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Rock 'n' roll has survived plenty in its 40 or so years -- bans, boycotts, burnings -- but you have to wonder whether it can survive the biggest threat of all: respectability.
The main reason I liked it during my adolescent years was that my parents hated it. The same was true of my friends. Some parents liked country music, many liked Broadway show tunes, others preferred Mitch Miller medleys -- but nobody's parents liked rock 'n' roll in 1966.
Mainstream society offered us kids dozens of reasons to come to our senses. Our ministers told us it was pagan throbbing, a portal to satanic trances, descended from voo-doo. Our teachers warned us that rock 'n' roll was jungle music that worked faster than alcohol at removing inhibitions.
Most interesting among the denunciations were those in a
book called Rhythm, Riots and Revolution.
My copy
vanished years ago, but I remember that the Beatles were
conscious agents of a Communist plan to make us so soft and
compliant and drug-addled that the godless Reds would be
able to march right in and take over.
History sure takes some peculiar turns. It was rock 'n' roll, as much as anything, that brought about the collapse of the USSR.
As for those Beatle fans in the Western Hemisphere, they have long since reached majority. They're so heavily into peace, love and drugs that they support politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, John Major and Newt Gingrich. They call constantly for more cops, tougher laws and longer sentences. They cheer for wars: Gulf, Panama, Grenada, Falklands.
Anyway, rock is respectable these days. Maybe it started when PBS aired the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert during fund-raising week a couple of years ago, and continued with the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland this year -- an event that had lots of Official Corporate Sponsors.
And now, we've got a major American television network
calling itself A Beatle C.
This marketing hustle
should convince even the last right-wing hold-outs that, at
heart, the surviving Beatles are capitalists of the first
order.
Even back in the early days, that was so with Beatle lunchboxes, Beatle dolls, Beatle cartoons on Saturday morning TV -- if there was a way to make a quick buck, the four lads from Liverpool jumped right in.
But there was more than mere marketing. As I watched the special Sunday night, I pondered how our world had changed, perhaps on account of the Beatles.
For one thing, they gave us hope. They were as big as stars could get, and they had started as four dead-end kids living in a provincial town. If the Beatles could make it, then maybe some of us kids in other dead-end provincial towns could aspire beyond the limits that society put on us.
They also created an industry, perhaps inadvertently. As their music got more intricate, you needed something better than the tinny speaker with an AM car radio to hear it all. Further, lots of kids started their own garage bands.
Thus millions of youngsters started building or buying good stereo gear -- an industry all in itself -- and others worked with PA systems, guitar reverbs, etc., for their own bands.
With that as their hands-on introduction to electronics,
millions of kids were poised to start working with small
computers when those appeared a few years later. Many
computer hardware gurus can trace their skills to building
better stereos to hear every note of A Day in the
Life
in 1967.
The Beatles were also, more or less, authentic. They weren't industry contrivances like Fabian or the Archies. They wrote and performed and recorded their own work. This encouraged individual expression, something that society in general tries to discourage -- why do you think the authorities now are so worried about the Internet, where anybody anywhere can write anything and the whole world can read it?
So the world has changed plenty in the past three decades, and maybe it's reasonable to credit (or blame) the Beatles for those changes.
But it still seems weird that rock 'n' roll is so respectable these days. You wonder where the music will get its energy if it's not rebelling against anything.
And as a total aside, I've talked with several women friends about the Hooters controversy. The federal government wants men to have equal opportunity to wait tables, while the fundamental premise of the chain is to present attractive waitresses in shorts and low-cut tops.
We've come up with a solution. Open a chain of
restaurants called Peckers
-- the stylized
woodpeckers of its logo would go nicely with the stylized
owls of Hooters.
Peckers waiters would wear muscle shirts and tight shorts equipped with codpieces. This gives men equal opportunity to work in demeaning environments, and women an equal opportunity to ogle.
Are there any venture capitalists out there ready to
invest in our concept? Or are we just going to have to sit
at home and listen to Free as a Bird
?
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