Folk Rock

Early 1960s

• Initial baby boomers were approaching college age

• The election of JFK marked a new, more idealistic era

• Next 3 years would witness the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement

Teenager Perspective

• Dance music seemed somehow shallow and trivial

• College students began listening to dust-bowl era folksingers/balladeers such as Pete Seeger and developed an affinity with the 1950s

• Beat poets as a way of coming to terms with the turmoil and conflict in this new world

• New ideals ---- personal authenticity, individuality, and non-conformity

College Campuses: the Folk Revival

• Late 1950s to early 1960s – a number of clean-cut, respectable groups popularized folk music

• Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, and the New Christy Minstrels ---even though they were bland & commercialized they made young college students aware of the folk tradition

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG539yiQt98

Folkies• Soon discovered “real” folkies of the

1950s• Woody Guthrie• Pete Seeger• The Weavers• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

_HCsW0xh1Mk

Folkies

• Also discovered Appalachian folk songs, bluegrass, & the blues• Odetta

(spiritual)• Bill Monroe

(bluegrass)• Muddy Waters

(Chicago Blues)• John Lee Hooker

(Southern “slide guitar” blues)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVNeozIH2SQ

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRCIgwpeKto

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IOou6qN1o

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSnQ0bdHW0s

Bob Dylan

• At the same time, coffee-houses sprang up in North Beach, San Francisco, Greenwich Village (lower Manhattan), & Venice Beach

• Bob Dylan (traditional folk music)

• Traveled from Minnesota to New York City to pay homage to a dying Woody Guthrie

• After that, Dylan wrote and performed his own music like Woody Guthrie

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyN-ya3rCPw

Bob Dylan• Paved the way for a new

generation of folk/protest singers• Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-

Marie, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGMHSbcd_qI

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AI8PVRrDSw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFOUkipI4U

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqL5ksOuoo

Folk Style Characteristics

• Voice with simple guitar accompaniment

• Message/protest songs dealing with the after-effects of the Great Depression, McCarthyism, bigotry, middle-class conservative values

• Lyrics and attitude are a reaction to the conservatism and repression of the 1950s

Folk (Bob Dylan) Hot Spots

1. CAFÉ WHA?Dylan played here when he first arrived in NYC

2. THE GASLIGHT CAFÉ one of Dylan’s favorite haunts, performers were paid by passing around a basket

3. WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK folksingers gathered here on Sunday afternoons

4. HOTEL EARLE Dylan lived here for a short while, room 305

5. THE BITTER END played here in 1975 with Patti Smith and Ramblin’ and

Jack Elliott

Café Wha?

The Gaslight Café

Washington Square Park

Hotel Earle

The Bitter End

Woody Guthrie

• Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912-1967)

• Dust bowl era balladeer wrote over 1000 songs such as This Land is Your Land

• Bob Dylan traveled to NY to see him in the hospital suffering from Huntington’s disease

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ

Pete Seeger

• Another dust-bowl era balladeer

• Wrote:• If I Had a Hammer• Where Have All the Flowers Gone?• Turn, Turn, Turn• Gauntanamera• We Shall Overcome

• His group, The Weavers, were blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings

Little Boxes

• Questions the status quo and “cookie-cutter” conformity of the 1950s

• Shows contempt for upward mobile, over-materialistic America• Play on the golf course• Favorite cocktail drinks• Kids go to the best schools• Selection the “best” and “safe”

majors

• Rejects being compartmentalized and labeled – “being put in a box”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tqtvxG8O4

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-yszPdRTk

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUwUp-D_VV0

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W6dOEdEAAQ

Folk-Rock

• Between 1965-1969 the social-conscious message song will hybridize with Rock and Roll to produce a fundamentally new view of pop music ----- Folk-Rock

Folk-Rock (1965-to late ‘60s)

• 1965 – Bob Dylan combined folk music with electric guitar during the Newport Folk Festival initiating what was to be the folk rock era

• Folk message combined with the popularity of rock music merged to create a musical/societal stance that would ultimately culminate with the Woodstock Nation (1969)

• Rock writers, counterculture activists, and folkies all found rock and roll was a perfect vehicle for bringing forth their social commentaries

