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Rock Concert
A High-Voltage History, from Elvis to Live Aid
Marc Myers
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Rock Concert
A High-Voltage History, from Elvis to Live Aid
Marc Myers
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About This Book
Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone 's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise. Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances, spanning the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colourful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.
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RockmusikPART 1
THE 1950s
The rock concert can be traced to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, when R&B revues were held at Johnny Otisâs Barrelhouse in the cityâs Watts section. At the time, L.A. was filled with young jazz and blues musicians, newly formed independent record labels, and clubs featuring nearly every type of popular music. The city and its surrounding suburbs also were flush with independent radio stations newly granted licenses by the FCC in hopes of keeping radio alive as TV proliferated. In 1950, in the South Central section of the city, where most Black residents lived, a few disc jockeys at low-signal stations began playing R&B records by local artists. By 1951, Black, white, Mexican-American, and Asian teens who lived in the area began to pick up R&B on their radios. One of those disc jockeys, Hunter Hancock, was hosting live R&B concerts and promoting them on his radio show. Teens soon showed up at the concerts in droves. Captivated by the music onstage, they ignored L.A.âs segregation laws and mingled freely with each other. Rebellion against adult norms had begun.
Word of L.A.âs growing R&B market soon reached Billboard and other music trade publications. In Cleveland, disc jockey Alan Freed started playing R&B records. When he first tried to hold a concert there in 1952, too many people showed up and the concert was canceled. More Freed concerts followed at regional theaters. By mid-decade, an electric blues guitarist in Chicago named Chuck Berry began performing at clubs and recording what would become rock ânâ roll. In Memphis, Elvis Presley combined country and R&B and performed live on the radio and at county fairs, clubs, and sports arenas. Known as rock ânâ roll, the music reached New York in 1955, when Freed, who had taken a DJ job there, began holding concerts at a large Brooklyn movie theater, launching the multiday rock ânâ roll revue for integrated teenage audiences.
By the late 1950s, rock ânâ roll held sway over teens nationwide. The music and artists were also featured regularly on TV jukebox shows and in movies for the teenage market. The musicâs surging popularity was helped in great measure by payolaâhefty cash payments and gifts of value provided by middlemen to radio DJs to ensure the repeated airplay of specific records. Payola also took the form of ad dollars that record companies spent at specific radio stations in exchange for airplay. Interestingly, such gifts werenât illegal at the time if broad legal loopholes were exploited. The value of payola was immeasurable and immediate. The frequent play of a record increased its sales potential and improved the odds of it becoming a national hit.
Chapter 1
LOS ANGELES AUDITORIUMS
Since 1916, Los Angeles had been a prime destination for millions of Black people migrating from the South for better-paying factory jobs and freedom from the threat of racial terrorism. They brought with them a passion for the blues and dance music. Before long, Black musicians in the city combined the blues and dance beats, and the music landed on jukeboxes at bars and clubs in Black neighborhoods. In addition, many early R&B songs had adult themes camouflaged by lyrics laced with innuendo, and most of the artists who recorded them were young adults. Those who were too young to drink in bars could hear R&B live in theaters and ballrooms or listen to it on small local radio stations. Rising sales of affordable nightstand radios let white teens in the L.A. suburbs pick up the signals. The question was: Where could they see the artists perform?
Ernie Andrews
(Los Angeles jazz, blues, and pop singer)
Los Angeles was wide open in the mid-1940s. All the major big bands and acts stopped in the city to perform and kick back, especially in the winter, when touring the country was harder. Top bands made short films in Hollywood or appeared in feature films. The city really became a music center after Americaâs entry into World War II in December â41, when L.A. was a major military port. Soldiers and sailors stationed on bases near the city as well as crowds of defense workers sought out entertainment. So did the many Blacks who had already migrated to the city from all over the country to work in the regionâs war plants.
