TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1960s) Folk & Pop Music--Woodstock </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <link 05250> <link 05251> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Folk & Rock Music--Woodstock </hdr> <body> [Americans sang along with the folksies and danced to the ever more ubiquitous rock 'n' roll--the whole country was grooving to the driving beat of youth's music.] (July 11, 1960) The Kingston Trio's Sold Out was anything but. With fond backward glances at Billboard's bestseller chart, where Sold Out last week led all the rest, Capitol Records was keeping all music shops well supplied with the hottest album cut so far by the hottest group in U.S. popular music. Hoisted to these heights by the noose that hung Tom Dooley--the ballad was sleeping in an album they cut early in 1958--the Kingston Trio have added to the burgeoning U.S. folk music boom a slick combination of near-perfect close harmony and light blue humor. To help their predominantly collegiate and post-collegiate audiences identify with them, the three do their best to festoon themselves in Ivy, wear button-down shirts, even chose the name Kingston because it had a ring of Princeton about it as well as a suggestion of calypso. (June 1, 1962) It is not absolutely essential to have hair hanging to the waist--but it helps. Other aids: no lipstick, flat shoes, a guitar. So equipped, almost any enterprising girl can begin a career as a folk singer. Enough already have to make them a fixture of current U.S. college life--like the "A" student and the Goldwater button. What most of the singers have in common is their age (early 20s) and their scorn of the "commercial." The most gifted of the newcomers is New York-born Joan Baez, 21, who has sold more records than any other girl folk singer in history, and who last week had two albums perched high on the pop charts. Songstress Baez boasts a pure, purling soprano voice, an impeccable sense of dynamics and phrasing, and an uncanny ability to dream her way into the emotional heart of a song. (May 31, 1963) There he stands, and who can believe him? Black corduroy cap, green corduroy shirt, blue corduroy pants. Hard-lick guitar, whooping harmonica, skinny little voice. Beardless chin, shaggy sideburns, porcelain pussy-cat eyes. At 22, he looks 14, and his accent belongs to a jive Nebraskan, or maybe a Brooklyn hillbilly. He is a dime-store philosopher, a drugstore cowboy, a men's room conversationalist. And when he describes his young life, he declares himself dumbfounded at the spectacle. "With my thumb out, my eyes asleep, my hat turned up an' my head turned on," says Bob Dylan, "I'm driftin' and learnin' new lessons." Sometimes he lapses into a scrawny Presleyan growl, and sometimes his voice simply sinks into silence beneath the pile- drive chords he plays on his guitar. But he has something unique to say, and he says it in songs of his own invention that are the best songs of their style since Woody Guthrie's. (July 19, 1963) All over the U.S., folk singers are doing what folk singers are classically supposed to do--singing about current crises. Not since the Civil War era have they done so in such numbers or with such intensity. Instead of keening over the poor old cowpoke who died in the streets of Laredo or chronicling the life cycle of the blue-tailed fly (the sort of thing that fired the great postwar revival of folk song), they are singing with hot-eyed fervor about police dogs and racial murder. Sometimes they use serviceable old tunes, but just as often they are writing new ones about fresh heroes and villains, from Martin Luther King to Bull Connor. The Peter, Paul and Mary recording of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind is, according to Warner Bros. Records, the fastest selling single the company has ever cut. Blowin' is young Dylan at his lyrically honest best. It sounds as country-airy as Turkey in the Straw, but it has a cutting edge. <qt> <l>How many roads must a man walk down</l> <l>Before you call him a man?...</l> <l>How many years can some people exist</l> <l>Before they're allowed to be free?</l> <l>How many times can a man turn his head</l> <l>And pretend he just doesn't see?</l> <l>The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,</l> <l>The answer is blowin' in the wind.</l> </qt> (May 21, 1965) Rock 'n' roll was still dismissible among the sophisticates as a curiously persistent fad. But then came the British. U.S. parents had weathered Pat Boone's white-bucks period, the histrionics of Johnnie Ray, and the off-key mewings of Fabian, but this was something else again--four outrageous Beatles in high-heeled boots, under-sized suits and enough hair between them to stuff a sofa. When they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, 68 million people, one of the largest TV audiences in history, tuned in to see what all the ruckus was about. What they saw was four young chaps having a jolly good bash. By refusing to take themselves seriously, the Beatles made rock 'n' roll fun again. They also made it all right to be white. Beatle music and even Beatle accents are actually Anglicized imitations of Negro rhythm and blues once removed. Says Beatle John Lennon: "We can sing more colored than Africans." The best brown sound is, of course, that sung by Negroes. Last year 42 of the bestselling rock 'n' roll songs were produced by one man: Berry Gordon Jr., 35, who as head of Detroit's Motown Records, employs some 175 Negro artists. The prize fillies in Gordy's stable are the Supremes, three girls who grew up together in Detroit's squalid Brewster Housing Project. With four consecutive No. 1 records, they are the reigning female rock 'n' roll group, followed by Motown's Martha and the Vandellas. Diana Ross, 21, the Supremes' lead singer, is greatly envied for the torchy, come-hither purr in her voice. Her secret: "I sing through my nose." District from the brown-sound school are the Beach Boys from California: "We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white." They made their big splash with the "surf sound"--clean, breezy orchestration, a jerky, staccato beat and a high, falsetto quaver reminiscent of the Four Freshmen. With hits like Surfin' and Hang Ten (toes over the edge of the surf board), the Beach Boys--three brothers, a cousin and a neighbor--have sold more than 12 million records, grossed as much as $25,000 for one concert in Sacramento. They write their own songs, following one rule of thumb: "We