All Right Now: One Fan's Discretionary History of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1960s & 1970s (Part 2)

Psychedelic rock, prog rock, glam rock, hard rock, folk rock.

From 1965 to 1975, owing to the widespread availability of record players and portable radios, and an extensive network of venues in which performances were regularly held, rock 'n' roll reached its undoubted peak, steaming ahead and fulfilling its destiny as a vital, unstoppable force. A counterculture of young people took shape, with rock 'n' roll as its foundation (and with The Beatles tunefully reigning as its benign monarchs), pledging itself to a peaceable outlook and standing in scornful opposition to the shallow values, threadbare lies, virulent prejudices, unyielding authority, unctuous hypocrisy, and needless wars of the older generation. The musicians who played rock 'n' roll were no longer looked upon as mere entertainers, artificial characters fitted out with guitars and mod apparel, brainless puppets who were required to do no more than throw bunches of catchy trifles to pliant hordes of boisterous kids. They had become musical preachers of a new gospel, upstart espousers (with many of them having an avowed liking for unlawful drugs) of an open, unhindered philosophy that was less subordinate, less timorous, and less hidebound than past philosophies, aiding their audiences in attaining a different, and presumably higher, state of being.

Rock 'n' roll itself was also changing. Its framework was being stretched, with the music becoming more diverse, more flexible, more sophisticated. Young rockers, impelled by a desire to express themselves more freely and more inventively, began to purloin elements from other musical styles, choosing to write and play songs that were longer, looser, and louder than before, songs that ventured beyond the straightforward tunes that had defined early rock 'n' roll during its infancy in the 1950s. One of the unmistakable signs that rock 'n' roll was being transformed came, as usual, from The Beatles. Their music had been progressing, steadily and deliberately, since the beginning, when they signed with Parlophone Records, galloping from "Love Me Do" in 1962 to "We Can Work It Out" in 1965, but "Tomorrow Never Knows," the last track on their seventh album, Revolver, released in August, 1966, was arrestingly strange, thoroughly unlike anything that The Beatles, or any other band, had ever composed or recorded: an eerie, inscrutable blend of haunting sounds (incorporating an otherworldly vocal, backward guitar, and tape loops) that came to be known as "psychedelic."

After Revolver, The Beatles released a stunning single, "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever," in February, 1967, and then, in May, unveiled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a superlative album of cleverly connected tracks (capped by the sweeping melancholy of "A Day in the Life") that continued the groundbreaking musicality of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Rock 'n' roll was forging ahead, shedding its constraints. For the rest of 1967 and into 1968, nearly every band, old and new, went for a psychedelic sound, with some bands going more overboard in their attempts than others. British bands were particularly eager to meet the self-assured challenge that The Beatles had delivered, with The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Pretty Things, Small Faces, The Hollies, Manfred Mann, Eric Burdon and The Animals, The Marmalade, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Traffic, The Soft Machine, The Creation, The Koobas, John's Children, Kaleidoscope, Dantalian's Chariot, The Smoke, Tomorrow, Blossom Toes, The Bee Gees, The Herd, The Move, Simon Dupree and The Big Sound, Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, Nirvana, July, Status Quo, The Idle Race, Grapefruit, Family, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and The Bonzo Dog Band being among those who embraced psychedelia, either cautiously or fearlessly.

Would You Believe, a gem of an album by Billy Nicholls, recorded for Immediate Records in 1968 (but never properly released until years later), was a pleasingly representative product of the fanciful bent that blossomed in British music after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Billy Nicholls was a child of London, a singer and songwriter still in his teens when he crafted the delectable tracks on Would You Believe (with help from Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins, and other peers), building a lightly baroque, gently psychedelic compound from many layers of voices, guitars, organ, piano, harpsichord, drums, brass, and strings. One of the best songs on Would You Believe, "London Social Degree," with a bouncy tune and sly words that appear to celebrate the mind-expanding efficacy of LSD, stands as a perfect musical confection: a quaint, unblushing relic of the unimpeachably swinging age in which it was created.

I found that the more rock 'n' roll surprised me, the more it sought to defy and exceed the apparent safety of its supposed guidelines, the more I liked it. Whether it was George Harrison making exquisite use of sitar, tanpura, dilruba, swarmandal, and tabla, along with violins and cellos, to invoke the mystic truth of India on "Within You Without You," or Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker of Cream contentiously jamming on Willie Dixon's "Spoonful" for a quarter of an hour, or The Who telling the harrowing tale of Tommy Walker (a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who suffers abuse, has a spiritual awakening, and becomes a religious leader) over both sides of two LPs, or Deep Purple performing a Concerto for Group and Orchestra in an unlikely partnership with Malcolm Arnold and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, or Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer of ELP ripping through their fierce, vehement, hell-for-leather interpretation of Bela Bartok's "Allegro barbaro" (which they recorded as "The Barbarian"), or Mike Oldfield acting as composer and one-man band on his album of finely wrought overdubs, Tubular Bells, it was all good music to me.

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Those bands who valiantly strove to broaden the horizons of rock 'n' roll have since been collected under the clumsy heading of "prog rock." Included among them are The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, The Nice, Procol Harum, Clouds, King Crimson, Van der Graff Generator, Colosseum, Jethro Tull, Atomic Rooster, Renaissance, Yes, Genesis, Rare Bird, Curved Air, Hawkwind, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Barclay James Harvest, Caravan, Matching Mole, Hatfield and the North, Egg, Stackridge, Curved Air, Fairfield Parlour, Electric Light Orchestra, Gentle Giant, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Focus, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Argent, The Strawbs, Fields, Supertramp, Babe Ruth, Flash, Greenslade, Badger, Gong, Man, Camel, and Fruupp. What the bands of prog rock had in common (aside from an ingrained habit of wantonly employing more synthesizers than might have been advisable or necessary, and an undisguised fondness for cooking up overblown conceits), and what repeatedly drew me to their music, was their guileless, but eminently commendable, policy of sticking their necks out and courageously forsaking the easy road. They were not afraid to mount expeditions into spheres of music that lay outside the accepted territory, even if their feats of musical derring-do did, at times, put them into an awkward pose of unwitting pomposity.

Fans in the 1960s and 1970s were, as I can verify, much more malleable, much more disposed to approve of musical creations that beseeched them to listen carefully. One evening in March, 1974, at Winterland in San Francisco, I was part of an audience, all young people in their teens and twenties, who gratefully subjected themselves to the uncompromising ordeal of an intense performance by Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, and Alan White of Yes, who gave a determined rendition of the dense, demanding piece, with ornate lyrics based on beliefs depicted in Hindu scriptures, that constituted the entirety of their current double album, Tales from Topographic Oceans. Even for me, a proud, unreserved fan of Yes, it was a fairly long evening, which dazed me and drained me, leaving me in want of relief at its end, but the music was well-meaning, sharply executed, and undeniably rewarding. Looking back, I am glad to have been there. That kind of fortitude, hardiness, and agreeability, although scarcely to be witnessed in an audience now, was, unbelievably, the custom in those years.

Prog rock was a mostly British affair, as was glam rock, one of the main musical trends of the early 1970s. Glam rock had more to do with how musicians looked than with how they sounded, and the two leaders of its glittery pack, David Bowie (whose fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, turned him into a sudden, white-hot star in 1972) and Marc Bolan of T. Rex (whose fey, peacockish performances drove teeny-boppers into the kind of transport and tumult not beheld in Britain since the dizzy, demented days of Beatlemania at its giddiest), were both renowned for their strikingly feminine looks, which playfully eschewed the dull precepts of brute masculinity. The gaudy realm of glam rock also encompassed Roxy Music, The Sweet, Slade, Mott the Hoople (who hit the spangly jackpot in July, 1972, with the release of their resplendent single, "All the Young Dudes," written by David Bowie), Wizzard, Mud, Silverhead, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, David Essex, Sparks, Be-Bop Deluxe, and, in America, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and The New York Dolls. Some people were appalled, offended, and threatened by the sight of male musicians prancing about in lipstick, mascara, and women's clothing, but I thought it was all a great deal of fun.

The early 1970s also saw (and, thanks to the tall stacks of powerful amplifiers that juiced up the volume of electric guitars, could not avoid hearing) the mighty birth of hard rock: a tough, lumbering sound that reared up from the British blues of the late 1960s (John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Savoy Brown, Ten Years After, Chicken Shack, The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, Taste, The Keef Hartley Band, Blodwyn Pig, The Groundhogs), and was most purposefully manifested in the music of Led Zeppelin (formed by Jimmy Page after his stint as guitarist in The Yardbirds, and acknowledged as the absolute rulers of hard rock's domain), The Jeff Beck Group, Humble Pie, Free, Stone the Crows, The Faces, Spooky Tooth, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Steamhammer, The Edgar Broughton Band, Uriah Heep, Trapeze, The Pink Fairies, Robin Trower, Nazareth, Bad Company, Queen, Foghat, Thin Lizzy, Budgie, Stray, Armageddon, and AC/DC. Hard rock found its crude strength in a raw, riotous, all-out assault of roaring vocals, screaming guitars, and thunderous drums, making it an unsuitable choice for anyone of a nervous disposition.

Yet another strain of British rock 'n' roll that appealed to me in the 1960s and 1970s was British folk rock, as preserved in the standout tracks recorded by Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, Steeleye Span, Trees, and The Albion Country Band, bands who all made it their practice to draw heavily from the rich traditions of British folk music (a practice whose most definitive example was Fairport Convention's fourth album, Liege & Leaf, released in 1969), deftly combining old ballads with electric guitars and a forthright rhythm (or, in the case of Pentangle, using acoustic guitars and applying the supple time changes of cool jazz). Donovan, Ralph McTell, Roy Harper, The Incredible String Band, John Martyn, Keith Christmas, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Mark-Almond, Bridget St. John, Trader Horne, Magna Carta, Vashti Bunyan, Mr. Fox, Shelagh McDonald, and Lindisfarne, on the other hand, all wrote most of the songs that they performed, songs which, although not taken directly from those earlier traditions, still had detectable roots in the musical heritage of the British Isles.

One of the other British bands whose music began in the late 1960s and came to fruition in the early 1970s was Badfinger. Their music was not prog rock, glam rock, hard rock, or folk rock, but rather, was a solid construction of well-made rock 'n' roll, with a punchy, upfront sound that clearly was indebted to The Beatles. Actually, Badfinger had another connection to The Beatles, being the first band signed to Apple Records, the recording company that The Beatles set up in 1968 to release their own music and the music of others. Badfinger started in Swansea, Wales as The Iveys, bearing that name until two members departed and two new members (both from Liverpool) were brought in, after which The Iveys became Badfinger, a quartet (Pete Ham, Joey Molland, Tom Evans, and Mike Gibbins) whose musical approach gave them an undeniable (and, they found, somewhat troublesome) resemblance to the Fab Four: two guitars, bass, drums, and a plentiful stock of quality songs that they wrote themselves. (Although their first hit, "Come and Get It," was written by Paul McCartney for the soundtrack of The Magic Christian, a film starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.)

Between 1969 and 1971, Badfinger worked hard and notched a handful of sturdy hits, with "Come and Get It," "No Matter What," "Day After Day," and "Baby Blue" all receiving wide airplay and selling in substantial numbers. Unfortunately, the four musicians had fallen under the villainous control of Stan Polley, a crooked American businessman who ruthlessly cheated them at every step, binding them to underhanded deals and hoarding most of their ample royalties for himself, until finally, they were left with meager finances and a doubtful future. Pete Ham, yielding to bitter despair and giving up all hope, responded to the bleakness of his wretched plight by hanging himself in 1975. Tom Evans was destined to relinquish his life, too, and hanged himself in 1983. While the hapless members of Badfinger were not the only musicians to suffer the unkind fate of being heinously exploited and glaringly defrauded by someone they had trusted, the stark horror of their pitiful tale is unusually grim, and leaves a dark, ugly, accusative stain on the uneven chronicle of rock 'n' roll.