After school and over the weekends, I worked as an usher at the 2,000-seat Lincoln Theatre, one of Central Avenueâs major concert halls. When I was seventeen, I was promoted at the Lincoln to head usher. Amateur nights, on Wednesdays, were packed. Everyone who was trying to break into show business would appear. I sang on those nights in my uniform. After each performance, youâd wait for Pigmeat Markham or Bardu Ali or Sybil Lewis to come out and hold a hand over your head. If the audience didnât like you, theyâd let you know it, and youâd have to get off. But they loved me, and Iâd be onstage so long that Pigmeat and Dusty Fletcher would have to cut me off to let others get on.
There were plenty of places to hear music and dance in L.A. in the 1940s, like the 5-4 Ballroom on the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Monet, and the Elks Hall on Central Avenue. Theyâd have dancing and singing and a mixture of jazz and R&B. The Downbeat on South Central Avenue was always hot. Youâd have to be twenty-one to get into many of them, but I was tall for my age. In 1945, I was discovered by songwriter Joe Greene during one of those Lincoln Theatre amateur shows. Overnight, he wrote âSoothe Meâ for me. I recorded the ballad with the Clara Lewis Trio on Greeneâs Gem label. We sold 300,000 copies. Then Joe wrote another one for me, âDonât Let the Sun Catch You Cryinâ.â It was even bigger.
I performed on Central Avenue with everybody you could name. I was trying to gain momentum. I performed at the Downbeat, the Last Word, the Dunbar Hotel, and Club Alabam. Many of the people who came up from the South loved the blues. They grew up with it and lived it. Unlike other vocalists, R&B singers didnât just stand there and sing. They moved with the music. Thatâs true of the blues shouters and the vocal groups, too. Many of these artists were earthier than jazz singers but not as schooled or as polished. Blues with a dance beat became hugely popular. Young people caught the music in L.A. on radio shows on small stations, hosted by guys like Hunter Hancock and Dick âHuggy Boyâ Hugg. Though these DJs were white, they sounded Black and created opportunities for everyone in the Black community.
In the late 1940s, I remember seeing R&B tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely at the Last Word, across from Club Alabam on Central Avenue. Heâd leave the stage playing his horn and lead everyone out into the street, honking and stomping. Bardu Ali had a full band that featured Johnny Otis on drums. They were partners in a club called the Barrelhouse. Johnny Otis was a giant. He was a great drummer and he got the beat. He brought a lot of Black R&B artists along. Even though he was white, he was dark and sounded Black.
Mike Stoller
(songwriter and record producer with Jerry Leiber)
In 1940, when I was seven, I began spending summers at an interracial summer camp called Wo-Chi-Ca, which stood for Workersâ Childrenâs Camp. It was near Hackettstown, New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York. Such camps were unusual then. One day, I heard someone playing boogie-woogie on a piano in the campâs barn. I slipped inside and saw a Black teenager sitting at a beat-up upright. I was mesmerized. When he left, I approached the piano and tried to do what I heard him doing. After the summer, when I went home to the Sunnyside section of Queens, New York, I kept trying.
I was crazy about boogie-woogie. For the next few years, I couldnât hear enough of it. My interest was so obsessive that when I was ten, I traveled by subway to take six or seven lessons from the famous pianist and composer James P. Johnson. He lived in Jamaica, Queens. This was in 1943 and â44. My life would have been very different if I hadnât taken those lessons. While I may have picked up some of the blues listening to the radio, getting it firsthand from James P. was much more powerful.
Still, like many kids after World War II, my imagination was awakened by the radio. Before television, thatâs all we had on each day. The radio was my doorway to the adult world, especially adult music. Black artists were foreign to most other white kids then. I listened to stations that played R&B and jazz, with disc jockeys like âSymphony Sidâ Torin. I heard musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, and Louis Jordan and vocal groups like the Ravens and the Orioles. In my early teens, I spent a lot of time with a friend, Al Levitt, taking the subway into Manhattan to Fifty-Second Street, where all the jazz clubs were and the bebop musicians played. On Saturdays, we went to a social club on 124th Street in Harlem. The music was remarkable and exciting.
