THE BIRTH of HARD ROCK 1964-9 Charles Shaar Murray Hard Rock

THE BIRTH OF HARD ROCK 1964-9 Charles Shaar Murray Hard rock was born in spaces too small to contain it, birthed and midwifed by youths simultaneously exhilarated by the prospect of emergent new freedoms and frustrated by the slow pace of their development, and delivered with equipment which had never been designed for the tasks to which it was now applied. Hard rock was the sound of systems under stress, of energies raging against confnement and constriction, of forces which could not be contained, merely harnessed. It was defned only in retrospect, because at the time of its inception it did not even recognise itself. The musicians who played the frst ‘hard rock’ and the audiences who crowded into the small clubs and ballrooms of early 1960s Britain to hear them, thought they were playing something else entirely. In other words, hard rock was – like rock and roll itself – a historical accident. It began as an earnest attempt by British kids in the 1960s, most of whom were born in the 1940s and raised and acculturated in the 1950s, to play American music, drawing on blues, soul, R&B, jazz and frst-generation rock, but forced to reinvent both the music, and its world, in their own image, resulting in something entirely new. However, hard rock was neither an only child, nor born fully formed. It shared its playpen, and many of its toys, with siblings (some named at the time and others only in retrospect) like R&B, psychedelia, progressive rock, art-rock and folk-rock, and it emerged only gradually from the intoxicating stew of myriad infuences that formed the musical equivalent of primordial soup in the uniquely turbulent years of the second (technicolour!) half of the 1960s. The heyday of frst-generation hard rock began in the autumn of 1964 with the release of its defning single: You Really Got Me by The Kinks. It was reinforced a few months later with the arrival of The Who’s debut single, I Can’t Explain, which was directly inspired by You Really Got Me’s central innovation: an angular, nagging, driving, endlessly repeated riff played in ‘power chords’ (made up entirely of the root note and its ffth) performed on a savagely, snarlingly overdriven electric guitar. Five years later, the advent of heavy metal, signalled by the release of the frst Black Sabbath album, and punk’s frst gleaming in the form of the debut album by The Stooges, made the hard rock of The Kinks, The Who and their successors seem almost mainstream and genteel by comparison. The Kinks – from Muswell Hill in North London – were one of dozens, if not hundreds, of small-time early-’60s bands infatuated with the blues who emerged in the wake of The Rolling Stones, the frst to attain national prominence and signpost an alternative to the Liverpool ‘Merseybeat’ bands following in the slipstream of The Beatles’ transformation of British pop. The Northern bands’ tradition, exemplifed by The Beatles, The Searchers and, from Manchester, The Hollies suckled thirstily from both rockabilly (and other classic early rockers like Little Richard, The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry) and Motown (not to mention Brill Building/girl-group pop) and specialised in clean, precise vocal harmonies over tight, neat but nevertheless driving guitar-based instrumental backdrops. The blues-oriented bands (mostly from Southern England, notwithstanding the excellence and popularity of The Animals from Newcastle and The Spencer Davis Group – starring infant prodigy Stevie Winwood – from Birmingham) were more likely to place their emphasis on a single lead voice and/or a spectacular lead guitarist. They classifed their music as ‘R&B’ (rhythm and blues), sharing the Merseybeaters’ adoration of Chuck Berry but, initially, focussed primarily on urbanised Mississippi blues (lionising Chicago-based stars like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley, and Detroit’s John Lee Hooker) and the proto-soul of Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. The R&B scene based itself in a club circuit inherited from the jazz world, and the bands were crewed by an assortment of musicians from a variety of scenes: refugees from rock, pop, jazz and even folk rubbed shoulders with the hardcore bluesers, with R&B as the lingua franca spoken in common by the various tribes. It is, somehow, splendidly appropriate that on the very day when the frst classic hard rock single ofcially reached the Number One spot in the UK pop charts, the group who’d made it were playing a show, booked long previously, at one of London’s premier jazz clubs. The queue to see The Kinks play the tiny 100 Club, in London’s West End, stretched a full couple of blocks down Oxford Street. The common ground shared by the Merseybeaters and the R&B groups was ’50s rock in general and Chuck Berry in particular, whose songs were recorded by both Beatles and Stones as well as by