I suppose if Mrs Mills had lived a little later she might have become a kind of ‘rock goddess’ a kind of female Elton figure dressed in colorful clothing occasionally getting up from the piano strutting about the stage or like Rick Wakeman maybe she would have have worn long flowing capes.
Rick Wakeman actually praised her piano playing in a documentary. Then it cut to film of her encouraging a sing along that I can just remember her doing. (She would wave her arm still playing with the other). Happy smiling faces all singing along, her really just accompanying them.
That’s my first point here that the focus became all wrong with the advent of Rock and Roll. Music now was about the performer not the audience. The performer not there to ‘serve’ the audience anymore
How great were Chas and Dave! That Chas story interests me in this context- he had just returned from America and met up with Dave again and told him how sick he was of singing in an American accent that it didn’t sound ‘real’. And they both agreed to write about what they knew, sing in their own accent.
My point here is that at some deep level, R&R is fake. Funny though he toured with Jerry Lee Lewis. Leant the piano watching him.
Which brings me to the birth of R&R. I don’t like that footage where JLL is playing the piano manically and ‘the kids’ are literally ‘shaking all over’, almost out of control. I know this will sound ridiculously old fashioned but there is a danger to youngsters losing control.
Maybe those worthies were right when they warned of the dangers with this new ‘Devil’s music’. It seemed harmless enough with Elvis gyrating his pelvis but look at the where it did lead to – actual Satanism with Marilyn Manson and ‘thrash metal’ and the Despair of the evil sounding ‘grunge metal’
Going back to music serving an audience. What about dance? You had musicians playing a for a square dance. There isn’t a set dance at a Marilyn Manson concert. Everyone is just ‘shaking all over’ by themselves. Rock and Roll split up the couple. It became about expressing yourself individually.
I hated concerts. I was one of those looking round wondering what we were all doing here. In my day the losing of control was ‘head banging’.
Finish up. The much maligned (on here) Paul Morely said an interesting thing. It was a programme about the history of Easy Listening. And the fact that if you look back at the charts far from R&R sweeping all before EL outsold it. He said ‘Maybe Rock and Roll was the anomaly’.
I would use the word aberration!
Nominated by: Miles Plastic
