‘Rock & Roll’ caused a furore in the period 1940 – 1960. Initially played and sung by ‘black’ musicians, later white singers gained the upper hand. The genre spread worldwide, thanks also to the polish the record industry applied to it. This alienated young people who felt more attracted to the catchy melodies and rhythms of the thousands of skifflegroups with their simple instrumentation. Their great example in the late 1950s was Lonnie Donegan. One such skifflegroups were the ‘Quarrymen’ from Liverpool, and when they picked up the pace and called themselves Beatles, the ‘Merseybeat sound’ spread around the world at lightning speed.
The Beatles left behind an extensive body of work, consisting of 12 albums and a string of singles. The first five albums represent the ‘Merseybeat sound’: ‘With the Beatles’ (1963), ‘Please, please me’ (1963), ‘Meet the Beatles’ (1964), ‘A hard day’s night’ (1964) and ‘Help’ (1965). You can watch and listen to ‘It’s a hard day’s night’ here, sung not by the Beatles themselves, but by the Dutch cover group, ‘The Analogues’.
Those who still prefer to listen to the real Beatles and take in the enthusiasm of thousands of fans singing along can find a recording of ‘It’s a hard day’s night’ HERE.
The performance of the Beatles and many other British groups in clubs in Hamburg contributed greatly to the ‘sound’ and breakthrough of the new genre. The musical revolution affected not only professional groups such as ‘Gerry & the Pacemakers’, ‘Searchers’, ‘Freddie & the Dreamers’, ‘Herman Hermits’ and ‘Hollies’, among others, but also thousands of amateur groups who played the music of their idols or wrote their own songs. A phenomenon that resembled the American ‘garage bands’ I will come to write about. Singers like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Petula Clark were also influenced by the new musical style.
The Netherlands had an early professional scene – Nederbeat – with groups like ‘Outsiders‘, ‘Q65‘, ‘Motions‘, ‘Shocking Blue‘ and, of course, ‘Golden Earring’. ‘Golden Earring’ made music continuously and in the same line-up from 1961. Only when George Kooymans fell seriously ill in 2021, the band decided to stop immediately.
Here is an (acoustic) recording of ‘Just a little bit of peace in my heart’. A song from 1968, which the group played until its last performances, and which has been continuously on the Dutch Radio 2 top 2000 since 1999 (2023: place 599). George Kooymans wrote this song after the end of his relationship with Melanie Gerritsen. He regretted it terribly and fortunately for him, she came back to him a year later. They married and eventually celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together.
One of the most distinctive features of ‘beat music’ is its driving character, which is caused by the first three beats of each bar having an equal emphasis and the fourth beat having a distinctive ‘backbeat’.
It was not only ‘Merseybeat’ that set the tone. Some groups were more strongly influenced by American rhythm & blues, also because of direct contacts with musicians there. These included “Rolling Stones”, “Yardbirds”, “Spencer Davis group”, “Moody Blues”, “Animals“, “Them” and “Kinks“.
Here is a 1965 recording of the very young ‘Rolling Stones’ with ‘I can get no satisfaction’.
In many places, young people were also making music themselves. It was referred to as ‘garage rock’ because the usually young musicians practiced in the garages of their parents’ houses. Garage rock songs often revolved around the traumas of high school life, such as lying girls and unfair teachers.
Here just a ‘random’ garage rock song in some venue. What rarely happened: This little band became famous and later called themselves ‘The Who’. If you know that, you immediately recognize the young Peter Townsend and Keith Moon.
By now, the term ‘Rock & Roll’ had moved into the background and was mainly referred to as ‘rock music’. In subsequent years into the first decade of the 21ste century, ‘rock’ would become an umbrella term for a variety of genres, with influences from almost all other genres, including classical music. From 2010, the influence of hip-hop, dance and electronic dance music increases, but as is the case with disco, the influence of ‘rock’ in popular music remains strong.
Musicians in the 60s-80s embraced the predicate ‘rock’ to differentiate themselves from ‘pop’, which they condemned as being commercial. That said, many rock songs became roaring commercial successes and their creators made gold money. During this period, ‘rock’ was also seen as the musical expression of youth culture sometimes also of resistance to society. The blurring of the line between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ repeatedly led to new more radical expressions of ‘rock’ such as ‘punk’ and ‘grunge’.
I explore the development of ‘rock’ after 1960 in six consecutive episodes.
Society, environment, art and music 