Rock & Roll: An Unruly History - Hardcover

Palmer, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517700506 ISBN 13: 9780517700501

Publisher: Harmony, 1995

Synopsis

Rock and roll is a profoundly American art form, the musical expression of revolutionary changes in popular culture and values, a Dionysian eruption that hit the white-bread fifties like a hurricane.  It was a force destined to shake up subsequent decades and transform American culture.  Throughout its nearly four-decade history, rock and roll has continued to reinvent itself, to challenge, to upset as well as delight, to break rules and make new ones.

Rock & Roll: An Unruly History is the companion guide to PBS's ten-part series on rock that aired in September.  When PBS first conceived the Rock & Roll series, they sought out Robert Palmer, an acclaimed rock historian, writer, and the New York Times's first full-time pop music critic, to help assemble the names, events, and landmarks that are the terrain of rock history.  Palmer acted as the chief advisor to the series and it was this association that inspired him to write ROCK & ROLL:  An Unruly History.

ROCK & ROLL traces the course of rock's rich history through Palmer's own perceptions and experiences. Incorporating countless interviews with rock personalities that he has conducted over the last three decades, ROCK & ROLL follows rock's road of creative flashpoints, but diverges, too, to explore the fundamental traditions that have helped define both the music and its culture.  With a corresponding chapter to each part in the series, ROCK & ROLL shows how people, places, and events from rock "gods" to little known session musicians, from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to the far reaches of West Africa shaped and defined the music's most important epochs.  Yet, to give rock the more in-depth analysis that it deserves, Palmer has written three additional essays "I Put a Spell on You," "Delinquents of Heaven, Hoodlums from Hell," and "The Church of the Sonic Guitar" which  respectively explore the rudiments of rhythm, the ritual of rebellion, and the story of the "six-string" in rock.

In ROCK & ROLL, Robert Palmer traces rock's ongoing evolution, showing how its many styles and early influences from blues and gospel to reggae, punk, and rap overlap and distinguish themselves from one another.  With more than one hundred and fifty illustrations,  ROCK & ROLL is the best of the two primary approaches to rock and roll history the history of innovative flashpoints, and the history of an ongoing tradition.  As told through the senses and lifelong  experiences of one of rock's preeminent critics, ROCK & ROLL is the most insightful and intelligent history of rock ever written.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Palmer was the New York Times's first full-time rock writer and chief pop critic (1976-1988) and has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the early seventies.  He has taught courses in American music at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, Bowdoin, the University of Mississippi, and Brooklyn College, where he was the first Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Studies in American Music to teach and write a musicological monograph on rock and roll.  He is the author of Deep Blues and other books, and served as writer and music director for two award-winning documentary films, The World According to John Coltrane and Deep Blues.  Since producing the latter film's sound track CD for Atlantic Records, he has produced a number of raw juke joint blues CDs for the Fat Possum label, winning a number of polls and awards.  He acted as the chief advisor to the ten-part WGBH/BBC series.

From Library Journal:

Rolling Stone rock-writer Palmer has authored a selective, personalized history of rock'n'roll that loosely serves as a companion to the PBS/BBC television series on the same topic. He offers ten chapters of uneven quality, including a good explanation of rock's origins, an almost needless chapter about Bob Dylan circa 1965, a look at psychedelia that omits leading San Francisco bands, and a weak concluding chapter on rap and metal. Clearly more comfortable with blues and its direct descendants, Palmer downplays or ignores MTV, Michael Jackson, the Mersey Beat British Invasion, early Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, grunge, and hardcore punk. Further confusing this "history," Palmer intersperses three thematic essays between the chronologically organized chapters: a detailed account of the African and Cuban antecedents of rock; a less-than-compelling look at rock's dangerous side; and an excellent, previously published examination of the electric guitar. Considering his past accomplishments (the indispensable Deep Blues, LJ 5/15/81) and his many interviews with musicians, Palmer has provided a disappointing book that adds little to rock histories currently available. Buy only according to demand.
--David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harmony
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0517700506
• ISBN 13: 9780517700501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325