CHAPTER 18 | ROCK IN THE 1960s 453FUN, FUN, FUN TILL WE GROW UP: ROCK COMES OF AGE
By the late 1950s rock and roll enjoyed a prominent place in the youth culture of
the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Some British youngsters encoun-
tered African American styles through recordings by southern and Chicago
blues artists. Many more took in the sounds of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and
Elvis Presley. By around 1960 the area of the rough-edged port city of Liverpool
alone boasted almost three hundred rock and roll clubs and as many local bands,
including one that had begun in 1956 as the Quarrymen and was now called the
Beatles.
Scoring an immediate hit with their fi rst single in 1962, “Love Me Do,” the
Beatles won such ardent popularity in Britain that their reception earned its
own label: “Beatlemania.” American Beatlemania began in 1964 with the group’s
appearance on CBS Television’s Ed Sullivan Show. The screaming teenagers
brought to mind Benny Goodman’s performances in the 1930s, Frank Sinatra’s
in the 1940s, and Elvis Presley’s in the 1950s. And their enthusiasm helped to
enrich the record industry’s coffers through a remarkable sales development:
the Beatles’ fi rst LP, Meet the Beatles, outsold the group’s fi rst single by a margin of
3.6 million to 3.4 million, the fi rst time an album had ever sold more copies than
its single counterpart.
Beatlemania and the ensuing British Invasion—the American fascination
with British bands in the 1960s, most notably the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—
had a lasting effect on American popular music in at least three ways. First, the
British musicians’ admiration for blues and early rock and roll artists led to a
resurgence of interest in those artists in their native land. Second, the Beatles,
working closely with record producer George Martin, built on the songwriting
and production achievements of people like Carole King and Phil Spector. In
the space of only a few years their records trace a skyrocketing development in
sophistication and artistry, raising the standards of what a popular song could
aspire to be. And third, the success of Meet the Beatles signaled a shift away from
the single toward the album as the focus of rock musicians’ artistic efforts.
All of these factors refl ected an artistic exchange between British and American
rock musicians. Among other infl uences, the Beatles found inspiration in one of
the most innovative of all rock artists: Bob Dylan. Abandoning folk music for rock,
Dylan brought to popular music his nuanced approach to the protest song, replac-
ing a naïve “us and them” sensibility with an understanding that good and evil are
intertwined in ways that implicate everyone. And to his earlier literary and musical
infl uences—Woody Guthrie, the Beats, British Romantic poets, and the French sym-
bolist Arthur Rimbaud—Dylan added a deeper engagement with the grotesque and
the absurd, with existentialism, and with dreams and hallucinations. In an ear-
lier day, such mental terrain would never have inspired popular songs. But never
before had the popular music audience included so many educated young people
who were searching avidly for messages.
Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), in which he sings caustic words to a joy-
ous, gospel-tinged accompaniment, shows the power of this fresh approach to
songwriting and performance. Electric guitars, piano, and organ play over a
foundation of bass guitar, drums, and tambourine. Dylan’s voice slices in over
the rolling tide of electrifi ed sound. Too free in form, repetitive in material,
and scarce in vocal melody to pass as a standard pop, country, or folk song, this
number is an early example of a rock song, differing from 1950s rock and rollthe Beatlesthe British InvasionBob Dylan“Like a Rolling Stone”172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 453 23/01/13 11:02 AM