In 1949, when I was sixteen, my family moved to Los Angeles. L.A. then was a city of transplants: there were whites from the Southwest, Blacks from the South, Mexicans, and Asians. They were largely isolated in their own neighborhoods with distinct borders, but I socialized with kids from all these groups in my senior year at Belmont High. That was a lot more exciting than my all-white high school back in Forest Hills, Queens. In May 1950, when I was a freshman at Los Angeles City College and living at home, someone called me on our phone. It was a guy named Jerry Leiber. Heâd heard about me from a drummer he knew and asked if I wanted to write songs with him. Jerry said he had moved with his mother to L.A. in 1945 from Baltimore and that he wrote lyrics. I politely told him I wasnât interested in pop music. Jazz was my thing.
Less than an hour later, Jerry was at my front door. He handed me pages of lyrics. When I saw that his lyrics were in the form of twelve-bar blues, I agreed to write with him. I turned Jerry on to some of the jazz artists I loved and he got me into R&B and the blues. Of course, Iâd always been into boogie-woogie, which is really what brought us together. Many boogie-woogie records at the time had a blues song on the flip side. Jerry and I were like two sides of the same record.
Jerry and I hung out at record shops, theaters, and clubs on South Central Avenue. After I met Jerry, weâd go see producer Gene Normanâs annual Blues Jubilee concerts at the Shrine Auditorium near the University of Southern California. Gene was a big disc jockey then, more on the jazz side than R&B. One day we met Gene, and he told us where a lot of the R&B musicians performed. So Jerry and I went to the theaters and clubs in search of artists who might record our songs.
At one of these placesâClub Alabam, next to the Dunbar Hotelâwe met Wynonie Harris, Percy Mayfield, and others. We also met Jimmy Witherspoon and gave him our song âReal Ugly Woman.â He wound up recording it live at a concert at the Shrine in 1950. Through sheer luck, the concert was taped, and the tape of our song was released on a record. Jerry and I went everywhere and met everyone we could on South Central Avenue. It was a thriving main street in the cityâs Black community. Jerry and I felt like we belonged.
In 1950 and â51, Gene Norman and Hunter Hancock were the big R&B concert promoters in L.A. At some concert, I remember writing a big band arrangement for the Robins after they had a hit with our song âLoop De Loop Mamboâ in 1954. I wrote out the trumpets the same way my right hand would play the notes on the keyboard. I was thrilled with the result. There also were concerts in larger clubs, like the 5-4 Ballroom with Big Jay McNeely. A lot of white and Mexican-American kids came to hear him, Chuck Higgins, Gil Bernal, and other performers. Even in cases where radio stations were aimed primarily at a Black audience, DJs would announce where concerts were held. White kids who otherwise never would have heard of these events found their way there.
At the time, there were five or six independent R&B record companies in the city, labels like the Mesner brothersâ Aladdin, Art Rupeâs Specialty, Otis and Leon RenĂ©âs Excelsior and Exclusive, and the Bihari brothersâ Modern. Lester Sill, who did sales and promotion for Modern, first met Jerry at Nortyâs Music, a record store on Fairfax where Jerry worked after school. Lester introduced us to a few people, including Ralph Bass of Federal Records. Ralph in turn introduced us to Johnny Otis. All Jerry and I wanted was to write good R&B and blues songs for the Black artists we revered. Our heroes were Charles Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon. When Johnny Otis introduced us to artists like Little Esther and Big Mama Thornton, they needed songs to perform and record. You didnât have to ask us twice. We wrote âHound Dogâ for Big Mama in about fifteen minutes. Those fifteen minutes changed our lives.
Bob Willoughby
(Los Angeles photographer)
In 1947, when I was twenty, I lived at my motherâs house on Marvin Avenue in Los Angeles. I loved listening to jazz and R&B on the radio. The musicâs energy, soul, and beat were mesmerizing. I also admired the cool confidence of these musicians on- and offstage. I was passionate about photography then and had been from the age of twelve, when my parents first bought me a camera. By 1948, I sat in on photography classes at the University of Southern Californiaâs School of Cinematic Arts. I couldnât afford college, so auditing classes was the next best way to learn. Before long, I began working as an assistant for several photographers I had been studying with. During my downtime, I photographed dancers and jazz musicians. I set up a darkroom in the garage, where it was pitch-black at night. In the garage, I always had my radio tuned to jazz and R&B stations.