• Folk rock is a turning point of the 1960s counter-culture revolution

• Beat aesthetics, folk messages, and baby-boom rock and roll merge

• The style consists of message songs with a rock beat and backup band

• Vocal harmony, sometimes elaborate as in CSN, is a trademark of the style

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuLBhxZUkmU

The Byrds

• Notable members---Roger McGuinn (guitar, vocals), David Crosby (guitar, vocals)

• Formed in 1964

• First successful & influential folk-rock band

• No. 1 hit “Mr. Tambourine Man” put them in direct competition with the Beatles for popularity in the US

• mid-1960s – the Beatles & the Byrds even sent each other master tapes to ‘compare notes’

• Other hits – “Turn, Turn, Turn”, “Eight Miles High”, “So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ymkBEhdHBE

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPqAvgN6Tyw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4

The Byrds

Frank Zappa

• Los Angeles composer/guitarist/singer

• Group was The Mothers of Invention – defined 1960s intellectualized and experimental rock

• Drew his material from a broad spectrum of musical interests: jazz, electronics, classical music, comic parody

• Recorded 55 albums & was highly influential throughout the 1960-1980s

• Album Freak Out (1966) was partly inspired by the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album

• However, Zappa gained little chart success

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcu32QXtTw4

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxAceec8DxI

Garage Bands

• Following the surf-rock craze of the early 1960s – thousands of teenagers started their own surf-rock bands

• Many used cheap guitars and low powered amplifiers

• Over-blown speaker cones created a raspy, distorted tone

• Singers of these band rarely had their own amplifiers

• As the singers competed with guitar players for volume, they often strained their voices and sang close to the microphone

• Result was amateurish and crude

• 1963- a few of these bands became popular and started a wave of garage band hits

• Now frequently called “frat rock”

• Style later evolved into psychedelic garage bands then to Detroit proto-punk

Acid Rock & Psychedelic Rock

• LSD (D-lysergic acid diethylamide or ‘acid’) – discovered by accident in 1943

• Seemed to be a chemical extension of cultural enlightenment of the early 1960s

• Beat poets experimented with hallucinogens such as marijuana, hashish, mescaline, & peyote

• 1960s – acid experimentation began on Sunset Strip in L.A. and quickly moved to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco

• Novelist Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest) and his Merry Pranksters began throwing “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” parties in San Francisco in 1965

Psychedelic

• Term frequently used in conjunction with acid rock

• Imitates how music is perceived when under the influence of mind-altering drugs

• Much use of distortion and sound effects

• Form, rhythm, and time become disjointed and distorted

• Songs tend to have languid melodies, erratic mood swings, and use of ‘freak-out’ sequences

• ‘Freak-out’ – musical tangent --- a long, disjunct jam usually started and ended with drum cues

• Many of the psychedelic bands had absurd, nonsense group names like – Strawberry Alarm Clock, Chocolate Watchband, Jefferson Airplane, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Electric Prunes

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhj2gTH7Yc

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-kVFfKezVo

L.A. Acid Rock• Lightly psychedelic

• Lyrics range from somber and introspective to wild ‘freak-out’ sequences

• 1st popular L.A. acid inspired song was Mr. Tambourine Man by the Byrds

• Soon the Mothers of Invention and the Doors were producing LSD inspired songs

The Doors

• Members – Jim Morrison (vocals), Ray Manzarek (organ, electric piano), Robbie Krieger (guitar), John Densmore (drums)

• Were stylistically ahead of their time mainly because of Morrison’s psychologically oriented ‘beat’ lyrics

• They were banned from L.A.’s Whiskey a Go Go after performing “The End” loosely based on the Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex

The Doors

• Named after Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and/or William Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed/All things would appear infinite”

• Led they way to Theatre and Shock Rock

• Important songs---• Light My Fire• People Are Strange• Hello, I Love You• Touch Me• Love Her Madly• Riders on the Storm

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxizIrbcSuU

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Jq1xbQwqw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuxu0HCr0oM

The Beat Poets

• A group of American poets who were disenchanted with the conservatism of the American status quo emerged in the mid to late 1950s

• Some members of the broadcast media referred to them as “Beatniks” in an attempt to chastise the Beats for what appeared to be their left-leaning if not subversive viewpoints

