Book Review: 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!' by Bob Stanley

Book Review: 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!' by Bob Stanley

 

An exuberant tour of 60 years of pop music.

 

 

By David Kirby in the Wall Street Journal

Stand-up comic Steven Wright has a bit where he describes his new map of the U.S. Problem is, it has a 1-to-1 scale, which makes it really hard to fold . . .

After reading Bob Stanley's breezy, opinionated and totally delicious history of pop music's past 60 years, I wanted to write a review like that map, one exactly the size of its subject. That would make for a piece of well over 200,000 words, though, so I will compress into a few column inches my enthusiasm for a book that, as a friend once said, is so good that "it makes my teeth ache."

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" gets off to a dizzying start, with Mr. Stanley saying that pop includes "rock, R&B, soul, hip hop, house, techno, metal and country. If you make records, singles and albums, and if you go on TV or on tour to promote them, you're in the pop business. If you sing a cappella folk songs in a suburban pub, you're not." Great pop music comes from "tension, opposition, progress, and [even] fear of progress," because "in pop, the conservative can be seen as cool." In sum, pop music "isn't there to be contained. It isn't school," Mr. Stanley notes before ending his sentence with a paradox that not only sets the tone of his book but also describes the artistic process generally. Pop "only has unwritten rules," he writes, "and they're all there to be broken."

As soon as that anything-goes tone is established, though, Mr. Stanley, a London-based journalist and musician, gets down to brass tacks as only a bluff Englishman can, and, indeed, the rest of the book alternates between an Aquarian roll-your-own outlook and a schoolmasterish insistence on important dates and names. Others who have tried to identify the first rock song range over candidates from Wynonie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight" from 1948 to Elvis's "That's All Right (Mama)" from 1954. That's bollocks, says Mr. Stanley: "[Bill] Haley invented rock 'n' roll." "Rock Around the Clock" (1955), by Bill Haley and the Comets, was "the sound the young had been waiting for," the first record to have "a lyric about all-night partying, a thrilling guitar solo, and a rock-solid beat, with its drums way up in the mix."

After that, the firsts fly fast and furiously. When Tony Jackson leaves the Searchers after their 1964 hit "Needles and Pins," it's "the first-ever instance of a modern pop group splitting over musical differences at their peak." The Doors were "the first major rock act with a logo." The year 1966 "was the first time that modern pop music had been seen as culturally and artistically significant." The "first indie record" is the Dreamweavers' "It's Almost Tomorrow," whose "fey sound and defeated yet hopeful stance" anticipated much of today's not-quite-mainstream music; it went to No. 1 in Britain in 1956. House and techno were "the first truly international sounds," in part because they're largely instrumental.

San Francisco alone gives us three firsts: rock concerts (as opposed to package tours and sock hops); FM rock radio; and rock critic Greg Shaw, whose mimeographed "Mojo-Navigator and Rock and Roll News" laid the groundwork for more mainstream publications like Rolling Stone. Oh, and Jefferson Airplane was "the first [San Francisco] band to make a noise nationally."

Even when he isn't slinging the F-word, Mr. Stanley is quick to point out milestones: Ray Charles's "What'd I Say" (1959) "sounded like nothing that had gone before," and Vanilla Fudge's Wagnerian treatment of peppy songs like the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On" makes that band "quite possibly . . . the most hilarious group of all time." That isn't to say that he can't be quarreled with: Taking Mr. Stanley's word for it, I confidently told a classical musician of my acquaintance that the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" (1964) was the first song to shift keys twice within each verse, only to learn that the "truck-driver modulation" (which my informant illustrated with a helpful gear-shifting gesture) had been in wide use for centuries.

But all teachers know that the most effective way to get a point across is through exaggeration, and if Mr. Stanley overstates from time to time, it's because his goal is clarity. Citing fellow rock critic Nik Cohn's assertion that the Beach Boys sang "sad songs about happiness," he goes on to say that the group's music is "the most emotionally satisfying in the whole modern pop canon."

Then he goes on to prove his point by painting a quick portrait of enigmatic Brian Wilson, who carried the whole band's weight on his shoulders and whose public suffering suggested how much it cost him. Dozens of writers have tried to explain Mr. Wilson's fragile genius and failed, whereas Mr. Stanley says his emotions "seemed to come out without any filter for what was deemed cool, or appropriate, or even musically acceptable." Seemingly "unaware of any concept of roots credibility," Mr. Wilson was "pop's own Charlie Brown," a naive bear of a man who wore his heart where everyone could see it and was welcome to it, too. Mr. Stanley describes Mr. Wilson leaving a 2004 London performance to a standing ovation and catching his shirt on something: "Everyone wanted to run on stage and help him, wanted to help Brian Wilson. After what seemed an age he noticed what was wrong, but not before he had appeared, in front of two thousand people, as a lost little boy, Charlie Brown aged sixty-five, bumbling and bemused."

