Elijah Wald's New Book

Elijah Wald has been performing music and writing about it for awhile, and our paths have crossed recently a couple of times, first at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Mexico City, and then again in Pittsburgh, when he came through on his book tour and I was alerted by mutual friends and went down to hear him. We had a little public discussion about the dearth of opportunities for live performance these days—that’s another story—and I picked up a copy of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (here's the amazon page). Elijah was pretty straightforward about the title being chosen for commercial intent, but every single reviewer on Amazon, for example, slagged him for it nevertheless. Having gotten through the book myself, I’m not against the title; his primary thesis IS that the Beatles, once they removed themselves from the multi-ethnic, dance-driven soup that had always been American popular music, DID change the way popular music was incubated and (not) performed. One of the consequences was virtually the end of interracial bills. He cites Woodstock as an example, with the only two black performers being Greenwich Village folkie Richie Havens and fresh-off-the-boat-with-his-limey-rhythm-section Jimi Hendrix.. I take that back, I’d seen him opening for the Rascals in Central Park in 1967 when he WAS fresh off the boat (and actually exchanged a few words and a handshake with him at the Fillmore East). Woodstock was 1969—Linda and I probably flew over it on our way to Europe for 10 years. Hendrix was dead little more than a year later.

Not to get distracted: Wald traces the history of American popular music when performance and recording opportunities were virtually segregated, but when influences still flowed freely across racial and ethnic divides. One of his key arguments is in favor of the Paul Whiteman legacy, who, as he points out, tends to be dismissed by hard-core jazz critics, while being cited favorably by many jazzers themselves, including Duke Ellington, for his orchestral approach to jazz big-band performance, his commercial success, and his introduction of vocalists (including Bing Crosby).

He also does a careful job of parceling out the credit for the beginnings of rock and roll, including Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Carl Perkins and emphasizing that none of them were working in isolation. Another of Wald’s primary points is that—contrary to the rock historians’ preferred narrative, rock and roll, then rock, did not manage a scorched-earth entry onto the popular music scene: do-wop, crooners, Motown, Chubby Checker and many others shared the charts throughout the Sixties. It was in the aftermath of Sargent Pepper that the album-oriented FM format (and others) started to devolve into today’s atomized media formats and audiences.

Whatever you think of this thesis—and Wald stops there, other than a few marginal references to later developments like hip hop—the book itself is a thoroughly researched and carefully written history that dislodges some comfortable assumptions about popular music, rebuilding its story into a much more complex mosaic.