IT’S A MIGHTY LONG WAY DOWN ROCK’N’ROLL (Part 1)
Maybe it’s the imminent onset of autumn or just a synchronicity of aches & pains but there has just been a curious overlapping of age-related posts from three Salon bloggers who won’t see 50 again. I posted an item recently on Rage, claiming (flippantly, I like to believe) that its indulgence becomes almost a prerogative of late middle age &, as such, it offers just about the only consolation for the aging process. Dr Omed’s chief acolyte Dana provided thoughtful reflections of his own in comment & I responded further, the two of us musing with a touch of melancholy on the whole sorry affair. And then, over at The Barbaric Yawp, also with a sigh & a sad smile, Christopher posted his own meditations on what was then & what is now & how we grizzled veterans might derive some benefits from the process of heading towards our twilight years.
Thematically unrelated to the above ponderings (but of great moment in respect of this post so stick with me) is Morgan’s current fascinating listing at Gnosis of the 50 Most Important Albums. It’s a daring enterprise, either - as the film cliché has it - very brave or very foolish. For so many of us, music acts as a sort of soundtrack to life & we are all very covetous of those sounds that mean most to us. Maybe it’s simply a matter of a piece of music acting as a receptacle for a key moment in life contemporaneous to the music so that when it’s heard the essence of that moment is relived. Or maybe the music carries some deep personal significance: the revelation that a well-turned lyric can have all the force of poetry, or the realisation that great political truths can be encapsulated in a simple song.
The crucial factor is that the last three generations since the War share a largely unreflecting, maybe even a largely unconscious sense of music as a phenomenon of cultural unification. Boundaries of class, age, nationality, intellect, personality are breached by popular song & dance. Like a net that commonality of musical perception & experience binds us together as was never the case within & before the first half of the last century. Whether one sees the emergence of The Beatles as symptom or cause in all this is largely irrelevant. The fact remains that by the mid-1960s young people across the Western world were united across barriers that hitherto had served as cultural absolutes, containing them securely within their own zones of social & cultural functioning.
And it was whilst in the midst of this set of rather arid socio-cultural ponderings that I had my little eureka moment - the realisation of one fundamentally important aspect of being the age I am that is of unique value. It’s simple & undramatic: I was there at the beginning of the voyage, have travelled the journey uninterrupted ever since & anticipate its rich & fulfilling continuation for many years yet. More specifically & personally, I can recall with absolute clarity that brief but revolutionary time within which the world dissolved from musical black & white into glorious, garish Technicolor. For me it happened thus…
In the mid-‘50s I was a timid, hypersensitive child of 8, plucked by my parents from an entirely ordinary state primary school whose standard red brick walls, linoleum corridors, white-tiled cloakrooms & asphalt playground filled me with fear & loathing. In despair, they sent me to a tiny progressive school some 15 miles from suburban Kingston-upon-Thames & there, in happy rough-&-tumble chaos, I boarded for 5 years. Freedom for we kids was pretty much total, but, kids being naturally conservative, we imposed order on our daytimes, evenings & nights & led relatively conventional lives. One staple of the evenings – unusual in Britain at that time – was an hour or so in front of the television. We watched more or less indiscriminately – documentaries, news broadcasts, quiz shows, nature programmes, whatever was on offer on the two channels available.
However, I remember with particular clarity what passed for musical entertainment on the box in those monochrome times – big bands led by patent-leather-haired men in tuxedos, fronted by female singers with vertical hairdos & flared skirts like lampshades. The brass section would rise & fire off a salvo, followed by the saxes, & behind, pumping away on a Guild Savoy or a Hofner President, would be a seated guitarist with a Clark Gable moustache. From time to time a vocal group – four finger-clicking men in bow ties – would chip in with a syncopated standard before we were returned to the unctuous smile of the baton-wielding bandleader. Sweeping around the floor & past the static camera, catatonic couples, brylcreemed & lacquered, quickstepped joylessly. The entire process generated as much excitement & had as much meaning for our small group of teens & pre-teens as the televised Sunday Service.
And then in 1956, within a few anarchic months, the world changed utterly. I have a series of fragmentary but vivid memories now: news items about riots in cinemas – seats slashed by young men in drape jackets to the harsh, honking strains of Bill Haley & The Comets; wild-eyed, plaid-shirted adolescents thrashing guitars in cellar clubs in Soho; an hysterical girl sobbing over & over to a baffled middle-aged interviewer the unlikely name ‘Elvis Presley’. Then it was all of us in a bedroom gathered around a tiny Dansette record player watching shellac discs the size of dinner plates flopping onto the turntable, crackling briefly & then releasing messages from the other side of the universe. The Everley Brothers, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan… We looked at each other in mingled fear & fascination. Even at that tender age we knew that nothing would ever be quite the same again...
2:04:52 AM 
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