Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Noise was only one of hard rock’s attractions. Another was its attitude: unpretentious, unrelenting and powerful. This was an adolescent’s fantasy of adult masculinity, clad in denim or leather: the rock star as true representative of the people. A third was community: more, perhaps, than any other genre in the history of popular music, hard rock encouraged its audience to bond. They were the true believers in a world which denied their right to pleasure, and which denigrated the thing they loved. They were the provinces against London; the Midwest against Manhattan; the working class against the privileged middle; rawness against sophistication; reality against the illusions of politics or art. None of those dividing lines was watertight. One of the great joys of belonging was that nobody was excluded. Even women were welcome, if they donned denim and broadcast their allegiance with T-shirts or ballpoint-pen tattoos.

  No form of music has been so roundly lampooned by the media that were supposed to serve its audience. Led Zeppelin, for example, were ‘trash with a rock beat18’; they exhibited a ‘very insensitive grossness19’ (not just an insensitive grossness, but worse than that); they were, according to Pete Townshend, a ‘gross, disgusting object20’. And Zeppelin were one of the more critically acceptable purveyors of the genre, applauded at least for their control of dynamics and their scything sexuality. Of the other British bands who dominated adolescent male passion in the early 1970s, Deep Purple were criticised for their pretensions (they dared to work with a symphony orchestra) and over-reliance on technique; Black Sabbath for their simplicity and lack of technique; Uriah Heep for daring to exist at all. Hard rock, unless it was employed by the Rolling Stones or the Who, in which case there was assumed to be some intelligence at play, was nothing more than stupid music played by stupid (or exploitative) musicians for the benefit of very stupid people. No wonder its fans were so loyal: they were standing alongside their heroes in the path of a verbal hurricane.

  From the beginning, Black Sabbath (and their near namesakes, Black Widow) were under assault on another front: from those who took their satanic references seriously. Black Widow exploited their devilish image with ‘Come to the Sabbat’ (‘Satan’s there’, the chant continued). They were no more dangerous than the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, whose leader donned a flaming headpiece and screamed ‘I am the god of hellfire’. Mick Jagger could flirt with Beelzebub in the late 1960s because he was a master of pose: the Rolling Stones were so powerful an emblem of adolescent rebellion that fans almost wanted Jagger to be revealed as the Lord of Darkness, just to see the reaction of their parents. Black Sabbath, however, sounded as if they might be in touch with Satan, so despairing was Ozzy Osbourne’s howl, so incisive the guitar of Tony Iommi. ‘Tony came up with this riff21’, explained Osbourne of the song which gave the band its name. ‘I moaned a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome – the best thing we’d ever done by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the “Devil’s interval” or the “triton”. Apparently churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar.’ Despite that, Osbourne insisted: ‘I can honestly say22 that we never took the black-magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was.’ But as his bandmate Bill Ward revealed, ‘We’ve even had a few witches23 on the phone asking us to play at their Black Masses’, which was a testament to the power of their image. ‘I’m scared of them24’, admitted a 14-year-old American fan. ‘They’re evil and strange. I hope they sacrifice something tonight. A human sacrifice would be good.’ No wonder the band was banned from the Royal Albert Hall in 1971: ‘It is our policy to avoid25 the risk of possible inflammatory situations’, the management explained.

  In the mid-1960s, when the American music trade defined rock ’n’ roll as anything that teenagers enjoyed (which explains why Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ was chosen as the Best Rock & Roll Recording at the Grammy Awards of 1965), the term ‘hard rock’ referred specifically to the music of the late 1950s. The Beach Boys were said in 1967 to have ‘evolved from writing hard rock26 to writing songs that sound like psalms’. But the controlled exercise of noise by the likes of Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, and the introduction of effects pedals and supercharged amplification, which instantly quadrupled both the volume and sonic range available to a rock band, forced a redefinition. At the core of this brand of hard rock (and its close cousin, heavy metal) was the riff. Beethoven knew its power: why else would he begin his fifth symphony with a riff even more famous than the skeleton of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’? So did the maestros of the swing band, Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’ being the most obvious example. Like the chorus of a pop song, the riff compressed the whole of a musical experience into a few seconds: a signal as identifiable as a television theme tune or the cry of a bird of prey. It focused and magnified a band’s power, took control of the body, offered elation, catharsis, a crescendo of joy, as the head instinctively rocked forward with the beat – the headbanging of metal legend.

