rock 'n' roll versus showbiz ("ain't no friend of mine")

 

This is a diagram I drew to help my students conceptualise the discursive space of popular music.

(Came up with this all by myself - only to find to my annoyance that Simon Frith developed a similar three-sided schemata in Sound Effects decades earlier! Instead of "showbiz", though, Simes uses the term "commercial". I prefer "showbiz" because of its flavorful connotations ( the Hollywood / Las Vegas / Broadway cluster... the area's self-reflexive tendencies: "there's no business like show business", "life is a cabaret" ).

When I say "discursive space", that's to make clear that I am not talking about the sound of music - genres, modes, styles - but about the ideas and rhetoric that circulate around the music. About how musicians explain the music to themselves and to others - what's it for, what's it's doing. Fans and critics (professional fans) are also in this business of explanation. The triangle space is not about musical practices per se but about the expectations that surround the music, in terms of impact or reception, the sphere of attitudes and values and assumptions. That said, there are structural differences in creative and business arrangements that loosely correspond to the sides - in the "entertainment" sector, for instance, you tend to get a separation between performer, songwriter, and producer / arranger. In pure folk, the "songwriter" is tradition itself, the historical community, as in "trad. arr" but then you start to get an art tinge creep in as the folky minstrels write their own material.

(It occurred to me later there could be a fourth side. See if you are as clever as some of my students and work out what it could be. There's actually several potential extra sides, although increasingly they start to leave behind "popular music").

Many artists are firmly and abidingly established on one side or other of this triangle. More interesting are the careers where the artist is located between one axis and another, or equidistant between all of them. The most interesting careers involve artists who travel on trajectories across the triangular space, starting on one side and ending up on the other - or zigzagging back and forth.

David Bowie is situated between Art and Showbiz but far from the Folk side. (Even when he briefly took on the mode of long-hair hippie minstrel with an acoustic guitar at the end of the '60s, he didn't have much truck with folk ideology - ideas like community, tradition, the message song. He was just looking for a circuit on which to succeed, going with the prevailing mode).

John Lennon's career jumps about all over the place - veers, doubles back, erases his own footsteps.

^^^^^^^^^

But what if there was a song right at the start of the rock and roll era that did the zig-zag thing? Where an oscillation between "folk" and "showbiz" was integral and constitutive?

Well, there's Elvis Presley's version of "Hound Dog", one of the string of #1 singles in 1956 that made him a worldwide superstar.

It had been a #1 R&B hit for Big Mama Thornton four years earlier, in 1952. But in a showbizzy wrinkle, this twelve-bar blues was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (separation of the roles of performer / writer / producer being a structural norm in entertainment music from musical theater to Motown to Nashville).  (The song is so identified with Leiber & Stoller that Hound Dog is the title of their joint autobiography). It's a stinging rebuke of a man who is a user and financial parasite, delivered with worldly raunch. 

Elvis first encountered the song in a different version and different context: Las Vegas, the citadel of showbiz. A popular lounge act called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys had worked up a tongue-in-cheek version that altered the lyrics to be less salty ("changing a racy song about a disappointing lover into a song that was literally about a dog"), while the rendition verged on blackface burlesque.  Presley and his band heard this rendering when the Bellboys performed it as part of their regular set as resident band in The Silver Queen Bar and Cocktail Lounge at The Sands Hotel and Casino.   Elvis himself was in town  as a performer at the Venus Room of the New Frontier Hotel and Casino, a third on the bill "extra added attraction" below the Freddy Martin Orchestra and comedian Shecky Greene.

The Presley version involved a re-rocking of this showbiz parody of blues and rock 'n' roll. The route to that involved a humiliating encounter with showbiz strictures. On July 1 1956, Presley and band appeared on the The Steve Allen Show. The host of this variety show despised rock 'n' roll and ensured that the performance was ridiculous. Elvis was forced to put on a tuxedo and sing "Hound Dog" to a basset hound wearing a top hat. Allen also presented Presley with a signed toilet paper roll, a corny and insulting joke on "rock 'n' roll."

