Popular Music and Instrument Technology in an Electronic Age, 1960-1969 Farley Miller Schulich School of Music McGill University, Montréal April 2018 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Ph.D. in Musicology © Farley Miller 2018 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................... iv Résumé ..................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ vi Introduction | Popular Music and Instrument Technology in an Electronic Age ............................................................................................................................ 1 0.1: Project Overview .................................................................................................................. 1 0.1.1: Going Electric ................................................................................................................ 6 0.1.2: Encountering and Categorizing Technology .................................................................. 9 0.2: Literature Review and Theoretical Concerns ..................................................................... 16 0.2.1: Writing About Music and Technology ........................................................................ 16 0.2.2: The Theory of Affordances .......................................................................................... 24 0.2.3: Assemblage Theory ...................................................................................................... 29 0.2.4: Actor-Network Theory ................................................................................................. 36 0.2.5: The Social Construction of Technology ...................................................................... 38 0.2.6: STS and Aesthetics ...................................................................................................... 44 0.2.7: A Note on Sources ....................................................................................................... 46 0.3: Chapter Outline .................................................................................................................. 50 0.3.1: Chapter One ................................................................................................................. 51 0.3.2: Chapter Two ................................................................................................................. 52 0.3.3: Chapter Three ............................................................................................................... 55 0.3.4: Chapter Four ................................................................................................................. 58 Chapter 1 | Plugging into the “Switched-On” Market ...................................... 62 1.1: Musical Merchandising Comes of Age .............................................................................. 63 1.2: Electronics Against Individuality ....................................................................................... 72 1.3: Selling High-Voltage Sounds ............................................................................................. 87 1.4: How Categories Structure Merchandising ........................................................................ 103 1.5: Musical Instruments and Lifestyle Marketing .................................................................. 110 1.6: Conclusion: Electrify Everything ..................................................................................... 127 Chapter 2 | “Amplified Ancients”: Fashioning new “old” sounds ................. 132 2.1: “Soundmania!” ................................................................................................................. 132 2.2: The “Olde Worlde” Meets the “New”: The harpsichord and its discourses .................... 139 2.2.1: “High” and “Low” ...................................................................................................... 140 2.2.1: “Sophistication” ......................................................................................................... 141 2.2.3: “String Sounds” .......................................................................................................... 142 2.2.4: The “Baroque” in Popular Music ............................................................................... 144 2.2.5: A Remedy for Modern Ills ......................................................................................... 148 2.2.6: The “Ironic” Harpsichord ........................................................................................... 151 2.2.7: “Acousticity” and the “Pastoral” ................................................................................ 154 2.3: “Should Be Eliminated Altogether”: The electric harpsichords ....................................... 155 2.3.1 The Baldwin Electric Harpsichord .............................................................................. 157 Table of Contents iii 2.3.2 The RMI Rock-Si-Chord ............................................................................................. 164 2.4: How to Make Your Guitar Sound Like a Sitar ................................................................. 170 2.5: “How About a Tune on the Old Sitar?”: England ............................................................ 172 2.6: “Pop Goes the (Electric) Sitar”: America ......................................................................... 187 2.7: Conclusion: In Search of “Harpsichord-” and “Sitar-ness” ............................................. 195 Chapter 3 | (Dis)honest Music: Authorship and authenticity between stage and studio ............................................................................................................. 205 3.1: Rock Authenticity ............................................................................................................. 212 3.1.1: Who Makes Music Matters ........................................................................................ 217 3.1.2: How Music is Made Matters ...................................................................................... 222 3.1.3: Popular Music and Collaborative Authorship ............................................................ 227 3.2: Authenticating Authorship in Live Performance ............................................................. 237 3.3: Jimi Hendrix and his “Organisation” ............................................................................... 253 3.4: (Dis)embodied Sound ....................................................................................................... 262 3.5: Conclusion: What is a (Rock) Author? ............................................................................ 275 Chapter 4 | High Tech/Low Tech: The synthesizer and “electronic music” in rock discourse ...................................................................................................... 278 4.1: “Electronic Music” or “Electronics in Music”? ............................................................... 281 4.2: Everybody’s Going to the Moog ...................................................................................... 293 4.3: The Musician as Tinker .................................................................................................... 298 4.3.1: Fifty Foot Hose .......................................................................................................... 301 4.3.2: Silver Apples .............................................................................................................. 305 4.4: The Lowest Tech: The 13th Floor Elevators and their “electric” jug .............................. 314 4.5: Conclusion: Relatively Electronic Music ......................................................................... 328 Afterword | Weird Musicology Online .............................................................. 330 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 340 Primary Sources ....................................................................................................................... 340 Secondary Sources ................................................................................................................... 349 Abstract This dissertation is a study of musical instruments in 1960s popular music organized around the theme of electrification. New electrical technologies for tone production, timbral modulation, and amplification prompted radical shifts in the instrumentation used in the popular music of this period, leading musicians to borrow instruments from other cultures, such as the harpsichord and sitar, and to engage novel technologies, including synthesizers and effect pedals. Nonetheless, electricity became a ubiquitous feature of popular music rather late relative to other domains, such as domestic appliances and transportation. The adoption of electrification, like any new technology, is based on a balance of both technical considerations and social contexts. Why did electricity come to feature prominently in the production of popular music when it did and in the ways that it did? My principal objective with this project, then, is