New BBC2 series- 'Seven Ages Of Rock'

 

What I'm wondering is how the Alternative and Indie chapters will differ. This is the same bloody phenomena, REM being the first widely succesful band to record on an indie label.

 

This whole thing is/seems completely distorted by professional British press writer sof the NME and MM type.

 

You want to construct a seven stage rocket:

 

1a) The original Rock an Roll >>> the 50's and how the establishment managed to kill the rebellion.

1b) The prefab "rock" stars >> how the establishment managed to change vicious sexual RnR into politically correct pop idols that were comlpletely controlled by the industry, including the Beatles debut , until say 63.

 

2) The awakening of Rock >> how the protest folk artist started revolutionizing songwriting and how they wrote their own rebellion thru the music , eventually leading to Folk Rock, Psych rock, Blues Rock and early Prog >> until 69.

 

3) The first apex: the 70's>> the industry losing control and trying to gain it back, with a first real halt with the 73 oil crisis plunging the Western world into depression. Prog , JR/F etc >> roughly stop at 77 with punk, but can go further with Heavy Metal

 

4) The punk era and its successors: (post punk, new wave etc....) >> the return of the record companies. The groups are often again manufactered. Until 87, roughly once REM and other indies are coming through.

 

5) The indie years: (from REM to Grunge and beyond). How the big labels are losing shares to the groups that can now develop without them an international career (this was mainly not the case with the 70's except for maybe Zeppelin)

 

6) the Dance thing: the story of rock as dancing music, how to exploit the girls with "rock" >> from American Bandstand to Motown, to disco and the 80's funk lead with Jackson (M and J), girls and boys bands and eventually touching the Techno scene >>> from 50's until now

 

7) the technological revolution and advent of electronics: how the first synths allowed more artistic freedom (Analogue) before limiting it seriously it by enticing kids not to learn music theory but become sampling machines. from 70 until now.

 

Now this makes sense!!!

 

This version of events isn't so far away from 'Dancing In The Street', actually, which was a BBC series of 10 or so years ago. The drawbacks of that were prog was not mentioned once, that I recall, and heavy metal was glossed over entirely, save a one minute Led Zeppelin reference. At least in this series that has been rectified to a certain extent- Floyd dominated Saturday's show, whereas DITS didn't bother with Floyd after Syd's mental collapse. However, some of the episodes ARE excellent in that series- the blues one called 'Crossroads' featured a wealth of rare footage, genuinely new interviews (that first episode of this new series regurgitated a lot of them), the rock and roll one called 'Whole Lotta Shakin' had some nice footage and interviews with the rock pioneers and the psychedelic one (this too has been almost forgotten in this new series) featured Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, Big Brother and The Holding Company etc. and interviewed most of them.

 

The rock and roll/prefab era is a fascinating area which these programmes seem to gloss over, imho, in favour of too many po-faced analyses of punk's 'importance'. This sort of stuff almost killed 'real' rock and roll- all the original 50s rockers like Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard etc. were either dead, disgraced, imprisoned or had almost vanished. In their place came a whole host of teen idols that totally sanitised it, and imho were scarcely different in sound to the music from the crooners that rock and roll had threatened to wipe out...Even Elvis, who was the only one of this era to survive in commercial terms (probably sold more than he did in the 50s), was a very different animal to the person who recorded in the 1950s. I believe his non-soundtrack albums sold far less than the soundtracks, and those soundtracks (and the films themselves) are incredibly lightweight. As you might have guessed, this is an area of rock music I do take a keen interest in.

 

 

And amusingly, the feedback here is plastered with annoyed prog fans...http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/sevenages/programmes/white-light-white-heat/

But it was more successful than previous TV attempts in that it did acknowledge the world of progressive rock (and I agree with Dick Heath, it was good that the punk episode wasn't used as an excuse for progbashing).

 

I wondered why I felt the need to buy Hunky Dory and The Man Who Sold the World the other day...

 

Yeah, I also found the punk era episode quite respectful, instructive (especially the Patti Smith stuff, which I'll keep). I was happy to have seen it. However I will use the tape space for tonight's fouth instalment, which is likely to be kept along with the second episode (sadly I missed the first one)