I'm Right Again Dot Com

A New Commentary Each Wednesday          Jan 29, 2014


About the 56th Annual Grammy Awards

     "Put your glad rags on and join me hun, we'll have some fun when the clock strike one..."

    After listening to one segment of the Grammy Awards, I know now how my father must have felt when he heard me play "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets over radio Station WDQN, DuQuoin (doo-coin), lllinois, where I was Station Manager, Sales Manager, Copy Writer, Chief Engineer, Morning Host (6:00 a.m. - Noon) the complete News Staff and Janitor. It was 1955...only 59 years ago. Yeah!

    ...we gonna rock around the clock tonight!

     Dad was a fine musician. He could sight-transpose from any musical key to another. An aunt told me that she had to lift him up onto the bench in front of the family upright piano when he expressed a desire to learn how to play, but couldn't reach the keys while standing on the floor. He later learned how to play the trumpet, and when he was 14 was the youngest member of the hometown band. By then, he had worked two years underground, as an apprentice coal miner.

    A miner during the day, and by 18 was playing with local dance band groups at speakeasies as well as roadhouse "dancing and fighting clubs" until the middle of the 1940s. He told us that he went back to playing piano instead of the trumpet because the big brass sound board in the upright pianos gave some protection when the shooting started.

    His favorite musicians were the leaders of the the Big Bands: Armstrong, Basie, the Dorsey brothers, Goodman, Henderson, Herman, James, Krupa, Miller, Shaw, Whiteman, etcetera, of that era. Those who survived that age can provide the first names I'm sure, even if we can't remember where we last laid the car keys. I may not be forgiven if I forget to mention Ella (Fitzgerald) and Connee (Boswell) in that mix.

    "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" -Duke Ellington

    However, Dad barely suffered the so-called giants of jazz such as Charlie (Bird) Parker and and less so the be-boppers, who followed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and included Miles Davis and Chet Baker. He admitted that he didn't understand their musicality. I once mentioned Theolonius Monk in his presence, but never again. 

    Popular music is an ever-changing thing.

    In 1955, I had been tracking record sales at the only "music store" in DuQuoin and learned that all of the young people were suddenly buying what the seller of the 45-RPM "donuts," called "Race Records."

    These, he kept under the counter. Not only did I not recognize the artists, I never heard of the labels.

    "You might get away with playing this," he said and produced the only one done by a white artist, the one by Bill Haley and his Comets on the Decca label. "Rock Around the Clock" soon became a gigantic hit everywhere.

    Hollywood made a movie using the song that was intended to inform the public how Rock 'n Roll came  about. It was a pathetic distortion, not anywhere near the truth, for soon the airwaves were full of Rock 'n Roll by black artists; Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Chubby Checker, James Brown, Fats Domino, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and the Su-premes, Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Little Richard...I will not attempt to name them all, but as Haley did, soon white boys and girls were imitating or trying to imitate the folks who invented the genre.

    Soon, there was Elvis, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Buddy Holly, Jan and Dean, Janis Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Linda Ronstadt and Rolling Stone. Yes, I missed a lot of those worthy of a mention, but I'm sure more will come to mind to the "Boomers" reading this.

    So what does this recollection have to do with the latest Grammys?  Well, of the 44 winners of the various categories this year, I recognized only four names: EmmyLou Harris, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake, due more to recent film credits as a non-singing actor and that business with the costume failure during a Superbowl halftime show a couple of seasons ago.

    I've been away from Country music so long, I don't know if Kacey Musgraves is a man or a woman.

    I did recall the names of  two long-time, heavy-metal rock groups who were winners: Led Zepplin and Black Sabbath, although I never was a fan of theirs. Most people my age were turned off by their kind of overloaded, often whining, double feedback, super-amplified sound (the kind where young pre-adults roll the windows down in their vehicles in order to share the visceral bass experience with the world), but I was associated with a glorified-juke-box radio station in Tucson until 1970 and our bill of fare was whatever people were buying at the time.  

    Long-story short: after 10 years of rock n' roll, I quit listening to my own station. After doo-wop, I was done, in more ways than one. By then, Jimi Hendrix, Dinah Washington, Jim Morrison and Janet Joplin had died of drug overdoses.

    I will not try and characterize what masquerades as music today. Groups listed as winners in the latest Grammys such as "Daft Punk," or artists such as Pharrel Williams and Nile Rogers, along with Maclemore and Ryan Lewis, are names where I draw a complete blank. I haven't the slightest idea of who "Lorde," is, either. I'll ask my great-grandchildren.

    As for "Rap," it may be more social commentary than music, but I can hardly make out what the rappers are saying. It certainly isn't poetry. Nevertheless, in every new decade, there's a new way of manipulating sound that thrills the emerging generation and leaves the rest of us yearning for yesterday, including Paul Macartney's beautiful melody of the same name. But then, who am I to judge what is or isn't "music."

    I'm willing to predict that those who are fans of any of the winners of this year's Grammy Awards will feel as I do now, come 2073. They will be as lost in whatever will be popular then as my father was in 1965 and I am today. "Nothing is as constant as change," someone is supposed to have said. Nothing changes more greatly in a generation than popular music styles, and today that includes the manner in which it is conveyed to our brains.

    What's next, do you suppose? A kind of telepathy, where an integrated chip is implanted in your head?

-Phil Richardson, Storyteller and Observer of the Human Condition


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