  Hard rock didn’t own the riff, as there were memorable motifs on thousands of records, from the thrilling descent at the start of the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ to its echo on Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’. The Rolling Stones were the masters of the riff as war cry: almost all of their greatest singles boasted one, from the two-chord prototype of ‘Not Fade Away’ to the totemic fanfare of ‘Brown Sugar’. But they were merely a conduit into the song, an amuse-oreille to announce its arrival. In hard rock, the riff could be the song.

  The combination of riff, volume, distortion and dynamics – the essentials of hard rock – was virtually complete on the Troggs’ 1966 hit ‘Wild Thing’, a successor to the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ as a song it was almost impossible to play badly. Blue Cheer’s 1968 revival of Eddie Cochran’s statement of teenage angst, ‘Summertime Blues’, fulfilled every requirement. It didn’t swing, it was drenched in fuzztone, and with its erratic sense of rhythm, it sounded as if a school garage band had inadvertently been let loose in a professional recording studio. ‘We had a place in forming27 that heavy-metal sound’, said Blue Cheer guitarist Dick Peterson modestly. ‘I’m not saying we knew what we were doing, ’cause we didn’t. All we knew was we wanted more power. And if that’s not a heavy-metal attitude, I don’t know what is.’fn2 Soon followed the culmination of American rock’s dance with death: Steppenwolf’s genre-defining ‘Born to Be Wild’. Here, for the first time in song, was a phrase coined to describe the firepower of military hardware, but applied to the ferocious growl of motorcycles: ‘heavy metal thunder’.

  A barrage of 1968 hit singles heralded an aesthetic change: Vanilla Fudge’s portentous mangling of the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’; Deep Purple’s ‘Hush’; Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Suzie-Q’, a hamfisted attempt to mimic the free-form jamming of the acid-rock bands; Iron Butterfly’s near-operatic ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’; perhaps, for its sonic thrust and reckless distortion alone, the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’.

  That was a prophetic title, even if the revolution was not one the Beatles would have recognised (though they anticipated it, purely for kicks, on ‘Helter Skelter’). By the end of 1969, Led Zeppelin were challenging the commercial supremacy of the Beatles, with a mangled edit of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ reaching into the US Top 10 while demonstrating their epic assemblage of hard-rock tricks – jet-plane guitar runs across the speakers, abrupt shifts of tone and volume, a voice teasing, pleading, wailing for sexual fulfilment, a drum solo, and a guitar solo with the jaw-shattering intensity of a dentist’s drill. And right behind them, hiding in plain sight, a power trio who were about to become America’s biggest rock band to date: the critically derided, defiantly unoriginal Grand Funk Railroad.

  American critic Richard Robinson co
uld smell profound change in the wind. ‘We’ve all gotten comfortable28 with a new music that is growing older by the minute’, he wrote in 1971. ‘We’ve all decided that rock and roll has gone through enough changes and we should settle back and relax. I say “all of us” have decided that. What I mean is all of us except the young people who like the new bands like Grand Funk and Black Sabbath. And I’d like to suggest that unless we want to wind up talking about the good old days … then we’d better reopen our minds and realise that once again there’s a new music happening across the land. A new music that hasn’t much to do with Sgt. Pepper, Simon & Garfunkel or CSNY.’

