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"