Through the Flaming Sword

I love rock and roll. I’ve been in three rock bands and few things thrill me more than the guitar crescendo in the Grateful Dead’s Viola Lee Blues, Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower, or the Cream’s Crossroads or Spoonful. So I’m breaking out of my Quaker mold here to share a resource that you other rock fans might really appreciate:

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, a podcast by Andrew Hickey. I cannot praise this podcast enough.

First of all, it’s exhaustive. The latest episode is the 181st.

Second, it’s utterly comprehensive. Hickey’s knowledge is truly encyclopedic. 

Third, it’s not just a history of one genre, or even just a music history. Because so many streams of American popular music influenced rock, he covers many, many other genres. And it starts in the 1920s; that’s how far back he tracks these influences. He doesn’t even get to the 1950s until the late teens episodes.

And he is always giving lessons in music theory, defining rhythms and beats and chord progressions and arrangement choices and vocal styles and the evolution of instrumentation. And he tracks new musical genres as they emerge and evolve and merge. 

And he tracks the history of the industry, of record companies and producers, and of promoting platforms and performance arrangements, and record charts.

And he tracks technology, recording technologies, record production technologies, performance technologies, like the effects of acrylic records with the 45 and LPs on, not just the demise of 78s but on the industry more broadly, or the evolution of the electric guitar and the introduction of the drum trap.

He has an excellent ear. He is constantly telling you how artist A’s song X sounds like artist B’s song Y. And he comments on, not only why the song he’s highlighting is important in the history, but why it appealed to audiences, and what’s distinctive or even revolutionary about it, what it contributed to the music’s evolution.

And it’s a social history, most important and fascinating. How segregation affected the music. How black musicians and song writers were treated—and mostly cheated—by record companies and performance halls and radio stations. How the music shifted from an adult entertainment to one focused on teenagers, especially white teenagers. How the black music scenes in different American cities fueled different kinds of music. Almost every episode includes discussion of these kinds of social contexts.

At the same time he repeatedly and humbly discloses his own possible shortcomings in reporting these matters. And he reminds us how hard it is to know what really happened, even while he’s giving you the most amazing detail about really complex stories, especially when it involves who wrote what or who was in what band when. The history itself is very slippery and sometimes opaque, but always fascinating, at least to me.

He is British, and has a rather thick accent, but he speaks very deliberately and slowly, so I have no trouble understanding him.

So if you’re interested in how doo wop evolved, or what’s the difference between rhythm and blues and R&B, or between country music and country and western, and how that mattered in the emergence of rock, or which of the dozens of candidates might be the first rock and roll song, or how Earth Angel set the pattern for doo wop going forward, or how Fats Domino crossed over, whose second language of English was so bad (his first language was French creole), so that some people found him impossible to interview, or the importance of Big Momma Thornton and Big Bill Broonzy, or Jimmy Page’s evolution as a musician, or what swing contributed to the genre, or . . . You get the idea.

Really great stuff.

Tagged: classic-rock, music, review, reviews, rock