My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #4, July 27, 1998

ROCK OF AGES

If you want to get some sense of what that eclectic composite known as rock music is all about, you could hardly do better than look at the poll VH-1 conducted recently , asking who were the 100 greatest rock performers of all time (which is to say, since 1954). Unlike most such surveys, VH-1 didn't ask the critics, or even the fans. They asked the musicians themselves.

This gives the results a special credibility, because these musicians were talking about the performers who blew their minds, changed their ideas of what music could be, and made them say "That's what I wanna do when I grow up." What did performers as diverse as the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Kiss and Creedence Clearwater Revival have in common? When VH-1 showed the musicians talking about their admired performers, the word that cropped up most often was "risk-taking."

The top 100 included a lot of performers who broke the mold because they could no more fit their talent inside standard musical forms and instrument sounds than Cinderella's sisters could squeeze their outsize feet into the glass slipper. More than this, these performers struck it rich with a particular sound which they could have kept on milking for all it was worth. Instead, they grew and changed over time, experimenting with new forms and sounds and content.

Of course, choosing a top 100 is inherently arbitrary. Once you get past the obvious greats, there's a lot of room for argument--if Tom Petty (#43), master of 3-chord kickass rock and roll, why not John Mellencamp? if Joni Mitchell(#32) and Carole King(#85) why not Carly Simon?

But the ones in the top 10 would be on anybody's list of the greats of rock, though we might not all put them in the same order:

1. the Beatles
2. the Rolling Stones
3. Jimi Hendrix
4. Led Zeppelin
5. Bob Dylan
6. James Brown
7. David Bowie
8. Elvis Presley
9. the Who
10. the Police

All ten are people who redefined popular music, and people whose intense theatricality transformed the pop music concert, but the Beatles and Dylan belong at the very top because they did more than anyone to change the sound, the form, and the content of rock.

The Beatles became the first of the studio artists, going beyond all the normal constraints of instruments, toying with the electronic possibilities of sound in the most influential rock album of all time, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Picking up where they left off, Jimi Hendrix transformed the guitar from an instrument that went plunk plunk to an instrument that could weep like a lost child and wail like the damned. Led Zeppelin also followed in their wake, getting the most astonishing sounds out of their guitars (any instrument dealer will tell you that kids trying out electric guitars always want to test-drive the instrument on "Stairway to Heaven"). Some later artists, learning from the Beatles what could be created in the studio, never even bothered to perform live at all, making up their sound by layering track upon electronically altered track.

With the Beatles' 5-minute long "A Day in the Life," and Dylan's 6-minute long hit, "Like a Rolling Stone," rock filed for divorce from the tired old musical form of 3 minutes of verse, verse, bridge, verse. Without that groundbreaking, we might not have had later long free-form pieces like Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," or some masterworks of Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. After the Beatles and Dylan, many musicians made the structure up as they went along.

Dylan, Elvis, and the Beatles also were the first of the fusionists, melding disparate strains of rock together. The Beatles combined the music and instruments of India with rock, while Dylan married folk music to rock by turning it electric. Elvis, of course, synthesized his rock out of rhythm and blues and hillbilly music.

Just as importantly, the Beatles and Dylan between them changed the subject matter of rock. Before them, songs were almost obsessively focused on love, except for the occasional cute little novelty number. After them, there was no subject that wasn't fair game to sing about, from revolution to the empty lives of Eleanor Rigby and the Nowhere Man. They liberated content, and rock music has talked about our real lives ever since.

It's given us songs about all our sins and weaknesses: racism, child abuse, guns and mass murder. Rock became the music of protest, the beat and the poetry that powered the anti-war movement and Earth Day.

But rock lyrics have also celebrated the "Good Vibrations" and the "Glory Days" in our lives. They have talked about our cultural obsessions and icons, in all those countless songs about cars, and in songs about Superman, baseball, Marilyn Monroe, television, and rock music itself. Where earlier pop music dwelt on love, rock music has tended to get more swiftly to the point--"Let's Talk about Sex," baby.

Would this liberation of content have happened anyway? Maybe. But the Beatles and Dylan started it, and they clearly belong at the top of the list.

Elvis belongs in the top ten because, in a deeply segregated musical world, he took black music, thought of as dangerously sexual, and made the sound just white enough to be marginally respectable. At the same time, of course, he made aggressive male sexuality the stuff of young girls' dreams. (Not until Elvis and James Dean were the heroes in romance novels portrayed as darkly handsome, sexually challenging outsiders.)

The Stones, David Bowie, and the Who were the ultimate live performers, each adding their own special little twist. They all put the sex and drugs and swagger into rock and roll, creating the flamboyant, larger-than-life rock star image. The Stones gave us great songs like "Start Me Up" and "Ruby Tuesday," while Mick Jagger's sinuously suggestive movements pumped up the crowds. David Bowie put on and discarded personas like a snake shedding one layer of skin after another--though some people never stopped thinking of him as Ziggy Stardust. The Who were the masters of noise, controlled destruction, and attitude ("Hope I die before I get old")--but they also created the first rock opera, and the first cohesive long albums.

James Brown belongs here as one of the first black artists to legitimize black music and desegregate rock and roll, forcing the industry to let him sing his own rhythm and blues, instead of having it covered by white performers. And as my son points out, NO ONE ever did more to clarify that rock is dance music. He got us off our duffs and made us shake our booties. We weren't just listening to music anymore--we were becoming part of it.

The Police were also fusionists, blending in Bob Marley's reggae sound with rock and jazz. In a sense they epitomize rock and roll itself, which has grown and regenerated over time by picking up musical sounds from all over the world, putting them together, reshuffling the deck, and creating something entirely new.

What the whole top 100 does in a compelling way is show you that rock is a game anybody with talent can play. The rock 100 is made up of working class kids from London, Liverpool, Seattle, Dublin, and Motown. It's also got good ol' boys, artsy college kids, tortured neurotic white girls, ministers' daughters who grew up singing gospel music, guys wearing dreadlocks, a family whose father bought them instruments and said, "Make us all rich." Like the music itself, the top 100 is a rich blend of gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, country, folk and hillbilly music, laid over a bass line of African rhythms.

In fact, even more than America, rock music is the world's biggest, tastiest melting pot. Except it does more than nourish our spirit. It makes us feel the music from head to toe, makes our bodies come alive, and makes us want to dance.