The Steel Guitar Forum

question;

Did Hippies Hurt or Help American Music?

answer:

I can't remember

Jason Odd wrote: Each to their own, but the late 60s-early 70s gave us The country-rock Byrds, Poco, Silver Apples, Three Dog Night, Neil Young, Mannassas, Santana, The Modern Lovers, The new York Dolls, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Black Sabbath, Skid Row, Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, Matthews Southern Comfort, Moby Grape, Pink Floyd, Amon Dull, Amon Dull II, Can, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Taj Mahal Band, Asylum Choir, Moon, Frank Zappa (solo), The Corvettes, The Faces, Deep Purple, The Earl Scruggs Revue, The Jeff Beck Group, Southwind, The Eagles, Great Speckled Bird, the Strange Creek Singers, Seatrain, Savoy Brown, Dr. John, Love, Jim Ford, The Flatlanders, Fletwood Mac, The Band, Knowbody Else, Cargoe, Big Star, Bread, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Delbert & Glen, Swampwater, Brinsley Schwarz, Eternity's Children, Argent, Crazy Horse, Warren Zevon, Red Krayola, Funkadelic, Os Mutantes, Gong, Humble Pie, Joe South, Jimmy Buffett, Bruce Haack, The Millenium, Andy Roberts, the Stonemans, Jack & Misty, Elton John, Duster Bennett, ... there's so much more, so much more...

Great list Jason,

I would also add that band that started up in '69 when a couple of hippie era kids from Philly moved to West Virginia and in '70 opened shows for Alice Cooper and Hot Tuna. Then a year later moved to the bay area of San Francisco, right in the thick of the whole hippie movement. A move to Austin, many records, and 9 Grammies later, they are still going strong as "Asleep At The Wheel"!

Mr. Gleespen, anything from the 60's is suitable. I know that Franky Valli and the Four Seasons is definitely not hippie, but I mention them because they seem to have been part of that "just before" period that the late 60's folks reacted to. And I just saw "Jersey Boys" the other night, so...

Something else that resulted from the Hippie bands was the discovery and embracing of the great blues singers by the white kids. Such artists as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and countless others saw their popularity and fortunes soar as a result of their inclusion in hippie subculture.

Beauty = eyes, ears of said beholder.

Mike makes a really good point. Chuck Berry(who was ripped off by the Beach Boys using the melody to Sweet Little Sixteen for Surfin USA) certainly got taken to the cleaners but it also introduced him to a WASP audience he never would have reached otherwise..Same with Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf whom the Rollings Stones made a living off of for years. Yet in the end ripped off or not the lives of these pioneers were aggrandized by the increase in concert fees and eventually royalties that they received. It is somewhat analogous to the horror of the Vegas Casinos when Beat The Dealer came out. They thought that everyone coming there would have the smarts of the guy who wrote the book. What showed up was an an enormous profit to the casinos when all the suckers who thought buying the book was equivalent to understanding it and dropped a fortune there.

Matt,

The lists are pretty cool, but I think it would also help to understand where most of the musicians were coming from (note: rampant personal opinion follows).

A lot of the musicians of the period started off as folkies or bluegrassers. In the UK, it was skiffle (kind of a cleaned-up version of US folk music). But that's not quite as straightforward as it appears, because people like Mississippi John Hurt and Rev. Gary Davis and Son House were considered "folk", so there was a hefty acoustic blues component (but Chicago blues was still pretty obscure).

Most of the musicians were energized to go into rock and roll by the Beatles, kind of a "hey I can do that!" reaction. So they took what they knew and put electricity to it. That's the start, in a nutshell.

Except for what I think is one other key point, which is at that point it was necessary to be "hip" (as always) but at that point the term was still close to its origins in the beat/jazz world, and it had heavy overtones of "sophisticated", so it was important to be thought of as broad-minded and eclectic. That brought jazz influences, especially about the importance of musicianship, and Indian influences in.

I know this is gross oversimplification, but I've always found that knowing the family tree helps my appreciation. My .02c

-eric

I think that's very interesting, Eric. Thanks for that.

Matt,

Here’s a small list of the non-jazz stuff from the 60s that have had a major influence on me (or at least had major influence on MY influences!). I've also included some links to reviews of these records from allmusic.com.