  Its audience was not just younger, but drawn to barbiturate pills and cheap wine, to numb the brain rather than propel it into different dimensions. ‘Now progressive music29 has grown its own teenybops’, contended Charles Shaar Murray. He added that ‘Grand Funk’s musical roots seem to stretch no further than 1967’, making them the first rock stars not to have a direct connection to the music of the mid-1950s. ‘Lowest common denominator30’ was about the kindest expression that Rolling Stone magazine could find to describe Grand Funk, pegging their audience as ‘young and not especially sophisticated’, while granting graciously that they ‘should be allowed to enjoy [themselves] without being tarred with a lot of undeserved labels’. Yet one label was well earned: GFR created the first anthem of America’s most powerful rock movement during the 1970s and 80s, the radio format known as AOR (or album-oriented rock). With 1970’s ‘Closer to Home’, Grand Funk concocted a song that was simultaneously rock and ballad. Adorned with vocal harmonies which dimly recalled the skintight arrangements of CSNY, sweetened with strings, and bearing a message so vague that listeners could fashion their own interpretations, ‘Closer to Home’ had an epic quality both rousing and strangely poignant. It hinted at loss while offering fans a place to belong, where they would not be pilloried for their musical choices. And it operated on a scale that could perhaps only be appreciated in a stadium – Shea Stadium, for example, which GFR had sold out more quickly than the Beatles. ‘The spirit of American punk31 rock certainly lives on in Grand Funk Railroad’, one critic wrote, in which case their success represented the ultimate triumph of the amateur – victorious even over the culture that gave them life. As Charles Shaar Murray concluded, admitting at the age of 20 that it might be time to pass on the torch: ‘Maybe anybody who cannot dig32 Grand Funk is too old for rock and roll.’

  GFR’s low standing among critics was rivalled only by Chicago, who dedicated an early album to ‘the Revolution’ but swiftly jettisoned their radical trimmings. By the time they issued a quadruple-album live set in 1971, their name was a synonym for soulless excess. Often described as a jazz-rock band because of their rousing brass section, they were accused by writer Bob Palmer of being a jazz band who couldn’t play jazz, a horn band who couldn’t play R&B. ‘Their roots seem to be planted33 firmly in AM radio’, he concluded: another band damned for their lack of connection to the appropriate elements of the past. But by condemning GFR and Chicago for their rootlessness, the critics were effectively refusing to recognise any heroes but their own. The rock bands of the new decade would create a fresh tradition, which no longer depended on the shared assumptions of their predecessors.

  * * *

  fn1 Somewhere there is a landfill site which contains reel-to-reel tape recordings of the 6-year-old author singing garbled versions of ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ and ‘Bits and Pieces’, two early 1964 hits which hooked my imagination with pinpoint accuracy. The creators of those records had probably imagined an audience that was a decade older, and female.

  fn2 A pause to remember one of the more unusual events from the rock underground: at London’s psychedelic Middle Earth club in October 1968, Blue Cheer were supported by a symphony orchestra performing pieces by Bach, Mozart and Stravinsky.

  1

  IT WAS A fact, said the minister of the Community Baptist Church in Aromas, California, that ‘95% of all illegitimate2 children nowadays are conceived following a rock concert’. Rock ‘caused crime, sexual promiscuity and destruction of the central nervous system’. Music therapist Adam Kuests, also from California, agreed. Rock, he claimed, was ‘more deadly than heroin3 … Rock is not a harmless pastime but a dangerous drug on which our children are hooked.’ Its consequences included hostility, fatigue, narcissism, panic, indigestion, high blood pressure and hypertension. Baptists in Aromas began to experience some of those symptoms themselves when they learned about the inherent evil of music. ‘To think it could cause your child4 to behave like a heathen, just strip off your clothes and do the sex act with a stranger’, an anguished mother exclaimed. Another said: ‘My children have these records, and I just didn’t know.’

  To these warnings could be added the words of the soon-to-be-disgraced vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew. Children were being ‘brainwashed’ into drug-taking, he alleged, by such pernicious songs as ‘White Rabbit’ (Jefferson Airplane), ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ (the Beatles), ‘Acid Queen’ (the Who), ‘Eight Miles High’ (the Byrds) and ‘Don’t Step on the Grass, Sam’ (Steppenwolf). He jolted American radio stations into action, and soon programme directors were drawing up their own lists of songs that might be suspect: ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and, inevitably, Brewer & Shipley’s gently satirical hippie anthem, ‘One Toke Over the Line’. In Britain, the BBC were no more rational. They elected to ban Mungo Jerry’s harmless ‘Lady Rose’ single until the group’s record company agreed to remove one of its additional tracks, a playful revamp of Lead Belly’s folk tune, ‘Take a Whiff on Me’. Meanwhile, the BBC happily played Tony Christie’s murder ballad, ‘I Did What I Did for Maria’. Violence was entertainment, it seemed; drugs a national threat. How long, people wondered, before radio would refuse to broadcast any song from an album which mentioned illegal drugs?

