous lyrical content, orchestral instrumentation and pretensions towards ‘serious’ music (debate still continues as to whether the Moody Blues had, or had not, originally been commissioned to create a rock equivalent to Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony). If this album was more ‘symphonic’ than ‘operatic’, its classical influences and air of self-improvement struck a chord with an educated young audience who would, a decade earlier, have shunned rock ’n’ roll in favour of jazz or folk. Close behind were the likes of Pink Floyd (Saucerful of Secrets) and the Nice (Ars longa vita brevis), dedicated in their very different ways to extending the outer limits of what rock could achieve on record. In America, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention blended Lenny Bruce-inspired satire, 1950s rock stylings and experimental classical music into an inimitable series of pop art collages – hooligans to the Moody Blues’ choirboys.

  The musician who epitomised the philosophy of the new genre was the Nice’s keyboard player, Keith Emerson. It was he who paired melodies by Dave Brubeck and Bach on 1967’s ‘Rondo’, and who oversaw the side-long title track of Ars longa vita brevis, again building upon a Bach motif. Emerson’s classical training, combined with an apprenticeship in the mid-1960s R&B group the VIPs, placed him perfectly to exploit the most theatrical elements of both traditions. When he formed the trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer in 1970, he had nothing less than full-blooded classical composition in his sights: having rearranged Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite for rock band, he eventually felt able to attempt his own piano concerto.

  By virtue of its scope and ambition, progressive rock felt like an elite brand. It offered its fan base the chance to feel superior to those who continued to rely on conventional rock songs or (worse still) the Top 40 pop charts. As such, it was immediately open to criticism from those who felt that its very seriousness robbed rock of its identity. Just as the FM/AM split had emphasised the growing divide between the rock and pop markets, now rock itself was fragmenting into subgenres. It was quite possible, in 1967, for someone who identified themselves as a rock fan to enjoy everything marketed under that banner, even allowing for their specific personal tastes. By 1970, there was little crossover between (for example) those listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. They represented two different aesthetics, two methods of touching and energising their audience, each resolutely convinced that its own solution rendered all alternatives superfluous.

  Nor were these the only themes on offer. The late 1960s also marked a renaissance of the British blues band, building on the free-form improvisation of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Both outfits utilised the simplest of rock instrumentation on stage – the power trio of guitar, bass, drums – but were still able to conjure up wall-bending levels of sound. Techniques of amplification had advanced to the point where the average band in a church hall was using more powerful equipment than had been available two years earlier to the Beatles in vast arenas. Volume now constituted an extra instrument: a tool of exhilaration and social manipulation, deafening and thrilling the audience in equal measure.

  For a year, perhaps a little longer, all of these elements could be condensed and compressed into music that would still, just, fit on to singles as well as albums. Two epics from 1968 represented the outer limits of pop’s experiments with time. 21-year-old songwriter and arranger Jimmy Webb sketched out a twenty-minute rock cantata, and then squeezed its elements into almost eight minutes of orchestral fireworks, over which actor and non-singer Richard Harris delivered a mock-poetic tale of romantic disillusionment. ‘MacArthur Park’ scaled new heights of pop grandiosity: simultaneously magnificent and ridiculous, it inspired the Beatles to create something equally epic. ‘Hey Jude’ launched the recording arm of the group’s gargantuan business empire, Apple Corps, a doomed attempt to merge counter-culture values with the capitalist profit motive. If any record could have made it work, it was this one, supported as it was by John Lennon’s politically wary, sonically abrasive ‘Revolution’. It was Paul McCartney who wrote ‘Hey Jude’, a reflective love song which expanded into the most populist of choruses, repeating a simple refrain with such exhilaration that its wordless content came to seem profound, a song of joy for an entire generation. The influence of these two production fiestas was so potent that even pre-Beatles stars such as Roy Orbison (‘Southbound Jericho Parkway’) were tempted to try their hand at something equally grandiose. Patience with such endeavours was wearing thin, however, as rock culture took a decisive turn towards more direct emotional stimuli.

  If Presley were on the next plane14 over here, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats Domino were following on another, then we could blitzkrieg England with the old-style rock. We could make it last for five years.

  Bill Haley in London, 1968

  Don’t be surprised if in 197815 your kids are wearing little leather jackets, raiding your record collection in the attic and looning to Elvis!

  Rave magazine, May 1968

  Spring 1968: psychedelic optimism was giving way to student unrest and street demonstrations, and Britain chose to indulge itself in a return to 1950s rock ’n’ roll. Once again, there were Teddy boys jostling outside theatres; the Top 40 included Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran; and stores were flooded with reissues and repackages and remakes of those oldies but goodies from 1958. ‘If you are a groover16 and all you�
��ve got is these ballads in the charts,’ Mick Jagger said, ‘I can understand you wanting to go back to rock ’n’ roll, but this is just living in the past.’ No sooner had the class of 1963 purged their live sets of the R&B and rock anthems on which they’d been raised than they were back, their vintage swing tossed aside in favour of power chords and distortion (the Who’s ‘Summertime Blues’, Jeff Beck’s ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’). The Beatles (‘Lady Madonna’) and the Move (‘Fire Brigade’) found ways to acknowledge the past without reliving it. Soon Elvis Presley would record his first television special in eight years, slimmed and sideburned, clad in biker’s black leather like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Sha Na Na, young men who resembled greased-up JDs from a lost 1958 rock ’n’ roll exploitation movie, revived doo-wop as performance art, and were received so well at underground rock venues that they ended up high on the Woodstock Festival bill.

  Few of the rock fans of 1968 wanted to return to the era of Eisenhower and Macmillan, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, but there was an apparent simplicity to that time which seemed strangely appealing amidst anti-Vietnam marches, classically inspired song suites and the shadow of economic decline. By rekindling the spirit of 1958, it seemed possible to rewrite the history of the previous decade, omitting all the distractions and missteps that had led the music astray.

  It was as if the contemporary world was a conundrum, to which only the past held the key; especially if it revealed roots that were hidden by the extravagant blooms of the flower-power era. In the 1950s, the British and Irish folk traditions had been revered as a touchstone of working-class authenticity, and then subsumed into the amorphous body of blues, folk and country songs raided by the skiffle boom. Over the intervening decade, several hundred folk clubs had been founded across the UK – some rigorously traditional in their outlook, some prepared to accept contemporary songwriters (as long as they avoided electric instruments). From this scene came some of the most diverse talents of the 1960s and beyond: Donovan, Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, and many more. Inevitably, some of them were drawn towards rock and pop. Donovan pioneered a peculiarly British brand of psychedelic whimsy, while Jansch steered a unique course between blues, jazz, folk and rock, both as a soloist and as a leading force in the folk ‘supergroup’, Pentangle. This was perhaps a more ‘authentic’ approach than that adopted by traditional singers who inherited their nation’s ‘pure’ folk heritage from records, songbooks and BBC radio shows – artificially preserving songs which would otherwise have met a natural death. Ultimately, all of these different approaches cohered uneasily in a brief but joyous explosion of British folk rock, in which Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Shirley & Dolly Collins and others sampled everything from medieval plainsong to modern American ballads, in their quest to keep the traditions of the British Isles alive.