I’ve left out a lot of the truly obvious (Jimi, Zep, Sgt. Pepper, not to mention ALL of the country rock stuff and most of the hippy/trippy), and this is certainly not in any particular order other than the order in which I thought of them. (and yes, I know Funkadelic is from 1970)

I know FOR SURE some of you guys are going to think some of these choices are nuts. If you feel the need to point it out, please be gentle!

Velvet Underground & Nico
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fqxql5ldhe

Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fqxql5ldhe

Beatles: Revolver
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fqxql5ldae

The Stooges
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fuxq85ldhe

Blue Cheer: Vincebus Eruptum
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fwxqq5ldhe

King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fpxq95ldte

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fwxqw5ldhe

FZ and the MOI: We’re Only In It For the Money
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fexqq5ldse

Pink Floyd: Piper at the Gates of Dawn
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... frxqr5ldje

Kinks: Villiage Green Preservation Society
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fqxql5ld6e

Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fexql5ldte

The Who Sings My Generation
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fqxql5ldfe

Funkadelic: Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=am ... fixqy5ldfe

For what its worth the use of using electric instruments was kind of an explosion...Dylan paved the way and threw down the electric gauntlet, metaphorically speaking, at the 65 Newport Folk Festival while Pete Seeger flipped out backstage and threatened to pull the plug on the amps. Certainly folk music changed forever on that day; this is not to say people in California(The Byrds) weren't goin electric at the same time but Dylan made it an announcement to the world. Although Dylan had released Subterranean Home Sick Blues in March of 65.... the masses didn't really realize what he had done til he showed up at Newport electrified and in your face that was really, to trot out an old cliche the defining moment and I was there to see it. It was a day that changed the musical world!

Let's not forget that both Roger (Jim) McGuinn (Byrds) and Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead) decided to "go electric" AFTER seeing The Beatles in "A Hard Day's Night"...the summer of 1964. (Those are two of note...there have to be others who said, "Let's put a band together!" It's well documented that the Ludwig Drum Company had to operate extra shifts in order to satisfy all the drum kit orders that stemmed from the Beatles' Ed Sullivan appearance in February, 1964.)

I would say that Dylan "threw down the electric gauntlet" to the folkies, but there were tons of other bands that were already playing electric. I agree, it was a defining moment when Dylan changed, especially the tour he made in 1966 with The Hawks, soon to become The Band. That tour changed music forever. Never before had there been a meld of rock and roll with intellectual lyrics. Dylan influenced so many. Because of Dylan and joints, The Beatles songwriting became so much better.




"Dylan's career as a folk singer - and the career imposed upon him, his unwanted role as "voice of a generation" - had hit a wall. The Beatles and others had changed the world he lived in. He heard them as a challenge and as a beckoning, a rebuke and a spark. Marcus recreates the brilliantly competitive pop world of 1965, and the energy, the anger, the thrill and the horror that, in his response to everything around him, on the radio, in America at large, Bob Dylan turned into a revolutionary six-minute single. Forty years later it remains the signal accomplishment of modern music. It drew to itself disparate traditions of American music and speech; it redrew the map of the country itself; it left behind a world that was not the same. The whole adventure is here."

What you don't hear about Jimi Hendrix these days is that he was a top notch jazz guitar player. There were many who thought he was going to be the next great player who would repopularize and revolutionize jazz guitar. What he did instead is well known. Many people were very disapointed, to say the least. On the Woodstock recording you can get a hint of some of the exquisite jazz improvisation of which he was capable. As much as some people idolize him, he seems the one person from that period whose abilities are probably the most UNDERestimated.

Eric J.'s last post is right on!

I think the influence of the Beatles on American young musicians in the Sixties cannot be overstated. That's certainly true speaking for myself! I'd been playing folk music for about a year when the Beatles burst on the world scene and changed my life forever (I was thirteen). Before that it had never occurred to me that playing electric guitar in rock and roll music was something I could do! Somehow rock and roll musicians had seemed like some kind of special exotic elite steeped in the culture of the American South, unlike me, but then, hey, if some guys from Liverpool, far from the native soil, could do it, why not me? I'd like to see the aggregate sales figures for electric guitars from the year before the Beatles hit compared to the year after.

With the Beatles it was more than music, it was the entire culture shift. When they grew long hair, so did we, when they got into Eastern Religions, everyone else experimented with it, when it was LSD, many of us jumped on the bandwagon. Of course it was their mass media exposure that made them the "champions" of these things, but I think they had a bigger impact on the social ramifications of the era than they did the actual music. Their music was really all over the map. But the bluesmen, as Mike pointed out, had perhaps a bigger impact on the music--Cream, Zeppelin, Hendrix, Allman Bros, Canned Heat, Blue Cheer, etc., all made their mark by playing rocked-out versions of Dixon, Waters, Hooker, Johnson, et al.