  All of these impulsive acts of censure and censorship signalled the alienation felt by many adults towards a rock culture that had moved beyond entertainment, into the realms of political comment and social misconduct. The parents of 1971’s teenagers had been born in the 1920s or 30s, raised during wartime and economic austerity, and often regarded hedonism and nonconformism as signs of rampant delinquency. Yet they could hardly complain that their more sedate tastes were being overlooked by the record industry. A wider range of music, past and present, was available now for sale than at any time in history.

  Those who had been raised on the big bands could watch the likes of Benny Goodman (then well into his 60s) lead his orchestra through his vintage repertoire. The Glenn Miller Orchestra survived, nearly thirty years after their chief’s disappearance. Paul Whiteman might have died in 1967, but there was a New Paul Whiteman Orchestra to keep his arrangements alive. The Pasadena Roof Orchestra (formed in 1969) ranged across the entire dance-band era, the jazz equivalent to the fashion for performing pre-1800 classical music on period instruments. Many of the stars of the vintage British music hall could be seen weekly on BBC TV’s The Good Old Days, while their American equivalents were the mainstays of the chat-show circuit.

  Bing Crosby was still recording, exploring at last the territory of the Beatles and Jimmy Webb. Frank Sinatra had already surveyed that terrain, retired because he knew his time had passed, and then returned when he discovered that his audience was clinging to the old songs. Basie, Ella and Ellington were still on the road – in Ellington’s case, composing on an epic scale until his death in 1974. Jazz was no longer a commercial force on record unless it was allied to rock instruments, but every era of its past was ripe for revival. Meanwhile, the easy-listening market was expanding with each improvement in hi-fi reproduction. Britain’s belated acceptance of stereophonic sound in 1969–70 sparked a marketing campaign hinged around the assumption that the core audience for stereo LPs was adult, and required nothing more strenuous from its listening than relaxation.

  The music industry struggle
d to comprehend that different sectors of its clientele might require individual attention. While rock culture was being served by an array of specialist journals, from Rolling Stone and Creem to Melody Maker and Sounds, and underground newspapers, more traditional media outlets vainly attempted to cater for everyone from pre-teens to pensioners. For example, a single issue of the New Musical Express from December 1970 contained album reviews, side by side, of Frank Sinatra with Count Basie; Yoko Ono’s fusion of rock, jazz and the avant-garde; actor Clive Dunn, aged 48, impersonating an elderly grandfather; variety drag artiste Danny La Rue; the Temptations, Motown’s kings of psychedelic soul; TV glove puppet Basil Brush; country star Waylon Jennings; pub pianist Mrs Mills; comedian Kenneth Williams; and the folk guitar wizard, Davy Graham. They were all pop: all equally entitled, in the pop universe, to the attention of journalists who would rather have been interviewing Led Zeppelin.fn1

  An equally diverse demographic was represented at concerts by the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister duo whose records blended the sexlessness of late 1950s teen pop with harmonies borrowed from the pre-Elvis era. Rock journalist Lester Bangs speculated that ‘this must have been a sort5 of diplomatic project in many homes: Mom and Pop would come and learn to Dig the Kids’ Music’. As keyboardist Richard Carpenter noted, ‘There had been no brother/sister6 act since Fred and Adele Astaire.’ He was alarmed to discover that photographers kept asking him to embrace his sister in publicity shots, while journalists sniggered about their relationship (and, on one notorious occasion, he was accused of incest in a live radio interview). His sister Karen’s voice was an enigma: pitch-perfect, an emotional blank canvas, so unwavering in its mellifluousness that it was almost eerily cold – or warm: it was hard to determine which. As the decade progressed, Karen grew thinner and more troubled, while maintaining a flawless showbiz persona. Their stage act was a bizarre collage of impulses: Karen donning a pair of false breasts for a Grease routine, before her brother interrupted their run of hits with Richard Addinsell’s mock-classical Warsaw Concerto – all things to everyone except themselves, until the last.