You might remember Dicko, the curiously irksome talent show judge. Recently he said this, ‘One thing you cannot take away from the baby boomers is that they invented rock and roll.’ Hmm, sorry, but I’ll take that away right now. I was a teenager in the classic rock and roll era which peaked about the mid 1950s. I was the right age (around 15) to be a fan, but I was six years too old to be a baby boomer. Elvis was another five years older, making him 11 years past boomerdom. Chuck Berry was quite a bit older than that and so was Little Richard, while Bill Haley was born right back in the 1920s. I saw Bill Haley and The Comets in Melbourne, along with Joe Turner, who is often credited with the first actual rock and roll song: ‘Shake Rattle & Roll’. He was older again and Haley, who had covered Shake Rattle And Roll, introduced him as ‘The daddy of us all.’ Sorry for calling you irksome, the old Dicko. I don’t believe you are trying to be irritating. Nor am I for that matter. Let us give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were referring to the ‘rock’ era in the 1960s. Obviously I was there too and I remember that they soon began calling it rock and roll again. There was a sort of rock and roll revival within the rock era, much as there had been a traditional jazz revival within the swing era.
In any case the baby boomers did not invent rock either. I was the same age as John Lennon, making him also six years too old to be a baby boomer. The other Beatles were a little younger but still too old to be boomers. I am three years older than Mick Jagger, which still makes him three years too old. Baby boomers did not figure in rock and roll – or rock as it was then being called – until the time of led Zeppelin and some of them were too old too.
Experts!
Much, much later than all that I took my then 16 year old daughter to see Hair Spray, and I still have the sound track, which has some magical though now obscure stuff on it. My daughter Rebecca was upset to see that Debbie Harry had aged and put on weight (she played the mother of one of the fans as I recall). A girlfriend of mine, who was incidentally an excellent singer, had come with us and she kindly did her best to explain that ageing is an inevitability but not necessarily a tragedy. Now, much more recently I saw John Waters, the director of Hair Spray (a curious albino presence with a Little Richard moustache and an air of deep pop wisdom) being interviewed on TV. The woman interviewing him smiled ecstatically when he declared, ‘The Beatles killed Tamla Motown overnight’. Was she so happy to hear of people losing their jobs, or was she thrilled by his knowledge and ineffable hipness? To be fair, interviewers’ reaction shots (once called the noddies) are often slotted in out of context.
My point is that he was remarkably wrong. The cluster of artists associated with Berry Gordy’s Tamla Motown label ran an almost concurrent course of similar duration to the Beatles. Both had a concentration of hits in the mid to late 1960s. In 1971 the Beatles dissolved as an artistic, legal and financial entity, and Berry Gordy’s label was being dismantled. Artists associated with the Tamla Motown label and general style, however, continued to have hits. I think immediately of Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross.
One more expert. A paper for which I worked as a freelance journalist was about to run a piece by a prominent expert, which began: ‘At a time when mono was the height of sophistication, Phil Spector predicted every development in rock recording for the next 25 years.’ Really? Just to begin with, I had a number of stereo albums that had been recorded in 1956, about four years before the period to which our man was referring. This chap made an extraordinary number of mistakes of this kind, but his readers often cited his expertise. One ABC announcer called him The Professor Of Pop. Truly, all you need is a beard and a very pompous voice. I sometimes worked in at the paper in question, though I was a freelancer. Somehow I had a pass card into the building and a password into the main frame. I noticed this weird blunder while scrolling through the stories in the art section file and I drew it to the arts editor’s attention, offering to bring in some of my early stereo albums. Not necessary. He believed me.
Here is the time to be modest and admit that I made my share of mistakes, but these consisted of wrongly identifying a composer of a piece or the year of recording. Stuff like that. Not grand, profound but erroneous, insights of music history. The fact is that I hated being introduced as an expert, or even a critic. At some point I pretty much stopped being a critic, because a proper critic is expected to criticise in every sense of the word. It occurred to me that nobody had any interest in knowing what I did not like. I still enjoy writing about music, but in my late years I am able to get away with writing almost exclusively about things I do like.
For instance: Tony Abbott’s Inspired Restoration
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