According To Roger McGuinn the Byrds recorded Mr Tambourine man in January of 1965, It wasn't released until May predating Dylans electric freakout at Newport. Apparently Dylan had made a recording of the song but thought someone was singing out of tune on the track so he didn't release it right away. The Byrds actually got a chance to record it because of Miles Davis who recommended them to Columbia; They were granted studio time for one cut if it was a hit they were signed if not forget about it. Apparently everyone tried singing lead and they ended up with Roger singing on it. McGuinn was also the only one who was allowed to play on it the rest were studio guys including drummer Hal Blaine..The twelve sting was recorded thru the board with some studio compression not thru an amp

Peter Dollard wrote:Apparently Dylan had made a recording of the song but thought someone was singing out of tune on the track so he didn't release it right away.

Did they ever figure out that it was the lead singer? (Y'know, nobody told the Emperor he had no clothes on either!)
.

When I was researching it I saw that and I wondered who the guy was in the backup group that sang worse than Dylan I was hoping someone would pick up on the humor and you were right on point Jim!!!!

Kinda ironic, ain't it? I mean, Dylan thinking somebody in his band was singing outta tune?? Sheesh! What was he afraid of? That they'd make him sound good? LOL!

[p.s. Now before y'all flame me for that remark, I'll just go on the record saying I think he's a terrific songwriter and I'd rather hear almost anybody sing his songs, other than him.]

Judy Collins has a really nice version of this song check it out....

Peter Dollard wrote:...if you accept the premise that they are gonna be who they are gonna be musically you can actually suppress your pitch perception and just enjoy the music...

Wish I could get away with that on steel... [well, actually I do from time to time. ]
.

http://www.guitarplayer.com/article/rog ... ct-04/1550

"I still didn't know what an electric 12-string was, but when the Beatles released 'A Hard Day's Night,' I had to find out how they were getting that sound. So we made a reconnaissance run to a movie theater that was showing A Hard Day's Night and took notes. Ringo had Ludwig drums and John had that little Rickenbacker 325. George played a Gretsch most of the time, but he also had a Rickenbacker 360, which looked like a 6-string until he turned sideways and you could see six extra tuning pegs emerging from behind the headstock, like a classical guitar. Once I realized what it was, I traded in my Gibson acoustic 12 and bought a Rickenbacker 360/12."

http://www.appleseedrec.com/rogermcguinn/about/

"Initially known as the Jet Set, the trio [Gene Clark, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn] was inspired to expand the sound and line-up of their band by the "British Invasion" of rock groups (and a viewing of the Beatles' movie, "A Hard Day's Night"). Conga drummer Mike Clarke was drafted as drummer (primarily for his resemblance to the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones), bluegrass mandolinist Chris Hillman was persuaded to take up the bass guitar, and the purchase of electric instruments and a drum kit solidified the transformation. The jangle of McGuinn's electric Rickenbacker 12-string guitar was to become an influential trademark still heard to this day in the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, REM, Elvis Costello and countless others."

The Tambourine Man track with the "out of tune singer" was reputed to have been with Ramblin' Jack Elliot...

I'm sure he was just trying to pitch-match his part to Dylan's lead vocal.

I don't see how you can say Dylan "paved the way" for electric instruments, when they had been used so prominently for over a decade in R&B and rock'n'roll, even country. I think what happened was that Dylan took the intellectual poetic approach of city-billy folk into what was already electric rock'n'roll. The leaders of folk like Pete Seeger came from the pre-rock'n'roll generation, and thought rock, and by association electric instruments, were crass and commercial. But I think the Beatles, etc. forced Dylan to realize he was from the rock'n'roll generation. He had paid his dues to the older, purist folkies. At Newport he said goodbye to them and followed his heart into rock. The rest of us in the rock'n'roll generation said "Yes!" We were so relieved and hyped that he finally wedded two strains of our schizophrenic lives, commercial rock'n'roll and so-called non-commercial folk (which by that time had become pretty commercial itself).

And, BTW, I agree with Jimbeaux. Dylan has got to be the worst singer in history to become a super-star singer.

BTW, here's an interesting site for those who were around Austin, TX in the hippie years and remember the local underground paper The Rag.