I wanted to write a blog about what I think the top ten most important rock and roll albums of all time are and why. I wanted to focus on entire albums rather than singles because I grew up in the late seventies and eighties, when album rock was at its peak. I am obsessed with albums.

But before I could do that, I decided to read everything I could get my hands on about rock and roll history. I started with a book called Flashbacks by Michael Lydon. It's a series of articles he wrote through his career as a music writer for a variety of magazines, and editor and part creator of Rolling Stone Magazine. It's pretty good, but focused on a few very well known acts like The Beattles, The Rolling Stones and so on. Then I started, and am working through it right now: Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock and Roll 1947-1977 by James Miller. The writing is much better and it's much more complete. I have kept a journal of the various songs that are mentioned, and have been able to find many of them on youtube. By the time I started buying records, I wanted nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the rock and roll of the fifties/sixties and early seventies. I thought it was trite and ridiculous. While I had changed that view before I started reading these books, I have begun to feel some of that same mythic excitement of its fresh "new" sound that was felt back in the early fifties and forward because while I read I can see and hear these songs performed, and can understand too, now, the sound of jump blues, or boogie woogie blues that was the impetus for rock and roll. It's a surreal experience because if I read this book five years ago, I would not have gotten this same pleasurable experience of being able to type in a few key words onto my computer screen and listening to this stuff as I read about it. So I figured, in the spirit of the whole thing, I would write in here my journal notes and the youtube videos of this stuff. I realize that to most people this stuff is relatively common knowledge. What is fantastic about it, is the blending of cultural modes of production and knowledge. I'm hoping to convey at least some of that.

First, Wynonie Harris' pivotal song that was recorded in 1947 "Good Rockin' Tonight". This song is where a lot of people say the term rock and roll evolved from. That is sort of true, because after this song there were a series of songs with some variation of the term "rock" in it. Wynonie Harris was a blues musician playing in dance halls from coast to coast. A kid from New Orleans wrote the boogie woogie blues song on a paper bag at one of Harris' shows and brought it to him back stage. It was ignored for a while, but when Roy Brown recorded his own version of it, and it did well in the south. After that Harris recorded the song that went down in history*:

*Source



This next one is important because it was a technological break through for recording, and made possible some of the greats of rock and roll. This is the first time in history where a singer sang harmonies with herself. She recorded each of the four harmonies on separate tapes and then recorded a fifth version of her singing over the others. This technique had been fooled around with for a short while, but this is the first recording actually made this way. Its production credits include Jerry Wexler.



This next song was a popular novelty song that was produced by Herb Abramson the co-founder of Atlantic Records (along with Ahmet Ertegun)(sorry for the video in this, but it was the best recording I could find thus far):



The first number one hit single for Atlantic Records (1950/1951):



also, R&B charts were originally dubbed the Race Charts in Billboard's weekly magazine.

Kansas City was written by Leiber and Stoller two white kids who met in LA. They ended up writing many of the rock and roll songs that we are all too familiar with (IE the score for Jail House Rock). This was their first big 'un. (I love this song).



More Later

Thanks Roseanne

This is a copy of her blog slagging the jolie-pitts. SO glad about this! It may not be well written, but I love it none-the-less. Go roseanne!

jon voight

is a frightened little girl in a pink ballet tutu, who acts like Obama just wandered in from the rain forest with a bone thru his nose and a communist pamphlet in his loincloth. The neocons who own jon voight and make him dance on the chabad telethons are the worst most elitist people on earth. glen beck and jon voight are their bitches... both of them are used tampons who must be flushed down the toilet immediately! jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a crap about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more. (just sayin').
Also miss jolie says she likes mccain too and hasn't decided who to endorse....huh? Aren't you supposed to be somewhat enlightened, or do you not know that the african daughter you hold in every picture had parents who suffered and died because of the republican party's worldwide economic assault on africa over the last few decades since reagan? whaaaa...??????!!!! (for that matter, the thai and cambodian sons you are photo'd with weekly too who's pictures you sell to raise money to help the poor? Their families are victims of America's right wing military incursions too. Mccain wants to continue with the idea of war for profit...the americans are over that thinking now! They have drugged our troops and lower classes into supporting their oil business atrocities for long enough. We want to save not lose our souls thank you. Now go back to making your movies about women who love to handle big guns that shoot hundreds of people to death. Ps....it might be good for your asian and african children's self esteem to know you support a brown man for the leader of the free world.)