Mr. Stanley is too decisive in his appraisals to be music criticism's Brian Wilson, but his joy is often uncontainable, as when he says that the Velvet Underground created "a noise so brand new that it tore a hole in pop's natural state of progression, so sharp and freakish and heart-piercing that it makes me burst out laughing every time I hear it." He is snappily clear even when he's not talking about pop music, as when he observes that "opera is the sum of all the performing arts mulched to become a whole greater than its parts." And he's clear about his dislikes, too. Of Steely Dan he says: "I've tried hard. I think, as with 90% of jazz, I might like them a lot more one day." But he doesn't even try with the Boomtown Rats, who remain "resolutely unlovable."

The main thing that Mr. Stanley is certain about, though, is the uncertainty of pop's bloodlines. The long view is his specialty, as is his ability to make why-didn't-I-think-of-that connections: The Rolling Stones were responsible for "some of the worst aspects of modern pop—their nonchalance has been taken up by hundreds of bands in the last forty years . . . to excuse lethargy, tedium, childishness." In this, they may be responsible for as many posers as Bob Dylan, whose "legacy is a lot of bad poetry, a lot of skinny guys in shades" peddling "a sly cynicism." On the next branch over in pop's family tree, Jim Morrison of the Doors dares us to laugh at his pretentiousness, thereby writing "the primary rule for all of pop's future satyrs and self-taught poets, from Lou Reed to Patti Smith to Nick Cave: stare down your detractors, and don't blink."

But calculated copying doesn't work as well as spontaneous leaps. One of the first successful R&B groups from the '50s was the Orioles, who spawned the vast number of bird groups who didn't do nearly as well: the Larks, the Penguins, the Robins, the Crows, the Flamingos. In 1956, when Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers sold two million copies of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," it was largely because of Lymon's youthful, exuberant, almost girlish voice, so "within a year, there were over seventy groups who featured a black male lead on the edge of puberty." The group's real impact isn't seen until years later, though: "It's hard to imagine the Jackson Five without the Teenagers," and "the entire sixties girl-group genre is based on their sound."

All of this simply reminds one that, as Mr. Stanley says, "the interdependence of living musical forms is essential for great pop." Then again, if you have his eye for detail, you see that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Sylvia Robinson first appeared as half of Mickey and Sylvia, whose "Love is Strange" rose to No. 11 on the pop charts in 1957. She wrote, produced and recorded for a couple of decades, and then she started the Sugar Hill label, whose first single, "Rapper's Delight," by the amateurish and unimaginatively named Sugarhill Gang, popularized a musical form no one had ever heard before. In this way, "Sylvia Robinson and the Sugarhill Gang were the Bill Haley and the Comets of hip hop." And true to pop music's staggering yet relentless march forward, "almost accidently, they started a pop revolution."

In an astonishing and typically high-speed turn, Mr. Stanley mentions that "great pop strain of big men on the brink, tough guys choking back the tears, brought to their knees and reduced to falsetto shrieks" and then takes us from Frankie Laine to Del Shannon to Bruce Springsteen. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana comes along and erases Mr. Springsteen's blue-collar romanticism. After Cobain's death, the grunge of Nirvana and other Seattle groups breeds with other genres and melds with the music of bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose "ultra-masculine mix of funk, hip hop, and metal" made them one of the biggest-selling groups in the world. How does he get from Frankie Laine to the Red Hot Chili Peppers? By pointing, as only he can, to every step in the path that leads from the one to the other.

When it works best, pop favors the rough over the smooth, Mr. Stanley stresses. So the "untogetherness" of the Who is "what I like most about them," whereas Berry Gordy Jr.'s polished Motown sound is bland. (He quotes Eric Burdon of the Animals saying: "Motown is just too pretty for me.")

Today, though, "we have entered a different era, the digital age, in which great records will continue to be made but, with such a choice of influences readily available, it will be much harder to create a brand-new form of music." To do so, a musician will need to rearrange the parts now available in a way that no one else has, and Mr. Stanley wishes fervently that some 15-year-old out there is doing exactly that.

Is he sad that the golden age of pop is over? Not exactly. Sure, he misses going into a mom-and-pop record store, buying a single, taking it home and dropping the needle: "Without the detail, pop music doesn't have the desirability it once had," he says; "it's not as wantable."

But things change fast, you don't have time to be bored, the music is still out there, and there's plenty of it. "I feel incredibly lucky" to have witnessed the modern pop era, Mr. Stanley says. In a word, Bob Stanley is a fan. We're incredibly lucky to have this detailed map of his fandom.

— Mr. Kirby is the author of "Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll."