Again, they were hardly available to the masses. A Telecaster in the early '50's cost the best part of $200. Equivalent to around $2000 or more today.
Wow you fellas! I'm reading this as it passes over my head. I couldn't tell a Telecaster from a dustbin. Where did my youth go? If I'm honest my youth was dedicated to Spurs,Sunday football on the Marshes,movies and the TL&R club!!!! Not even a girl could interfere. Bloody sad,isn't it?
I'm just sat here listening to Simon & Garfunkel's dulcet tones [video=youtube;DGma3NrCFVA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGma3NrCFVA[/video]
Yes, they were available to the masses. That is why Fender opened up a factory to build them - previously, instruments such as guitars, had been hand-built. Cars were (and are) expensive, but that didn't stop them being built in factories and sold in their thousands. The point I am making, which you seem to be ignoring, is that the advent of Rock n Roll coincided with the ready availability of good quality factory-built electric guitars. I really don't know we were are still arguing this point.
Yes, Leo Fender was one of the first to mass produce solid body guitars. Although, in those days, a lot of the work was still done by hand - especially the neck. My contention is that $200 was not a price that was in easy reach of many people on the early '50's. Rock derived from several influences, some already mentioned. But also skiffle and country music played their part. What the solid body electric guitar, along with the advances in amplification of course, did was to make a far wider choice of sounds available to guitarists. Given most musicians' proclivity for experimentation, it was just a matter of time before this "new sound" came along.
I remember my stepdad taking my sister to the Palace cinema in Tottenham to see Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock". He came home totally ticked off because he couldn't see the screen because kids were all up dancing and jumping about........and that kid Webb from Cheshunt is 74 today.Happy birthday Cliff!!!!!!
The Brit invasion destroyed everything that had been before in the US.. RnR was dead as it had been wattered down to a insiped teen sugar sound of the likes of Ricky Nelson , Paul Anka . The Brill building pumping out safe mainly honey coated hits . The Surf sound of instrumental Link Wray , or pop sound of Jan Dean . Elvis was pumping out dross through a bunch of silly films. Then these long haired mainly working class Brits came along and changed music for ever . Others have mentioned they introduced blues back to the US but they added to it . The Stones from " Little red Rooster " and in a couple years the brilliance of "Paint in black ". A total change , bands not manufactured , playing thier own instruments , writing their own songs , with swagger . The Beatles were amazed how backward and hickville America was outside NY City . They loved the ladies but did comment how much bigger their bums were on average to back home. This was the blueprint for evermore .
"Destroyed everything that came before" is an exaggeration, but "revolutionized most of it" is true enough. US folk, country and what can loosely be called soul all had important singers and groups who weren't necessarily greatly changed by the British invasion. Someone like Merle Haggard was not, and went on to be an important influence, as were the Ventures. I don't really see much British Invasion influence on people like Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin either. They were more influencers of British invasion bands than influenced, I would say. But the impact on American music can be summed up by the fact that the most important and influential American groups of the mid-sixties who had started before the British Invasion like Dylan and the Beach Boys were very heavily influenced by it--though more, I would say, in the case of the Beach Boys than Dylan. And authenticity, as you say, may have been the most revolutionary thing of all. American electrified popular music, aside or distinct from country, folk and soul, had indeed become a wasteland, as it was in the UK. The Beatles freedom and individual creativity changed everything in popular music, and then the Stones almost immediately staked out much wilder territory. I was surprised to find 25 years ago that Germany, the Netherlands and Greece played much more US music from the British Invasion era than people in the US did. I think the UK does as well. In the US, most of us think almost all the very best work from that era was British. Newsflash: Boston and Pittsburgh are facing off for the title of the ugliest accent in the US in some contest somewhere. It's a clash of titans. The truth is that the Boston accent is much uglier on girls and women, but is pretty cool for guys, whereas the Pittsburgh accent is about equally bad for both, if anything worse on men. It shrieks bad taste and stupidity in both sexes, but bad taste and stupidity are traits men find enticing in women because most guys think, hmm, stupid, terrible taste...I got a chance!
One thing they Didn't change was Motown,in fact they loved it so much,the Beatles put some songs on their Album,With the Beatles,and Epstein,,promoted a few of thier Groups,like the Four Tops tour
The biggest influence on the Beatles was Buddy Holly. If you hear the demos he was working on when he died you know that he would be revered as much as the Beatles now. The stuff was so good, his influence was going to, ah-hem, Not Fade Away.
I think the Beatles had many influences. But yes, Holly was one of them. He Wrote some great songs, all by the age of 22! The Not Fade Away sound, however, he pinched from Bo Diddley.
Red , I totally agree that the Brit bands had little if any influence on country or soul . Even if many established soul stars would add a Beatles number to fill an album . Motown's Supremes did a whole album dedicated to the Brit invasion . My point is in the Rock sense . To the white young population the change was revolutionary . America had just come out of segregation , the country was still divided along racial lines, even if music occasionally crossed over. Without the Beatles there would never have been "Pet Sounds " they raised the bar for everyone . Without the Kinks a thousand Garage bands , without the Stones the template for a RNR band.
Yes they had many influences nearly all American and British Skiffle . They would play a host of RNR standards in their time in the den of despair in Hamburg for a couple years. Full of drunken sailors , ladies of the night , dressed in Black Leather they tailored and perfected their sound and style. This was a RNR lifestyle in its truest sense .
You see the trickle down effect of musical influences in bands of any substance. Bo Diddley's influence cannot be underestimated. Probably the most significant influence in the history of rock'n'roll. Any would be rock'n'roll band wanted to play those riffs whilst singing "I'm bad to the bone." It was youthful, trailblazing, exciting and different. The Beatles and Stones did lots of covers in their early days of blues, jazz, roots and soul songs. With most households having TVs by then, it was the widescale promotion and marketing of popular music in the '60s which brought their music (and, therefore, indirectly, their influences too) to mass audiences. Glam and punk were hailed as different. Their style of dress may have been, but their musical influences most definitely were not. The Ramones wanted to write melodies in the style of The Beatles, The Beach Boys and '60s bubblegum pop whilst stylistically imitating The New York Dolls. T.Rex's Dylan and blues influences are obvious. The Clash wore their influences on their sleeves - which included skiffle. Bo Diddley's rhythyms are clear in The Velvet Underground's work. And VU influenced 1,000s of indie, punk and pop- punk bands from the '80s onwards. The rest copied the Ramones! Quite how we've now finished up with the banality of X Factor is anyone's guess.
"Banality of the X factor" Sad when Cowbell has such an influence on the mainstream . Never has someone had so much promotion time and exposure to fill the charts with a conveyor belt of karaoke stars . I think pop\rock is not as significant to the present young generation as before. There is quality but it has to be searched and hunted down . Today I listen to Royal Blood, Forster the people, a little Kasabian , not to everybody's taste . As Bowie said , Cowell could be "the man that sold the world"
The mainstream is always full of crap, though. The same people grab hold of whatever's exciting, take all of the edge off it and mass produce it. It's been happening for decades.
In the '50s when rock'n'roll came along, kids were smaller versions of their parents. They'd listen to Mario Lanza. When Elvis, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent came along, they gave the youth an exciting identity and sound. We've gone full circle. Kids whoop and holler on X Factor at the sight of some ordinary Joe off the street wailing and yodelling through a Billy Ray Cyrus dirge as if it were being played at 33rpm. It's pitiful. And it's not even done as a joke - it's all painfully serious. Then some cloned boy band will sing something ridiculous - like a Sheena Easton cover - in out of tune falsetto voices. What is the point? If you're going to do karaoke, at least have kids who can play their instruments (guitar, bass, drums) coming on and launching into noisy versions of upbeat songs, where a decent percentage of the older viewers at home are likely to be saying "turn that racket off!" Give youth back to the young.
As an ex music student and pro musician, I cannot bear to watch drivel like X Factor. TBH, it makes me so angry with it's cynical exploitation of both the punters and the participants that I want to put my boot straight through Cowel's self satisfied smirk! I do keep up, as much as I can, with what music is being produced nowadays. It's always nice when some fresh, genuine talent does actually come along.
The X Factor is ****e, its a competition based on using a story or an image to sell records, rather than using musical talent to do so, and most of the garbage they play on mainstream radio shows on Radio 1, Capital etc. is all rehashes of the same catchy riffs and hooks anyway. I literally can't tell the difference between some of the songs on air now and the ones that were on 6 months or a year ago and I would generally count myself musical enough to do so. And they play the same crap 5 or 6 times a day too. Its awful.
