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…