Confessions of A Rock and Roll History Teacher

I’ve been an adjunct lecturer in rock and roll history at the local campus of our largest state university for twenty-two years. Students seeking to pick up three credit hours of an elective have had majors ranging from nursing to English to mechanical engineering to elementary education. Some have done well; some did poorly.

That time span has been interesting in and of itself. In the early years, I occasionally had students even older than me, who could regale the class with stories about experiences like seeing the Grateful Dead at Fillmore East in 1970. In recent times, they’ve all been considerably younger.

For a textbook, I use Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947 – 1977 by James Miller. In the early years of Rolling Stone magazine, Miller wrote record reviews, and he edited the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll in 1976. He went on to write for myriad other publications on a broad array of subjects, and did some teaching. In the 1990s, he realized his take on the subject of rock history had undergone some changes, which prompted him to write Flowers.

It’s not the kind of book most rock-history teachers would use as a text. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. Each chapter is a vignette about a specific instance that is fraught with implications about the subject at hand. There’s one about the circumstances under which Little Richard recorded “Tutti Fruiti” at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans in 1955, one about Brian Epstein wandering into the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1961 and seeing The Beatles, and so on. He also only takes it through 1977, as he feels that everything that’s come along in rock since then is a derivation of some sort of what developed before then.

One semester about fifteen years ago, two ladies sat in the back of the classroom every week. I assume them to have been friends outside of class. They did pretty well on tests and papers. On the last night of class, one of them raised her hand and said, “We’ve read Miller’s book, and we’ve concluded that he doesn’t like rock and roll,” which led to an interesting discussion about whether one has to like something to become a historian of it.

On my final exam, I ask this question:

4.) In Many Years from Now, Paul McCartney’s memoir, he says:

“One of the things that’s hard for people to realize is that we were on the cusp of the change-over between showbiz styles.The thing we were doing, rock ‘n’ roll, was to become an industry.Probably because of us.The Beat Boom.We opened it all up in America and once America gets hold of a thing, it’s a thing.We weren’t looking to build a huge industry, which is what happened, there was none of that.It was just being in show business, that’s how we looked at it.We thought, this is what it’s like now so we’d better get ready for it, it’ll probably be like this then.But of course it all changed and we were the ones that changed it.”

How did rock and roll fit into the overall landscape of show business prior to the Beatles and how was the overall entertainment industry affected by rock becoming an industry unto itself?

Sometimes the answers are fairly insightful; sometimes they dismayingly miss the mark.

There are certain sociocultural shifts that have always been hard for me to convey, and more so as time goes on. For instance, I’m constantly trying to more effectively impress upon students what kind of phenomenon The Ed Sullivan Show was. It ran on CBS from 1948 to 1971, and aired on Sunday nights. American families would clear off the supper dishes and gather in the TV room to watch it. It was a true variety show. Guests included Broadway show casts, circus acrobats, Jewish standup comedians from the clubs along 52nd Street, and, from 1956 on, rock acts. Something for every member of the family.

Or consider how the grownup press in the United States first reacted to The Beatles upon their 1964 revival. While reporters had been charmed at the press conference at JFK airport, their music and appearance were routinely panned, and no one expected them to have anything like the impact they’ve come to have.

My sister is eight years older than I am. She graduated high school in 1965. She’d cut her musical teeth on “Runaway” by Del Shannon and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” by Curtis Lee. At the equivalent age, I was into the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack, and in short order, Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan and Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead. The sit-ins and teach-ins of her college years didn’t really affect her small liberal arts campus. By the fall of 1970, when I started high school, an underground newspaper was being distributed. My buddies and I were reading Do It by Jerry Rubin.

The great upheaval of Western civilization was a fait accompli by the time I turned 18. Feminism, environmentalism and radical chic had gone mainstream. Led Zeppelin concerts were a commodity.

It’s all shrouded in the mists of antiquity now.

How do I adequately convey the tumultuous impact of the 1968 student takeover of administrative offices at Columbia University in an age of campus safe spaces and queer studies majors? How to put in proper context concern over lyrics to such songs as “Mr. Tambourine Man” in a time when Elon Musk jokes about smoking weed at Twitter board meetings?

I think those students in the back of the classroom some years ago were looking for a hard and fast take from me. For professional reasons, I wasn’t going to give them one, and for personal reasons, I wouldn’t be able to.

Last week, my current class reached the point in the semester at which I talk about the San Francisco Bay Area scene of the mid-to-late 1960s. I played the class some Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Sons of Champlin and Santana. I got misty-eyed and a bit choked up. The old feelings of solidarity with all that that stood for, how it validated by desire to get away from the whole worldview of my square old parents, came rushing back.

But I realize it wasn’t just nostalgia. It was a deep inner conflict.

We’ve lost something as a culture. We’ve cut ourselves off from an artistic and philosophical lineage that had been our birthright as heirs of Western civilization.

It shows. It’s no secret that we’re not very happy and we’re extremely polarized. Schools now routinely employ mental health counselors. (They also routinely have armed law enforcement personnel – “school resource officers” – on hand.) Divorce rates have stabilized, but that’s because the marriage rate has declined.

So I blow hot and cold on whether rock and roll has been, on balance, a force for good or bad. It’s powerful; there’s no denying that. But I think The Who may have made an assessment beyond what they realized when, in 1965, they sang that “things they do look awful cold.” Six years later, after all, they’d determined that they wouldn’t get fooled again.