The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Animals, The Pretty Things and a multitude more. However, The Animals – like Manfred Mann, another blues-based band of the era who successfully straddled the pop/R&B borderline – favoured the organ, rather than the guitar, as their primary instrumental soloing voice. The hard rock strain which emerged from UK R&B celebrated the absolute primacy of the guitar. Specifcally: the guitar RIFF. Why it was the British blues-based bands who ended up blazing this particular path, rather than their white American contemporaries, is relatively straightforward. First of all, white blues wannabes in the US, particularly those fortunate enough to be located in — say — Chicago, Memphis or Texas, were able to gain access to, and in some cases – like Paul Butterfeld and Mike Bloomfeld in Chicago or Johnny Winter in Texas – be actually mentored by, their authentic blues heroes. The result was that their imitations of the music of Muddy Waters or Little Walter sounded far more like the ‘real thing’ than did the work of The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things or The Kinks. Physically separated from their source material by thousands of miles of land and water, and culturally distanced by nationality and history as well as by race, the British bands were forced to replace what they didn’t know or couldn’t understand with what they were able to invent. The resulting creative misunderstandings, based around lyrics they could only partially decipher, a social milieu then but scantily documented and a few album liner notes flled with hyperbole and misinformation – plus the occasional meeting with visiting blues stars – resulted in the invention of something entirely new. The second major factor differentiating the British and American white blues boys was that the British bands, either signed in the wake of the Stones’ breakthrough to the major UK record labels like EMI, Decca, Philips-Fontana or Pye, or else trying to achieve that enviable status, were expected to function as pop groups and create potential hit singles. By contrast, white American blues bands, like Paul Butterfeld’s or Charlie Musselwhite’s, recorded for folk-based labels like Elektra or Vanguard, for whom the prospect of hit singles was barely on the radar. In other words, the Brit bands needed driving, catchy songs , with ear-grabbing vocal or instrumental hooks (preferably both), and unusual sounds to make their records stand out from everybody else’s on the radio. Some they either bought in or adapted from classic repertoires – the Stones were late starters as composers and enjoyed their frst few hits by adapting The Beatles’ I Wanna Be Your Man into the style of Elmore James and Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away into the style of Bo Diddley, not to mention borrowing It’s All Over Now from Bobby Womack’s group The Valentinos; The Yardbirds’ frst couple of real hits came off-the-peg from songwriter Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc – but the defning pioneer hard rock bands, The Kinks and The Who, rolled their own pretty much from the start. Each of those bands contained one of the greatest songwriters of their era: The Kinks had Ray Davies at their creative helm and The Who had Pete Townshend. If the British hard rock of the mid-1960s had a single midwife, it would be an expatriate American record producer named Shel Talmy (b 1941), the most celebrated aspect of whose varied career being that he recorded The Kinks, The Who and the Great Lost Band who should have completed hard rock’s founding Holy Trinity but never achieved the success and impact they deserved: The Creation. Those early recordings form the basis for much of the hard rock which followed. “I think it was the putting [of World War II] behind everybody,” Talmy later opined. “Rationing had fnally gone, you had a group of disenchanted and, in their opinion, disenfranchised kids aged 14, 15, 16 and listening to American music. Because English music sucked. And the whole thing just exploded.” Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me on the piano in the front room of the Davies family home, stabbing out that insistent two-chord riff in two-fnger chords. His guitarist brother Dave, at 17 fve years Ray’s junior, transferred the riff to guitar, playing it through a tiny, battered 5-watt amp, its natural propensity for distortion when cranked to the max exaggerated by the holes Dave had poked into the speaker’s cone with a knitting needle. The brothers’ band, The Kinks, were signed to Pye Records, but their frst two singles – one a cover of Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally, the other an embryonic Ray Davies composition – had both dismally fopped, so if they stood any chance of holding on to their record deal, their third single absolutely had to be a hit.

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