Eamonn Forde - The Bluffers Guide to Rock Music

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First published 2013

Copyright Bluffers 2013

Publisher: Thomas Drewry

Publishing Director: Brooke McDonald

Series Editor: David Allsop

Design and Illustration: Jim Shannon

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[The music business] is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Theres also a negative side.

Hunter S Thompson

THE MONEY TRENCH

R ock is built entirely on bluster, myth and a revisionist approach to its own past which Stalin himself might regard as a bit heavy-handed. This means that bluffers hoping to carry themselves off in this world will have to slide everything up a gear. If they are especially daring, they can add to the great mound of bluffs the entire genre perches on, like putting a bean tin at the summit of Everest.

Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson had this to say about the music business: [It] is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Theres also a negative side. The very essence of rock clings to that precise superficiality, presenting plastic statements and gestures as coming from a more honest, real and authentic place seeing itself as the only place such inauthentic authenticity can survive and flourish.

Rock fans are able to hold two utterly contradictory world views in their mind that their music is simultaneously real and equally unreal. But to the outside world and to interlopers, they talk of albums and musicians in the hushed and reverential tones that one would normally associate with great paintings and 5,000 bottles of wine.

This book will give you all the ammunition you need to walk into that down-at-heel venue or back-street record shop where rock fans congregate and hold your own. It will conduct you safely through the main danger zones encountered in discussions about rock, and equip you with a vocabulary and evasive technique that will minimise the risk of being rumbled as a bluffer it might even allow you to be accepted as a rock aficionado of rare knowledge and experience. But it will do more; it will give you the tools to impress legions of marvelling listeners with your wisdom and insight without anyone discovering that, until you read it, you probably didnt know the difference between Limp Bizkit and a chronic case of erectile dysfunction.

So throw away those comfort-waist jeans and cushion-soled casuals and, while youre at it, toss that TV-advertised compilation album you got for Christmas into the recycling bin. Were going into the booming, beating, plastic heart of rock in all its many guises.

ROCK OF AGES

R ock is a mongrel genre with bits of assorted musical styles in its DNA. But like budget rhinoplasty, you can see the scars if you know where to look. Those in rock like to present it as somehow being elemental, suggesting that it sprung forth from the earth fully formed. In reality, as much magpie as cuckoo, rock took what it wanted, evicted what it didnt want and dressed itself in the fineries of whatever it stole as you shall see.

BLUES, COUNTRY AND GOSPEL

Rock is obsessed with the past (things were more real then) so ensure that you talk about rock musics roots as the first real melting pot genre in the 1950s a meshing of black genres (rhythm and blues and gospel) with white ones (country and western).

While Elvis is the accepted King, bluffers should casually drop in the fact that Bill Haley pre-dates him and that the first rock n roll single was Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (which was really a pseudonym for Ike Turners Kings Of Rhythm).

The term rock n roll was a euphemism for, ahem, sexual congress and it is commonly accepted that it was popularised by 1950s American DJ Alan Freed who brought black music to white audiences at a time of segregation. His career was one marked by scandal; he was charged with inciting a riot in 1958 at a show in Boston and the next year was sacked by WABC after the payola scandal (accepting bribes to promote certain records) engulfed the radio business. From this moment, rock n roll really gained its outlaw status, breaking rules and refusing to behave with decorum.

ROBERT JOHNSON SELLS HIS SOUL
TO THE DEVIL AT THE CROSSROADS

While Elvis was famously only filmed from the waist up initially on American TV (lest his wiggling legs and thrusting pelvis compromise the nations morality), this, as all bluffers should know, was a mere bagatelle compared to blues legend Robert Johnson. The myth goes that he was a very average blues guitarist and singer who died at 27 (see ) but went supersonic when he, at a crossroads somewhere in Mississippi at midnight, met the devil and had him tune his guitar and make him a master musician in a Faustian exchange for his soul.

Johnson left behind just a handful of recordings (and only a few photos of him exist), making him perhaps the most mythical and elusive figure in rock history. The fact that the devil/crossroads story is hokum has not got in the way of the myth, and bluffers must solemnly nod and accept this as truth, thereby imbuing rock with a sense of sinister danger and netherworldly intrigue. He died, according to reports, after drinking a poisoned bottle of whisky handed to him by the irate husband of a woman he was propositioning for sex.

Thus the building blocks of rock were put in place sex, the dark side, alcohol, immorality and lascivious behaviour. Johnson should consider himself lucky that Rasputin has not been dubbed the Godfather of Rock instead of him then.

ELECTRIC GUITARS AND AMPLIFIERS

The devil, based on the Robert Johnson myth, has all the best tunes but before rock music, they werent very loud. Two technological advances combined to result in the parental cry that all bluffers must agree marked their childhood and adolescence Turn that bloody racket down!

The electric guitar dates back to the 1930s but came into its own in the 1950s. Two names, however, made it synonymous with rock Les Paul, who is credited with creating the solid body electric guitar, and Gibson, whose mass-produced instruments pushed prices down and made them widely available. You might feel compelled to genuflect when either name is mentioned, eyes misting over as you rhapsodise about the action and sustain of vintage Les Paul and Gibson guitars. The other guitar brand in the holy trinity is Fender, whose Telecaster and Stratocaster (always called Tele and Strat by seasoned bluffers) are perhaps the most iconic guitars of all time. Bruce Springsteens default guitar is the Tele while Jimi Hendrix set fire to more Strats than Gene Simmons has had hot groupies.