picture the U.S. as one great big California." (April 28, 1967) A paternity suit here, a fine for urinating on a building there, and pretty soon the London papers were asking: "Would you want your daughter to marry a Rolling Stone?" With each blast of adverse publicity, their recordings edged higher on the pop charts, until the boys suddenly found themselves the champions of the teeny-bopper revolt against adult authority. Perversity pays. The Stones have sold 40 million recordings and currently have three albums on the U.S. bestseller charts. Though they deny that they consciously play up their rebel image, they bill themselves as "five reflections of today's children," write songs about "trying to make some girl," with supposedly coded allusions to menstruation, marijuana and birth-control pills. For their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in January, they reluctantly altered the words of their recent hit, Let's Spend the Night Together. (June 23, 1967) In its permutations, the San Francisco Sound encompasses everything from bluegrass to Indian ragas, from Bach to jugband music--often within the framework of a single song. Most of the groups write their own songs and, unlike most rock 'n' rollers, improvise freely, building climax upon climax in songs that run on for 20 minutes or more. As the pile-driving beat thunders out of six speakers with deafening insistence, blinding strobe lights flash in rhythm with the music; the walls swim with projections of amoeba-like patterns slithering through puddles of quivering color. Just as in other psychedelic-lit joints, such as Andy Warhol's Gymnasium in Manhattan, the aim is to immerse everybody in sound and sight. When the spell takes hold, young mothers with sleeping infants in their arms waltz dreamily around the floor; other dancers drift into a private reverie, devising new ways to contort their bodies. (August 5, 1968) He hopped, twisted and rolled over side-ways without missing a twang or a moan. He slung the guitar low over swiveling hips, or raised it to pick the strings with his teeth: he thrust it between his legs and did a bump and grind, crooning: "Oh, baby, come on now, sock it to me!" Lest anybody miss his message, he looked at a girl in the front row, cried: "I want you, you, you!" and stuck his tongue out at her. For a symbolic finish, he lifted the guitar and flung it against the amplifiers. Such scenes have not been uncommon during the past three weeks on the latest U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience--Hendrix plus Englishmen Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Their music, when Jimi pauses to concentrate on it, is a whirlpool where the currents of Negro blues and psychedelic rock meet, and it churns with all but overwhelming power from their nine amplifiers and 18 speakers. But it is no more than a conveyor on which the high-riding Hendrix projects his anti-personality: wild, woolly and wicked. (August 9, 1968) "My message," Janis Joplin says, "is `Get off your butt and feel things!'" When she stomps, quivers, flails her arms, tosses her mane of hair and swoops through a vocal chorus with hoarse croons and piercing wails, few listeners fail to get the message. Last week at the Newport Folk Festival, a crowd of 17,800 clapped and roared for encores until nearly 1 a.m. Janis is the lead singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company, a hard-driving San Francisco rock group whose sound somewhat resembles a busy sawmill. At 25, Janis is the most distinctive female performer yet to emerge from the West Coast rock movement. (June 6, 1969) Youngsters begin lining up at the box office of Manhattan's Biltmore Theatre before dawn. Sidewalk scalpers hustle tickets for as much as $50 a pair. A year after its Broadway debut, the rock musical Hair is not only a nightly sell-out in New York and Los Angeles but an international hit as well. By any measure, this electronically amplified paean to peace, pot and permissiveness has become the My Fair Lady of the Now Generation, and its success is even more striking on records. Hair is the first Broadway musical since Man of La Mancha to win a gold platter--the record industry's reward for selling $1,000,000 worth of disks. RCA Victor's original-cast recording has been the No. 1 album bestseller for seven weeks. [The youthful hopes of the decade were captured in the summer of 1969 during a weekend of music--Woodstock.] (August 29, 1969) What took place at Bethel, N.Y., ostensibly, was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which was billed by its youthful Manhattan promoters as "An Aquarian Exposition" of music and peace. It was that and more--much more. The festival turned out to be history's largest happening. As the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the '60s openly displayed its strength, appeal and power, it may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age. By a conservative estimate, more than 400,000 people--the vast majority of them between the ages of 16 and 30--showed up for the Woodstock festival. Thousands more would have come if police had not blocked off access roads, which had become ribbonlike parking lots choked with stalled cars. Had the festival lasted much longer, as many as one million youths might have made the pilgrimage to Bethel. The lure of the festival was an all-star cast of top rock artists, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane. But the good vibrations of good groups turned out to be the least of it. What the youth of America--and their observing elders--saw at Bethel was the potential power of a generation that in countless disturbing ways has rejected the traditional values and goals of the U.S. Thousands of young people, who had previously thought of themselves as part of an isolated minority, experienced the euphoric sense of discovering that they are, as the saying goes, what's happening. To many adults, the festival was a squalid freakout, a monstrous Dionysian revel, where a mob of crazies gathered to drop acid and groove to hours of amplified cacophony. The real significance of Woodstock can hardly be overestimated. Despite the piles of litter and garbage, the hopelessly inadequate sanitation, the lack of food and the two nights of rain that turned Yasgur's farm into a sea of mud, the young people found it all "beautiful." One long-haired teen-ager summed up the significance of Woodstock quite simply: "People," he said "are finally getting together." </body> </article> </text>