Looking at the posters that litter the side streets of central and suburban
London, one might be forgiven for assuming that the
Blues was created by a post-
Aldermaston generation of art students rather than by the afflicted
negro population of the
American Deep South. The posters advertise
authentic Rhythm ’n’ blues by groups which play a variety of music—
some
Pop-
oriented, some
Folk-
oriented, some
Jazz-
oriented but largely derived from the music of the more sensational
coloured entertainers of the
USA, like
Chuck Berry,
Bo Diddley,
James Brown and
T-Bone Walker. Of the 2,000 or more groups working the multitude of large and small
clubs, no more than two dozen are in any way original, even in pop-
music terms, and even these are rootless shadows of the singers on whose material they draw. The difference between the blues of modern America and the “blues” of modern
United Kingdom is the difference between music which is an authentic racial expression and music which is an expression of no more than a liking for the authentic form.
The origins of British “blues” are far from clear. Their seminal genius may have been Muddy Waters who toured Britain in 1958 but it was not until March, 1962, when the harmonica player Cyril Davies and the guitarist Alexis Korner opened the first of the clubs—next door to the ABC Teashop off Ealing Broadway—that the “boom” really had its beginnings. Korner and Davies played mainly pre-war blues of the negro night clubs of urban America. Once they had their own stage the “boom” gathered in Central London, attracting a young audience in reaction against a particularly enfeebled pop music—this was the hey-day of Cliff Richard. The Band—known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated—had the now familiar line-up of harmonica, guitars and drums and if it was unexiting compared with its Chicago parent it had, at least, a rhythmic earthiness and an emotional directness which had been completely absent from pop music since the demise of rock ’n’ roll in the late ’50s.
By the end of 1962 the
Beatles had had their first small hit,
Love Me Do, featuring the magical combination of harmonica, guitars and drums, and the
Rolling Stones were making their early public appearances at Ealing and elsewhere. In January, 1963 the Stones appeared for the first time at the
Marquee. The
bill was topped by
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Brian Knight’s Blues-
by-
six and the Stones earned £2 each as the fill-
in group. By March the Stones had moved on—
to the fringe of pop success—
and their place was taken by another group from Ealing, the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, later to be re-
named
Manfred Mann. By the time the Stones had their first small hit,
Come On, in the summer of 1963 (only enough to earn them 83rd position in the 1963
New Musical Express Points Table, equal with
Sammy Davis,
Frank Sinatra,
Ken Dodd and Chuck Berry) r ’n’ b was freely tipped as the next pop craze.
It seems to have happened for much the same reason as rock ’n’ roll ten years earlier: a teenage reaction to the sickly gutlessness of orthodox pop. Its success has led to extraordinary results. The Cliff Richard pop image of tidy, boy-
next-
door
Christianity, has been replaced by a stylised image of rough-
living—
beards, long hair, defiant nonchalance and an incoherent, unarticulated curse against conformity. The new image may be as unreal as the old but it is a great deal more tolerable. It is a cliché to observe that pop music is a major field for the exploitation and manipulation of young people, generating respect for false values and poor standards, exploiting dissatisfaction to turn young people in on themselves rather than out on society, serving the function ascribed by
Marx to religion, that of an “opiate of the people”. It would be unrealistic to claim that r ’n’ b has altered this deeply engrained pop-
cultural pattern but it may have dented it. Since the success of the Beatles—
recorded not because they might be made into stars but because they
already were local stars—
teenagers have shown a gradually increasing independence of the will of record companies.
Merseybeat and r ’n’ b—
or at any rate the local variant on the American theme—
were created by teenagers for themselves and although the companies have exploited this music, they have had their urual role, that of
creating stars, stolen from them by teenagers. This has been a tendency rather than a decisive trend but it may represent the first steps of teenagers to free themselves of the parasites who live off them and their enthusiasms. It is not just that the quality of the music is better, although I believe it is (compare the Beatles’
I’m a Loser or Manfred Mann’s
I’m Your Kingpin with
Adam Faith’s
What Do You Want? or Cliff Richard’s
The Young Ones) but that the relationships between stars and audiences have changed. The new stars are
of their public, neither patronising nor stupid. They are irreverent, they smoke, they drink, they behave with a naturalness which would have earned them nothing but abuse ten years ago and they are articulate spokesmen for the teenage thing as well as for their music. The new stars are not held in awe except by the very young. The club-
goer knows that records are poor imitations of club performances, that record success leads to nothing so much as the dilution of a group’s “sound” in an endeavour to court general popularity. It is, in short, doubtful whether the companies have ever held so little sway over the
avant garde “popnik”. Most young people listen to nothing but pop music and within this context the infusion of some blues-
form into pop music is extremely welcome. Even in the hands of white singers it has introduced into a sadly ailing pop culture some elements of an infinitely richer
folk culture
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and some elements of a less corrupted
pop culture—
the music of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and James Brown still expresses something of the agony of negro life as well as the enormous surging vitality and new optimism of the
Northern ghettoes. British blues is primarily a
dance music and if it is impure it has, at least, an enthusiasm which is positively damning to inhibition. In the clubs there is a new vigour.
Kenneth Rexroth once argued that jazz is a revolutionary music only insofar as it is conducive to eroticism in dancing. The same might apply to British r ’n’ b. Today’s audiences are active and the groups, who still play for the critical club audiences rather than the easily pleased pop “concert” audiences, must make people want to dance. The modern dances are not set pattern dances. The Shake, the Dog, the Jerk are dances for crowded rooms, improvised round a basic pattern, and the groups must be able to improvise to provide variety. In the clubs, for example, Manfred Mann have played numbers like Cannonball Adderley’s Sack O’ Woe and their original—naturally enough never recorded—Packet of Three, which involved violent climaxes and sudden cliff-hanging breaks in the rhythm. Graham Bond and Brian Auger, recruits from modern jazz, and Georgie Fame, a recruit from rock ’n’ roll, play in much the same manner and now that instrumentation is veering away from harmonicas and guitars, to saxes, flutes, organs and pianos it is these latter groups who may really come into their own.
If the new music is different, so are the new stars. Many of them are strange pop idols. Keith Relf, leader of the Yardbirds, was a Beat before he made a living by singing and so was Rod the Mod Stewart, possibly the best vocalist to emerge from the “boom”. (Rod Stewart was also an International Amateur footballer.) Many groups look Beat; tired, worn and weary with the bum’s slouching walk. Indeed the mythology of the r ’n’ b clubs is the mythology of the angry, dishevelled reject of orthodoxy, the protesting bum. The Pretty Things, the most beat-looking of all, sing: “I’m on my own, just wanna roam/I’ll tell you man, don’t wanna home/I wander roun’ feet off the groun’/Digging sounds from town to town/I say I think this life is grand/I say, I dig it man, don’t bring me down, man/Don’t bring me down I met this chick the other day/Then to me she said she’ll stay/I got this pad just like a cave/And then we have a little rave/And now I’m lying on ground/My head is spinning round, don’t bring me down man/don’t bring me down”.
