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Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

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Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hamilton, John C. 2013. Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125122 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination A dissertation presented by Jack Hamilton to The Committee on Higher Degrees in American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2013 © 2013 Jack Hamilton All rights reserved. Professor Werner Sollors Jack Hamilton Professor Carol J. Oja Rubber Souls: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination Abstract This dissertation explores the interplay of popular music and racial thought in the 1960s, and asks how, when, and why rock and roll music “became white.” By Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970 the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was considered literally remarkable in ways it had not been for Chuck Berry only ten years earlier: employing an interdisciplinary combination of archival research, musical analysis, and critical race theory, this project explains how this happened, and in doing so tells two stories simultaneously. The first is of audience and discourse, and the processes through which a music born of interracialism came to understand whiteness as its most basic stakes of authenticity. This is a story of the deeply ideological underpinnings of genre formation, and the ways that the visual imagination of race is strangely and powerfully elided with the audible imagination of sound. The second story is of music’s own resistance to such elisions, and examines a transatlantic community of artists including Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and others to fashion an interracial counter-history of Sixties music, one that rejects hermetic ideals of racial authenticity while revealing the pernicious effects of these ideologies on musical discourse. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a new way into the topic of race and popular music— long dominated by essentialist claims of cultural ownership on one hand, and a romantic “colorblindness” on the other—by demonstrating that racial thought is both a producer and product of expressive culture. Rarely has this been truer than in the 1960s, when both popular music and racial ideology underwent explosive transformations that were never entirely separate from each other. Rock and roll music, I argue, did not become white as a iii result of the music that people made, but rather as a result of discursive forces that surrounded, celebrated, and too often drowned out the music that people heard. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 Margo Jefferson’s Nightmare Chapter One 26 Darkness at the Break of Noon: Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, and the Birth of Sixties Music Chapter Two 89 The White Atlantic: Musical and Cultural Origins of the British Invasion Chapter Three 132 “Friends Across the Sea”: Motown, the Beatles, and Sites and Sounds of Crossover Chapter Four 182 Being Good Isn’t Always Easy: Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul Chapter Five 231 Just Around Midnight: Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the End of Sixties Music Conclusion 292 Bibliography and Discography 296 v Acknowledgments For starters it only seems appropriate to thank my parents, who’ve given me an excess of love and support and have always mustered an enthusiastic curiosity for my interests, even when those interests have led me in unexpected directions. I’d also like to thank my brother, Rob, a great friend and my immediate family member most likely to actually enjoy reading this. I’ve been blessed with a truly amazing advisory committee. Werner Sollors and Carol Oja have both been with this project before I even knew it existed. The countless hours I’ve enjoyed in their classrooms, offices, homes, and elsewhere make me so glad that they took me under their wings, and I can’t imagine better teachers, readers, and role models. Werner, I still owe you a new tree for your backyard. Ingrid Monson has been responsible for some of my best memories of graduate school, in the classroom and out, and is always an inspiration. Eric Lott has been unreasonably generous with many things, most of all a lightning-in-a-bottle friendship that’s one of the best aspects of my professional life. Arthur Patton-Hock and Christine McFadden have been peerless administrators, in History of American Civilization and finally American Studies; none of this would have been possible without either of them. I am also profoundly indebted to the wonderful library staffs at Harvard (particularly Widener Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library), the British Library at St. Pancras and Colindale, New York University, the University of Southern California, and Berklee College of Music. Other friends and scholars were extraordinarily generous in providing feedback and insight into this project as it progressed, and even if they are not technically “advisors” their intellectual influence is all over these pages. Glenda Carpio, Daphne Brooks, Josh Kun, and Hua Hsu all read significant portions of this and provided invaluable suggestions, vi commentary, and professional advice. Greil Marcus’ ongoing support and encouragement has been the most humbling endorsement I could imagine. Erich Nunn, Eric Weisbard, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Scott DeVeaux, Carlo Rotella, Phil Deloria, and Barry Shank have all been wonderful interlocutors at conferences, over email, and other virtual and physical locations. Tommie Shelby, Andy Jewett and Nancy Cott all played sizable roles in the beginnings of this project, even if none of us knew it at the time. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful community of graduate student colleagues, both at Harvard and across other institutions. Glenda Goodman, Mike Heller, Andrea Bohlman, Danny Mekonnen, Drew Massey, Ryan Banagale, Meredith Schweig, Sheryl Kaskowitz, William Bares, Eitan Kensky, Liz Maynes, Kathryn Roberts, Alex Black, Alex Corey, and Erica Fretwell—thanks for your brains, friendship, and everything else. And one of the great privileges of returning to the Boston area for graduate school is the number of friends from “home” who have helped keep these past years far more sane than they could have been. Paul Venuti, Peter Gelling, Retno Prawati, Matt and Leah Wiacek, David Moore and Chrissy O’Brien, Oliver Sellers-Garcia, Andrew and Melissa DuBeau, Nate Jaffee: even if you never read this, I couldn’t have done it without you. Derek Etkin, Becca Bailey and Bianca Etkin are like a second family to me. Gina Welch has become a home away from home, and I am grateful for her. I’ve also spent a large portion of my life as a working musician, and those experiences have shaped my work here as much any library or classroom. No two people have had more impact on how I think about music as a living act—which, lest anyone forget, is always what it is—than Mike Welch and Alec Derian. I owe a great debt to Jan Welch and the chance she took on me long ago. Warren Grant, Brad Hallen, Abbie Barrett, Josh vii Kiggans, Steve Levy, and Mike Oram are just a few others I’ve had the great privilege to perform with regularly over the years. The friendships I’ve made in and around Harvard’s American Studies program are some of the best I could have ever asked for. Scott Poulson-Bryant has been an amazing friend, co-conspirator, and lunch companion. Katherine Stevens, Eli Cook, Hillary Hochman, David Kim, and Megan Greenwell are among the finest people in the world who have never seen a documentary about Phil Spector. Brian, Laura, and Tippy McCammack have offered their home, their television, and the contents of their refrigerator to me on many an occasion; Buddy McCammack is dearly missed. Pete L’Official and Nick Donofrio are among the finest sportsmen-slash-multimedia-correspondents I know, and the ways in which knowing George Blaustein has improved my life are too numerous to list here. Tim McGrath’s friendship and housemateship are truly without peer—give me a few more minutes to finish this up and we’ll go grab a burger. A lot of my friends have read a lot of this dissertation, but two in particular have read close to every word. Brian Hochman is the most encouraging reader I’ve ever known, and the only person who repeatedly asks to read my dissertation for his own enjoyment. This makes him an insane person and one of the best friends I can ever imagine. Maggie Gram has read and listened to me think through this for far too long, and still acts interested. She is, in the parlance of the times discussed ahead, outtasight, and I’m a better and smarter person every time we talk. Finally, in the middle of writing this dissertation I lost someone very close to me, in a sudden and senseless accident. No one in my life has had a bigger impact on the way I read, write, think, and laugh than Neil Chamberlain, and I miss him every day. I’d like to dedicate viii this dissertation to him, even if doing so feels redundant, since no small part of everything here is already his.
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