One night in late â51, I was listening to KFOX, an R&B station. The DJ, Hunter Hancock, began promoting a midnight concert he was hosting at the Olympic Auditorium. He was urging listeners to come down to see the show. The Olympic was an arena on South Grand Avenue built in 1924 and often used for boxing matches. The idea of starting a concert at midnight was so intriguing I had to take my cameras and see what it was all about. I walked into the Olympic sometime after midnight, when the concert was already underway. The hall felt as if it was rocking on its foundation. I could see the audience on their feet, screaming. You could taste the energy. I had never seen or heard anything to match it. It was my introduction to the amazing tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely. Big Jay stood where the fight ring was normally set up, in the center. He was playing his heart out, and the crowd was exploding around him. He had created some sort of resonance with the audience. In some weird way, he seemed to be playing them.
What I saw was so mind-boggling that I found myself scrambling for the cameras around my neck as I ran down the aisle toward the fireworks. I was afraid I was going to miss it all. But I didnât really have to worry. Big Jay was a marathon player. I was so caught up in the excitement, I climbed up on the stage without thinking. Big Jay was strutting back and forth onstage, playing run after run on his sax and honking his way through forty-five minutes of pulsating, explosive rhythm. While playing, he kneeled down, he sat, he lay flat on his back. He played into the faces of orgasmic girls. He was on some spaceflight. He perspired until his clothes were soaking. And then he took off his wet jacket without missing a beat.
The crowd was nearly hysterical. Big Jay literally was a pied piper. I was told that at another concert in San Diego, he had swept the entire audience out of the theater and led them on a tour around the block while honking on his saxophone. All of this was much to the dismay of the local police. In L.A., the police werenât too sure what might happen at this gig either. You could see them in the crowd, probably looking for drugs. But with Big Jay in orbit onstage, the crowd was already euphoric.
Big Jay McNeely
(R&B tenor saxophonist)
I decided to play the saxophone when I was sixteen, around 1943. My brother played the instrument and was an excellent musician. When he was drafted during World War II, he left his saxophone home. I was working at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company at the time. I decided music would be a better bet for me. I rode my bike each day to Alma Hightowerâs house and took lessons for twenty-five cents. Then I took lessons with a gentleman who played first saxophone chair with the RKO Studio Orchestra. When my brother, Robert, came home from World War II, we both studied voice with a guy who would teach the Hi-Loâs and the McGuire Sisters. My brother and I figured eventually weâd have to sing and that studying singing would help us with our blowing.
In 1947, I played at the Barrelhouse Club, owned by drummer Johnny Otis. It was right down the street from my home in Watts. There was a lot of blues energy there. At the end of 1948, Ralph Bass, an A&R guy who was at Savoy Records at the time, asked me if I wanted to do a record. I said yeah. He told me to put a tune together. A kid I knew in Watts had a record shop. He gave me a record by Glenn Miller that opened with a drummer playing the sock cymbal. I canât remember the name of the song. But I built a blues off of it called âDeaconâs Hop,â which became a #1 hit on Billboardâs jukebox ârace recordsâ chart in early â49. Hunter Hancock broke in the record by playing it a lot. Heâs the one who started playing race music, our music, in L.A.
One night on tour in 1950, we played Clarksville, Tennessee. When we played for the first time, the audience didnât respond. They just sat there. I couldnât understand that. The music usually got people going. So on the next set I did something different. I got down on my knees to play. Then I laid down on the stage and played from there. People went crazy. After the concert, I said to myself, âIâm going to try this again.â So I did it in Texas. And again, everyone went crazy. Back in L.A., I did it, too. The kids went nuts. They loved that I was on my back blowing like th...