The very next day Presley and band went into the recording studio, where his anger about the Steve Allen show fed into an aggressive performance from the singer, matched by Scotty Moore's guitar.  Musicologist Robert Fink asserts that this version of  "Hound Dog" is "notable for an unremitting level of what can only be called rock and roll dissonance: Elvis just shouts...  Scotty Moore's guitar is feral: playing rhythm he stays in the lowest register, slashing away at open fifths and hammering the strong beats with bent and distorted pitches; his repetitive breaks are stinging and even, when he begins one chorus in the wrong key, quite literally atonal ...  drummer D.J. Fontana just goes plumb crazy. Fontana's machine-gun drumming on this record has become deservedly famous: the only part of his kit consistently audible in the mix is the snare, played so loud and insistently that the RCA engineers just gave up and let his riffs distort into splatters of clipped noise. The overall effect could not be more different from the amused, relaxed contempt of Big Mama Thornton; it is reminiscent of nothing so much as late 1970s white punk rage – the Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Sex Pistols."

Can't quite hear the 'punk' myself, but then by the time I ever heard Elvis et al - this would be late '60s, early 70s -  it was already quaint oldies music even to my unschooled child's ears. Still, it's markedly rawer in the singing and playing and more forceful rhythmically than the Steve Allen Show performance, which feels toned down or cowed or some combo of both. 

Showbiz bites back: Frank Sinatra joined Senator George Smathers' campaign against "inferior music", specifically targeting "Hound Dog" with derisive praise ("a masterpiece"). Oscar Hammerstein II had "a particular loathing of 'Hound Dog'". In a newspaper interview,  crooner Perry Como declared: "when I hear 'Hound Dog' I have to vomit a little, but in 1975 it will probably be a slightly ancient classic."

Despite this, by 1958 "Hound Dog" had became one of only three singles to sell more than three million copies: the others being Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and Gene Autry's "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer".

And then showbiz of course eats Elvis entirely.  

Whereas his first Las Vegas 1956 booking got cut drastically short (down to just a week) owing to bad audience reactions, by 1959 he was booked for a four week, fifty-seven show engagement at the International Hotel, the largest showroom in the city, in the process breaking all existing attendance records for Las Vegas.  His first live album is Elvis in Person at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Steered by his manager to where the money is, the biggest audience  - the Showbiz side of the triangle - what follows is the endless sequence of movie musicals, the living-death of Las Vegas in the 1970s....

Famously, there is just one moment when the Pelvis recovers his virility and veers sharply back to the raw 'n ' real side of the triangle: the 1968 Comeback Special. Here's a medley that sandwiches "Hound Dog" between "Heartbreak Hotel"  and "All Shook Up"

  

Glam Rock Cops

 

More glam rock cops - they appear first at 2.41

The Bölan beat

 

Bolan - or Bölan  - reviewing the pop singles for The Tatler, February 19 1966

(via Peter Stanfield)

An earlier micro-profile on Marc in The Tatler, as part of "ones to watch" package 

 

anti-theatricality at the movies

"They're fiction, but you know you're not being lied to"

- Gena Rowlands on the films of husband John Cassavetes

The whole of Opening Night seems to roil around a set of deeply conflicted feelings vis-a-vis the histrionic arts, actors and acting, how to achieve reality onstage (the actress played by Rowlands is tormented, driven almost mad, by the feeling that the script, characterisation, etc is false.. and ultimately she is compelled to sabotage the whole thing in order to open up the possibility of some kind of reality, an Event). 

It becomes a bit like an American theatre version of Jim Morrison's latterday concerts with the Doors

^^^^^^^^^^^

Struck by the fact that Fassbinder started out leading a troupe of actors called Anti-Theater. 

Not seen many of his films but they do seem to turn around the collision between stageyness (all the Douglas Sirk melodrama stuff) and the compulsive irruption, within the artifice, of the real, the ugly, the profane, the abject, the scatological, the grotesque

Not unlike the drag aesthetic as it fed into Theater of the Ridiculous, or John Waters early movies - glamour and grossness shoved together.... glittering stylized exteriors stained and soiled by the interior-body muck of secretions and urges

glam / new wave - the return

.