• The term ‘nik’ often was used during the period to imply communist leanings

Jack Kerouac

• On The Road

• Introduced the phrase “Beat Generation” in 1948

• Used the term to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in NYC

The Beat Poets

• The literary effects of Beat novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch on rock music were evident throughout the mid-1960s

• Naked Lunch described the auditory impression of mind-altering drug experience as “heavy metal thunder”

• Term was picked up by the Beat enthusiasts and subsequently used in Steppenwolf’s 1965 song “Born To Be Wild”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWRypqz5-o

The Beat Poets

• Huxley’s novelette The Doors of Perception about mescaline was influential in the decision of Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek to call themselves The Doors

• In many ways Beat literature has as important an impact on mid-sixties rock as the absorption of rhythm and blues had in the mid-fifties rock and roll

• Beat aesthetic combined with the social & political consciousness of the 1960s baby boomers led to the evolution of the hippie counter-culture.

San Francisco Sound• Musical & cultural magnet in the mid-

60s

• Style is a loose-knit combination of folk, blues, jazz, Bluegrass, and hard rock

• Main venues – Avalon Ballroom & the Fillmore Auditorium

• Performers frequently added visual effects to their performances (slide projections & experimental film)

• Trend led to the development of light shows & a shift from dance music to music for listening/experience

San Francisco Sound

• First major acid rock band – Jefferson Airplane

• At the height of acid rock there were about 500 bands in San Francisco

Jefferson Airplane

• Formed in San Francisco in 1965

• Pioneer of counterculture psychedelic rock

• 1st from the San Francisco scene to achieve mainstream success

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdLasOrG6c

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmrMMYpQL4

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0

Jimi Hendrix

• Members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: Jimi Hendrix (guitar, vocal), Noel Redding (bass), Mitch Mitchell (drums)

• Heavily influenced by the British blues tradition

• Hendrix defined 60s guitar playing

• Not so much a pattern players as a conceptualist, was after a “sound” and he would use or invent any technique or device that would provide it for him

Jimi Hendrix

• Along with Pete Townshend, popularized “sculptured sound/noise” in rock music

• Style became a model for the next generation’s guitar players

• Greatest hits – Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, The Wind Cries Mary, All Along the Watchtower

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03yPUlBE5OU

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjwWjx7Cw8I

Grateful Dead

• Original members--- Jerry Garcia (guitar), Phil Lesh (bass), Bob Weir (guitar), Bill Kreutzmann (drums), Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan (keyboards)

• One of the world’s loudest bands

• One of the longest surviving rock acts

• Institution as well as a band

• Most loyal of all fan-clubs – “Family” or “Deadheads”

• Best selling and most successful live band of all time

• Hits – Truckin’, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones, Touch of Grey

• Biggest market was in concert tapes; there are even audio feeds (for a fee) at the concerts

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5jn58DZ6Fw

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8zLTaKxeE

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8dcQHyuf-0

1965-1970The Festival Years

1965 Newport Folk Festival

• Newport, Rhode Island

• Attendance – 71,000

• July 1965

• Performers – Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez

Monterey International Pop

Festival• Monterey, California

• Attendance – 200,000

• June 1967

• Performers – Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Co. (Janis Joplin), Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, The Who, Ravi Shankar

Woodstock Music & Art Fair

• Bethel, New York

• Attendance – 450,000

• August 1969

• Performers – Richie Havens; Country Joe and the Fish; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; The Who; Santana; Jefferson Airplane; Sly and the Family Stone; Jimi Hendrix; Grateful Dead; Joe Cocker

Altamont Festival

• Altamont, California

• Attendance – 300,000

• December 1969

• Performers – Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, Flying Burrito Brothers

Isle of Wight Festival

• English Channel

• Attendance – 600,000

• August 26-30, 1970

• Performers – Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Sly & the Family Stone, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull

• Last performance for Morrison & Hendrix

Flower Power

• Commercialization and marketing of Hippie subculture

• Ballad oriented, flower power melodies are very sing, songy

• Tunes are “laid back”

• No wild, screaming guitar work

• Lyrics tend to reflect peace, good will, and hopeful optimism

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDl8ZPm3GrU

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5bUmx-hk-c

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sjSHazjrWg

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvu3xiFmfDU

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ_WG3d3GL8