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music history from the 50s to 90s

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     1950s                                                        1970s

FOLK ROCK
Pop music had begun in the 1950s primarily as the inarticulate expression of teenage angst. But by the early 1960s, a new generation of artists who had grown up listening to rock and roll were eager to explore the seemingly infinite opportunities that it offered for creative freedom and self expression, when invested with integrity, intelligence and imagination. As the youth of the Western World became more aware of the world around it, principally through the influence of television and rock music, teenagers found themselves growing up fast and consequently rejected the contrived commercial sound of the 1960s pop. Teenagers were also becoming increasingly independent in their opinion and restless to find somebody to echo those beliefs. In America, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and singer-songwriters such as Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Bob Dylan were eagerly adopted as spoke persons for their generation.

Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane once famously remarked that if anyone claimed that they could remember the 1960s then they couldn't have been there. The inference being that those who were really involved were so stoned on acid (LSD) and other illegal substance that they could never hope to recall what it had really been like to live through the surreal decade. Now that the hash haze has cleared, it has become apparent that the band who were most responsible for ushering in the "psychedelic Sixties" were not the Beatles, as is commonly believed. Not even one of the experimental "head" bands such as Pink Floyd, but mild, unassuming Californian Folk Rock outfit called The Byrds.

GARAGE ROCK
Punk were not a phenomenon of the mid-1970s, as is commonly believed, but the second wave in an assault upon the musical establishment, which had launched its first attack in America in the mid-1960s. The British invasion of the United States, led by The Beatles, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones, had inspired the formation of countless US "Beat Groups" whose enthusiasm to imitate their heroes was often disproportionate to their talent. But in Rock, youth and raw energy were often all that were required to create something irresistibly exciting.

Garage Rock were formed during the mid-1960s' pre-psychedelic minimalist US rock movement typified by a frenetic three-chord, three-minute thrash, screaming vocals, distorted guitars and an occasional electric organ line. These groups were dubbed the "Garage Bands" for the simple reason that most of them were limited in playing in their parent's garages because they were too young and inexperience to get paid gigs. But even once they had persuaded skeptical club owners to let them take the stage they retain their casual amateur attitude and penchant for musical minimalism cranked out at a volume that had initially been intended to irritate the neighbors. The other endearing characteristics of a garage band included the reedy drone of a Vox or Farfisa portable organ, which sounded like it might have been taken from a schlock-horror movie soundtrack, and the presence of heavily distorted guitars, which had been fed through what were known as fuzz-boxes. It was a raw, intimidating sound and often based around no more than three major chords because the band were simply too impatient to spend any more time extending their musical vocabulary.

PSYCHEDELIC / ACID ROCK
New fashions in pop and rock music have tended to originate in specific regions. Often a new sound can be traced back to a particular city or even a readily identifiable district. Rock and Roll was brewed in the southern United States, for example, doo-wop in the Bronx district of New York, soul in Memphis with a branch in Motown in Detroit, Merseybeat erupted in Liverpool and so on. The same is true of the music that dominated the latter half of the 1960s pop - Psychedelia or Acid Rock whose themes and sounds sought to re-create the hallucinogenic effects of mind-expanding drugs such as LCD (acid). The music that the bands of Bay Area in san Francisco made and that, later, other groups around the world would make under the influence of LSD. Was dubbed psychedelic, a clinical term that had been applied to describe the altered states of consciousness induced by the drug. Psychedelia aimed to recreate in sound the same sensory effects as a mind-expanding acid "trip" and for that the groups needed to free themselves from the mundane preoccupations of previous pop lyrics. As a result, songs became longer if you were not "stoned" or "high" yourself.

Psych-pop and its blissed-out associate acid rock were not a single, readily identifiable sound, but a composite diverse sound and styles created by very different groups. They came together spontaneously for one brief, glorious yearlong summer to provide the soundtrack to a genuine youth movement. By the time media and record company marketing executives arrived in San Francisco, the original movement was already fading. The middle-class American teenagers were naively latching on to "flower power" as the next fad after The Monkees and bus loads of curious tourists were herded through Haight to gawk at the "freaks". Perhaps only The Greatful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and the UK's Pink Floyd qualified as being authentic psychedelic but they were too diversified once the euphoria of 1966/67 had given way to disillusionment and cynicism at the end of the decade.

It was not so much a sound that they all shared but a way of life. The hippies saw themselves as the peace-loving "flower children" of a new Golden Age, the Age of Aquarius, in which they would re-establish the Garden of Eden on earth free from the corrupting influence of mass, crass commercialism and the manipulative men in suits. In this naively idyllic new world, everything would be free; free love, free food, free acid and of course, free music. Drawn by the music and the promise of free drugs and free love, several million young Americans and several million more from other European countries converge on San Francisco in the summer of 1967 for huge tribal gatherings in Golden Gate Park that were dubbed the Human Be-ins.

HEAVY METAL / HARD ROCK / PROGRESSIVE ROCK

Heavy metal was a stylized form of rock, which relies on a repeated riff to propel the song forward. When it first appeared in the late 1960s, it drew its imagery from Sword and Sorcery fiction and horror comics. On the other hand, hard rock is a guitar driven genre, which differs from heavy metal in that it is less rigid and riff oriented and frequently draws on the  blues format and feel. The inevitable consequence of the "beat boom" and blues revival in the mid-1960s, was that bands on both sides of the Atlantic began to explore the possibilities beyond the three-chord, 12-bar format once they found that they could write original materials. Many retained the riff-driven, back to basics approach, but tricked up their own songs with demonstrative vocal and guitar histrionics, which had been one side effect of the psychedelic experience. Of these bands, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath made a lasting and profound impression on the development of popular music and racked several multimillion-selling albums in the process.

A second stream shook off what they saw as the restriction imposed by the blues and evolved an entirely new and experimental form rooted in rock, but aimed squarely into the future. Progressive rock (also known as pomp rock) is a genre popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which attempted to broaden the musical vocabulary, instrumentation and themes used by rock groups in an effort to create a hybrid of rock and classical music. These "progressive" rock bands strove to blur the boundaries between rock and classical music, a laudable enough ambition and one, which they achieved with varying degrees of success. Of these groups, King Crimson, ELP, Yes, Genesis, The Moody Blues and Jethro Tull were the most successful although, ironically, it is their sound and vision that has dated more dramatically than their less ambitious contemporaries. One reason for this is that the progressive groups augmented their sound with keyboards, specifically the then fashionable Moog synthesizer and the notoriously unreliable Mellotron, which provided the ethereal string sound triggered by tiny tape loops. Guitars, drums and bass alone couldn't evoke the atmosphere, nor provide the broad spectrum of additional colors that these (mostly classical trained) musicians required. But in comparison with the pure digitally sampled sounds of the 1990s, some of the keyboards used in the 1960s and 1970s were positively primitive and wholly unrealistic.

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