At the exact intersection of prog, glam, and New Wave-to-be, you find: Split Enz

Grotesque and risible! 

Except there is one brief moment, from about 2.20 onwards, where their desire to be Roxy very nearly happens - the sax gets gaseous and the faint whiff of "2HB" and "Amazona" reaches our nostrils - but then it dissipates almost instantly, the sax shifts into a thin-bodied jocosity, like The Piranhas or a dozen other pubby New Wavers

("Desire to be Roxy" - just noticed that "Sweet Dreams" is from 1976's Second Thoughts, produced by no less than  Phil Manzanera  - I wonder how much he had to do with the eruptive-bit-in-"Amazona" quality to that brief exciting moment in the song?)

By the third album, Dizrythmia, released August 1977, Split Enz are fully, archetypally New Wave, but the late-glam dress-up-box thing lingers 

Those jackets are nearly cool though, almost like a hand-painted suit that Tristan Tzara might have worn at the Cabaret Voltaire

 

A December 1976 review of Split Enz live, from NME. 

"My favorite bit was Noel Crombie's spoons solo" !

Fully transitioned to Noo Wave (so in another sense, rewinding the clock to the pre-psych mid-Sixties - suits, neat hair). But still a bit garish and over-glossed.

Now there were a bunch of groups at this exact midpoint of the '70s who had this "let's get dressed up" late glam thing going on, but in a fatally "let's not take ourselves seriously" way. Generally, they looked a right mess, as if a fancy dress party in its last plastered throes had somehow wandered onto a stage.

Deaf School  - just like the Enz, hovering on the cusp between Old Wave and New Wave, with aspects of pastiche and winking irony that are sorta kinda pomo.

Also caught between late glam and New Wave, hovering on the cusp of bigness for a single year (1976), Doctors of Madness

 

As with Deaf School, not much prog in the equation here - unless we count the violin. 

Aussie neighbours to Split Enz, Skyhooks were coming from the same  rock-as-theatre place - this video pushes the "it's showtime"  vibe with its dressing room with lights all round the mirror frame mise-en-scene

And then like Split Enz, they strip down a bit musically and sartorially in hopes of hitching a ride on New Wave

Another Aussie - Duffo - a Bowie damaged feller  but here hitching a ride on punk (yet also looking like a laughing - or laughable - gnome).

   

Andrew Parker directs my attention to another Aussie bunch - The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Strangely, just seeing their name, I could already see-hear them - and they look and sound almost exactly as I imagined!

Bang on the nail in terms of what I am talking about - and again, under the daft campy surface, there is serious musical chops on display. As with some other groups in this list, the music is not so much proggy as more in line with American roots-eclectic sophisto-rock, that area that includes The Band, Little Feat, Dr John, Ry Cooder, The Wild Tchoupitoulas...   If not for the silly clothes, voices and lyrics, you could imagine them joining the Last Waltz line-up.

 Another late glam troupe were Sailor, here brazenly imitating Roxy circa "Virginia Plain" and getting a couple of chart places higher (#2 to Roxy's #4) 

The voice and the piano bit  on "Glass of Champagne" are trademark infringement level infractions

And then just a little later in the decade  Big In Japan  - influenced by Deaf School, also heavily Bowie-damaged in the case of Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson, this troupe split into a number of postpunk / New Wave / careers of greater eminence

Also check out this embedding-disabled performance on What's On.

And then - later, mid-80s, quite out of synch with pop temporality, but still "at the precise nexus point" - the Cardiacs

Some would argue there's psychedelia in there as well as prog and New Wave.

Kooky but disturbed

This '82 Stonehenge free festival is probably similar to what greeted my aghast ears a few years later when me and my companions wandered unawares onto Port Meadow where a free festival was taking place, resulting in my first-time sighting-hearing of the Cardiacs. Although I didn't know the name of the group -  indeed it was years later that I realised "that was them!!". Hideous flashback ensued.  This video is really just audio, so only one dimension of the frightmare is captured - the herky-jerky psycho-clown sound.  

Every member looks like the stolid military-history obsessed one in Peep Show. Well, except for the girl with the sax.

