A chronological journey through the decades that built rock and roll into the defining cultural force of the twentieth century. History of Rock moves from the genre’s tangled origins through its commercial peaks, genre wars, and seismic reinventions – told as history, not mythology.
By the middle of the 1960s, pop music moved through an industrial system built around turnover. Jukebox operators needed new records, radio schedules favored compact songs that fitted predictable programming clocks, and promotion depended on a continuing supply of releases that could be played repeatedly and sold as individual hits. For much of rock and…
The Engine They Built In the late 1940s, the basement clubs and union halls of Greenwich Village belonged to something more deliberate than a music scene. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, and the organizers around People’s Songs treated music as working infrastructure. An acoustic guitar could travel through a meeting hall or a…
The wooden floor of Southern California’s Rendezvous Ballroom had become part of the amplification problem by 1961. Thousands of young people could fill the room, dance, shout toward the stage, and create an acoustic environment that ordinary guitar equipment had never been designed to defeat. Dick Dale stood in front of them with an exceptionally…
In 1962, the raw material for one of the largest shifts in popular music could still fit inside a paper sleeve. American rhythm and blues records crossed the Atlantic aboard ships, entered British ports, and passed through specialist shops and private collections into rooms where young musicians played them repeatedly. The records carried songs, but…
The institutions had spent the end of the 1950s trying to regain control. The Payola hearings had wounded independent disc jockeys, Alan Freed was finished, Elvis Presley was in the Army, and Buddy Holly was dead. The rawer edges of early rock were giving way to young male singers whose songs, clothes, and public behavior…
On February 3, 1959, the Winter Dance Party tour was already in trouble before an airplane ever left the ground. Buddy Holly had been crossing the Midwest on a bus whose heater had failed during one of the coldest stretches of the tour. The next performance was roughly three hundred miles away, so Holly chartered…