The first rock critic?

[koganbot]

freakytigger continues the discussion regarding origins of rockwrite, links* Issue 4 of The New Vulgate containing David Lightbourne's "Little Sandy Review And The Origins Of Rock Criticism." This is what I wrote on freakytigger's comment thread (bear in mind that I've never seen an issue of the Little Sandy Review):

What absolutely jumps out at me is that, if Lightbourne's summary is correct, in regard to current folk c. 1960 the Little Sandy Review takes what you'd expect as the conventional position, championing the old stuff and the new stuff that tries to sound like it but hating on the popular bastardizations by the Kingston Trio and Belafonte and ilk. Of course, there's no reason in principle that Nelson et al. couldn't have been right about this, and I'm sure in a lot of instances they were ('cept the first two Kingston Trio albums cook, and the little I've heard of Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk is dull in comparison)(not that I know from Lightbourne's piece what the LSR guys thought of Elliott and Van Ronk). And Lightbourne goes along with the opinion, obviously. But someone who wouldn't have gone along is Bob Dylan. He wrote this about Belafonte in Chronicles:

He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility... Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry - who could have kicked the shit out of all of them - couldn't be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight.

Nelson and Glover went on to champion Dylan when Dylan went pop - i.e., electric - in '65, a move by Dylan that divided Sing Out!. I don't know if this caused Nelson et al. to rethink their earlier opinions of Belafonte and the Kingston Trio. I've heard very little of Belafonte, so for all I know they were right and Dylan was wrong, but their embrace of electric Dylan meant that they couldn't take it as a given that mixing "folk" and modern pop diluted and unmanned the music. Not to say that they'd necessarily believed this earlier - might have just disliked the particular pop that the Trio and Belafonte went for (I'd have to read those old issues to know). But this confirms that for me rock criticism starts with Dylan, even though he didn't write any.

The reason I pick Dylan rather than the Beatles or Stones as the start of rock criticism is that Dylan would talk in the lyrics about the mix and match going on in music ("Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped a bed roll"), and they didn't.

(I might argue that chronologically Ring Lardner and Otis Ferguson are the first rock critics, but they're not part of the stream that feeds into Dylan (unless I'm wrong and they are), and Dylan streamed into me before I discovered Sarris and the Ferguson stream. Of course, Mark Twain is relevant here, as I think dubdobdee has said.)

*AK in Cle had already tried to link it for me, but for some reason his link didn't get me to the Lightbourne piece.

Comments

[koganbot]

Last week's discussion is here:

http://freakytigger.livejournal.com/259269.html

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Was he saying this stuff out loud -- about belafonte et al -- or just thinking it? (I mean in interviews and etc; obviously he was putting it into his songs, though the latter may well read differently with hindsight -- his praising someone unacceptable to folkies in say 1960 being read as absurdist humour or sarcasm?)

And of course there's a subtle difference between Dylan the Folkie saying "yay Belafonte" -- who was in the folk ambit, however commercially -- and "yay Beatles", as he would later

(not that i really diagree with this line of argument: the crackle of excited tension between the folk lyric, beat poetry and non-beat poetry is more overtly and undodgeably what eg the pop art people were doing, because it's made of words where their argument was made of images

[koganbot]

Oh, I have little idea what he was saying c. 1960; Chronicles came out in the mid '00s. If I'm remembering what I read correctly, Dylan very early on in New York actually had a gig accompanying Belafonte on harmonica. Presumably if someone criticized Belafonte Dylan'd defend him, but I don't know if the press overheard this. In Robert Shelton's liner notes to his first album, along with mentioning Guthrie and Chaplin and old blues and country guys and current folkies like Elliott and Van Ronk, also mentions (or claims, since Dylan might have been pulling Shelton's leg) that Dylan dedicated the first song he'd ever written at age 15 or so to Brigette Bardot, and that he'd listened to Carl Perkins and early Elvis Presley. ("Early" is significant, as it might be a way of disassociating Dylan from Presley's more schmaltzy stuff post-Sun, though I really wonder how much of the folk audience would be aware of such distinctions.)

[koganbot]

"his first album" = Dylan's first album

[koganbot]

And obviously this bit of sociology from Dylan '65 on the liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home had a big impact on me:

I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine.

[(Anonymous)]

AKinCLE says: Frank, what happened was I sent you that link without checking it out first, based on an e-mail blast that Joe Carducci sent out last week. This edition was posted just yesterday or today. Dylan also talked early on about the importance of graffiti in the liner notes of one of his albums:

"am standing there writing
WHAAT? on my favorite wall"

"person . . . some
people say that i am a poet

(end of pause)

an' so i answer my recording engineer
"yes. well i could use some help in getting
this wall in the plane"

http://www.kosmix.com/search/dylan_%22my_favorite_wall%22_engineer

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

I need to catch up on all these intital-germ-of-rock-crit theories; I find what I've read so far fascinating, but it's not something that I've really given any thought to before, for some reason. Anyway, has anybody cross-referenced the early chapters of Paul Gorman's (maddeningly incomplete) 2001 UK oral history In Their Own Write: Adventures In The Music Press? I haven't read all of that book, either, but it's a good toilet read, and he definitely seems to touch on the '50s and early '60s folk, pop, jazz, and mainstream journalism press as a progenitor. (But fwiw, "ROBERT CHRISTGAU: There was no music press to speak of when I was coming up, although I read Ralph Gleason in The San Francisco Chronicle when I lived in the Bay Area in 1964 and Al Aronowitz in The New York Post and did look at Down Beat occasionally.")

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Amazingly, Lalena was playing her LP copy of Belafonte's Swing Dat Hammer (the chain gang songs collection mentioned in that piece) three or four weeks ago, and I found it mostly unbearable -- basically, I took the Little Sandy side of the argument. Not sure I was wrong in that, either (and I like the Kingston Trio). But that Dylan quote makes me want to read his book, if not investigate Harry more.