Toy World  (title of debut tape) is a good trope for the vibe - clockwork non-sense. 

Back to the mid-70s historical cusp, I remember Punishment of Luxury well from when I first  started listening to late-night Radio 1: the deejays were enamored of the B-side to "Puppet Life", a herky-jerky tune called "Jellyfish".  Punilux included fringe theatre people and were obviously proggers and/or Bowie-damaged mime artist types. 

As the presenter on this TV show (clad appropriately in an 'ironic, this is showbiz' glittery jacket) points out, Puniluxer Brian Bond was taught mime by Lindsay Kemp - just like David Bowie and Kate Bush were. 

Reformed but still deformed

Steevee in comments suggests Toronto New Wavers The Dishes

Conceivably Ze Whiz Kidz (Tomata du Plenty - later of The Tupperwares and then the Screamers), a Seattle "comedy glam troupe", belong here -  albeit progless 

Max Webster

Singer went solo with a New Wave remodelling

How could I forget? Be-Bop Deluxe - they go from glam-tinged prog to New Wave-adjusted glamprop across several years in the exact midsection of the 1970s. Well I say "prog" but it's actually more like pomp rock - a more refined Queen without the front-man effrontery. 

Here it's 1978 and Nelson & Co are trying manfully to adjust the New Wave mandated tightness ("New Precision" indeed) but still keep the guitar heroics. 

Rebranded as Red Noise, with quasi-militaristic outfits and herky-jerky riffage, melodies that shriek and jut angularly,  nasty Noo Wave sax - an agile style jumper, that Bill. Soon he'd be onto synthpop. 

I guess Sensational Alex  Harvey Band count as being on the nexus point of prog, glam, and New Wave - the musicians had been Tear Gas, a Zappa-phile prog outfit.... then they happily went theatrical with Harvey as their charismatic frontman, but he  had a menace - and street delinquent preoccupations - that anticipated punk (even if the music itself never did)

 

program from May 1976 Manchester Free Trade Hall - note reference to "punk" in the Cast List

Can't forget SAHB's buddies The Tubes

A common denominator with a lot of these groups is that the band could really play - under the fancy dress and stage stunts, and regardless of the punkoid  'sick humor' / 'bad taste' themes, there is a suspicious (and distressing) level of chops on display

Oingo Boingo were originally a highly theatrical proggish ensemble called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo

Then they become quite literally the worst group that has ever existed. The internal struggle between proggoid desires and New Wave / commercial-aspiring constraints is quite hideous to hear-see.

Amazed to see a lead review of a Danny Elfman project in the Wire in the last year or so.

No glam element with this next one, as far as I'm aware - but certainly existing at some kind of nexus between prog and New Wave: Poli Styrene Jass Band

(although maybe there were theatrics in the live performances = apparently they had some narrative set pieces on stage, and involved actors as well as musicians later on).  - 

Unusually the prog element here is clearly Canterbury Sound - Kevin Ayers, Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Caravan, Egg ... with possibly some Euro-prog / late-psych (Supersister)

Poli Styrene Jass Band (note the odd anticipation of Poly Styrene) eventually became The Styrenes, but via another alter-ego, Styrene Money

(via Cardrossmaniac2)

I feel there are more "nexus point" examples of this syndrome -  hyper-theatrical / overdressed late-glam / late-prog outfits who either have proto-New Wave aspects or manage to transition fairly seamlessly.  (Toyah - an actress, so has a head start... Sadista Mika Band... The Kursaal Flyers).

There are also New Pop era examples - Howard Jones, fairly clearly (the mime artist dude in chains whose only job in the group is visual is the giveaway). Also Nik Kershaw -  not so much image-wise as musically.  

The general tendency to visual excess in promo videos is where a lot of these tendencies seep back.

 

high self-esteem

Everyone talks about the dangers of low self-esteem.... what about high self-esteem? 

Caused by new styles of parenting that irradiate the child with praise and a sense of achievement and specialness. Rising rates of narcissistic disorders.... 

All those surveys showing that an ever growing proportion of young people want to be famous or otherwise do something extraordinary and heroic with their lives

When that destiny fails to manifest itself as a life outcome...