Alas, Rock

By Capt. Fogg

Remember the Dave Clark Five? If you don't, you can go away now, I'm writing this for your parents.

It's not that I was ever a fan. They were, in my opinion, there only so that some of the younger Rock & Roll generation could pretend that they weren't against anything so popular as the "British invasion" which consisted mainly of the Beatles. To my way of thinking, their soulless enthusiasm, like the roar of the satanic mills of Manchester or Birmingham it came from, was certainly as fulsome and puerile in its mechanical banging and screeching as any Beatles tune I had heard to date.

I couldn't stand either group actually, or their cheap simulacra of the already moribund American genre. It was like listening to some guys in white shoes and belts at the country club, drinking martinis and trying to sing the blues like Manse Lipscomb or Son House; like seeing your grandchildren loving it.

Rock & Roll was already here when Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard. Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins were making the tubes glow in my radio and making the Juke boxes boom in road houses on two lane highways all over the midwest. I think it began to die when the peg pants pretty boys from England's industrial North were making adolescent white girls scream in sports stadiums. All ancient history to most people, sure, but when the Rock & Roll Museum decides to install the DC5 along with Madonna, perhaps it's time to bring in Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack or simply close the doors.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)