Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay
By Mitch Berg
It was sixty years ago today – when Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets officially reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This is generally regarded as the beginning of the “Rock and Roll Era”.
Read Steyn, of course; it’s worth it.
The parlor game for me, of course, is noting what parts of pop music history are before and after the half-way mark of Rock and Roll history.
Music that was released closer to Rock around the Clock than to the present day?
- All Rolling Stones albums up through Undercover.
- All of Prince’s albums before Sign O The Times
- Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms
- Tears for Fears Songs From The Big Chair
- Every Springsteen album up through Born in the USA – and Live ’75-’85 is coming up pretty soon, here.
- Every Bob Dylan album you probably remember
- All Tom Petty albums up through Southern Accents
And the 1/3 point? July 9, 1975? Anything before then is half as far from the beginning of the era as from today.
- Who’s Next
- The entire Beatles’ catalog
- Born to Run
- Pretty much the entire Stax/Volt catalog
- Every song Bachmann Turner Overdrive ever put on the Top 40
- The first three Rush albums
- The entire singer/songwriter fad
And the 1/4 point? Music that is three times as far from today than from the beginning of the era, before July 9, 1970?
- Tommy
- Everything “Sixties”: Hendrix, the Doors, the entire hippie thing.
Anyway – read Steyn.
July 9th, 2015 at 12:46 pm
This post reminds me of your recent discussion about “Dream On.” That song is 42 years old and it still gets played at least once a day on KQRS. If you go back 42 years from 1973, you’d be talking about the big hits of 1931. I don’t recall hearing “Minnie the Moocher” or “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a 5 and 10 Cent Store)” on the radio back then.
July 9th, 2015 at 12:50 pm
Mr. D,
Along those lines; last year, I heard some Australian power-pop boy band (they actually play instruments, at least) doing a cover of the Romantics’ “What I Like About You”. The song was from 1979 – 35 years old when the cover came out.
A similar cover in 1979 would have been originally released in 1944. Did that ever happen?
Well, yeah – “Manhattan Transfer” had a hit with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” around then. But that was very clearly a novelty.
July 10th, 2015 at 9:21 pm
Well they still play Bach n’stuff, so there’s that….