Art News and Articles: FAR® Columnist
Underground Part II
Hippy to Punk
Within the story of contemporary pop and popular music is a great example of why the counter-culture has been reduced to skid marks on the undies of America.
In the early days of the music industry we saw people who owned publishing companies and hired songwriters to write songs for singers.
The Brill building (Tin Pan Alley) in New York was the most widely identified icon of the period. A medium-sized building filled with little rooms with pianos in each. If you were a hired songwriter, you got a salary and you wrote five days a week. If you got lucky and one of your songs became popular you would get a small piece of the publishing. But the majority belonged to the publisher. The singer would have a manager who would look for songs that would be RIGHT for them. The entire thing was controlled. In the late ‘40s when RnB (race music) started to find an audience and small independent record companies were putting out 78-rpm singles, it didn’t make any real waves for the Tin Pan Alley crowd. It was small, it was off in a corner and it was exclusively a Black product.
As everyone knows RnB begat rock n roll and now in the mid 1950s the Tin Pan Alley people had to start to take notice. They didn’t understand the DOO WHOOP street corner poets, they didn’t like these guys writing their own songs and they thought the music was AWFUL!!!!!
SO they attempted to recreate the form in their own image. They got young songwriters to write the songs – (Carol King, Cynthia Weil, Neil Sadaka). The managers would find WHITE, good looking – not scary –kids to sing the songs written by the other white kids in the little rooms with the pianos. Fabian, Pat Boone, Leslie Gore, etc. These kids were the products of the music establishment. This was intended to maintain control of the industry and drive this silly, sexual RnB and rock n roll into submission. AND they almost did it. Try to imagine that the week the Beatles premiered on the charts in America, the number one song in the country was…DOMINIQUE by the Singing Nun. There was nothing to worry about in terms of the corrupting value of Dominique.
BUT two things happened. The Beatles, the Stones, The Animals, the British invasion, all of these groups had two things in common, they wrote their own songs and played their own songs and the other thing was, they all loved and admired the great American Blues players. This was 1963/64.
By 1966 the Haight Asbury Folk Rock, Acid Rock movement was in high gear. This threw Tin Pan Alley and the major record companies into a panic. They didn’t understand the music, it hit hard and was moving too fast to corral. So they did the only thing they could – Mercury, Warner Bros., Arista, etc., all sent AnR people (Artist and Repertory scouts) to San Francisco to sign up everybody. I am not joking. If you do not understand the music and it all sounds like crap to you, you sign up as much crap as you can and hope for the best. Recording studios sprang up like weeds. Some of the record companies opened their own recording studios. It was a wild and crazy moment. The two major royalty-collecting agencies got into a bidding war over the bands’ publishing rights. Brian Rohan and Michael Stepanian represented most of the bands. One night in 1967 45 to 50 representatives of the SF bands gathered at Brian Rohan’s home, a converted church in the upper Haight. The musicians lounged on pillows and the man from ASCAP and the man from BMI pitched to the group, all of the reasons we should sign with them. This went on for a while until somebody hollered from the audience – "HOW MUCH ARE GONNA PAY US?" That took care of everything. ASCAP offered each writer in each group $1,000 fee. We all signed with ASCAP. Bands present were Blue Cheer, Mother Earth, Tongue and Groove, Santana, The Dead, my band The 50 Foot Hose, and others. The hippy music was being taken seriously at least as a cash cow. BUT by 1972 (the official year that the 60s ended) the record companies had weeded through all of there poor investments, which totaled about 85% of the signed bands. The A and R people had long hair, got loaded, and had brought the hippy musicians into the fold. The record companies were back in charge. The concerts had started to move into the age of the arenas and major festivals. Three dollars at the Fillmore for three bands and six hours of music was a thing of the past.
The next musical catastrophe was the death of the independent radio station. Slowly the music industry professionals continued the slow creep back into the driver’s seat and slowly bought up all of the independents radio stations and replaced them with format radio. The only upside was the spread of college radio stations to fill the gap.
Things were status quo again until 1976 and ‘7. The economic status of the working class in England was terrible. Entire neighborhoods were on the dole (welfare). There was no future for kids coming out of this situation and there were no pop heroes to identify with. The music industry had turned its back on the dangerous qualities of rock ‘n roll.
The rock ‘n rollers had started to take themselves seriously and were playing 20-minute guitar solos. That is like listening to speed freak babble. These rather self-important musicians had nothing to say but people were paying to hear them babble.
So the scruffy and disenfranchised of England started to make Dada music. The first radical position was: you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument or how to sing. The music had two rules: how fast and how loud. And with this the punk gesture was born. Like Dada, being born out of World War 1, Punk was a function of a socio-political situation.
The response from these young artists was a nightmare scream. A noise and a howl that said, "WE ARE ALIVE!" Punk was not a musical style, it was a political statement. The bands completely ignored all of the standard musical conventions. They would save some money, record a song in a $10 an hour studio or with a tape recorder in their rehearsal space and then press 50 singles. When they were done they would press another 50. There was no ASCAP, BMI or royalty structure; the money that you got from the sale of the CDs at your gigs is what you got.
By 1977 Malcolm McLaren, a clothing designer and shop owner on the Kings Road in London, started to pay attention to the underground scene that Punk was. He very quickly designed fashion with safety pins, etc., and he saw the possibility of some good business by packaging a band for a major record company. This next bit is important. The record industry had evolved to the point were it had no interest in what it produced. Unlike the Tin Pan Alley guys who thought they knew what music was, these new guys were simply looking for product. There was not an establishment left to push against. If you did push you were absorbed, kinda like hitting a big pile of clay. This is really an important moment in the discussion of the counter culture. Through the control of the media, Punk quickly became a Musical Style and a fashion.
We still see the fashion today. It is so sweet to see kids trying to be shocking with an 8 inch high Mohawk they worked on for 2 hours before they left the house in their torn jeans and black work boots. It’s a costume. Very much like the three-piece suit, the Burning Man patina, the no sock Gucci loafer look and the earth mama.
So again, what is there to push against today? We are fed. If we want we are stoned. We worship at the alter of FAME for Fame’s sake. People used to be famous for something. We as a culture have no privacy. Our lives are electronically available. Our government spreads fear constantly and lies. The middle class, who is what the American dream had been built by, is on its way out.
So maybe its time to simply look inward and listen to your own mind. Stop the chatter and take back your spirit. The underground and counter culture have gone from masses of like minded people to individuals that simply want to live their lives their way, without government interference. To operate under the radar in plain sight is starting to sound like a really radical thing. All of this desire to control and own takes a lot of work on the part of the controllers and it depended on capitulation on the part of the individual.
This government/business/corporate thing is huge and there are shadow areas where it is possible to move and to operate. In the large shadow of this bloated moment in time, those of us who wish to, can bask quietly in untold freedoms that only require silence.
This your time to be the American of another generation. An American that is not afraid because you use judgment and do not buy the party line.
For an artist this means making your mark your way and living with the consequences.
— by Cork Marcheschi | April 27, 2007
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