HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK 'N' ROLL: An Alternative History of Popular Music. By Elijah Wald. Oxford University Press. 336 pages. $24.95.
The subtitle of this history is more to the point than the main title. Elijah Wald is a treasure, a working musician who has made himself into a historian, biographer and socially oriented music critic. One hopes his good example spreads throughout the universe of musical criticism.
He has written biographies of proto-folksinger Josh White and Ur-white bluesman Dave Van Ronk, and he forced re-examination of the Robert Johnson legend. His street cred as a musician provides him with entrée to places academics dare not tread. In fact, an earlier book, Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns and Guerrillas, should be a landmark in sociological writing. Hitchhiking alone into remote Mexican villages where armed convoys of federales dared not go, Wald illuminated a subculture and an epic music concerned with marijuana smuggling across the U.S. border.
This was an amazing feat of bravery, and should be required reading for anyone at all interested in our neighbor to the south.
In this book, Wald supplants almost insane bravery with a pointed and clear-eyed heresy -- an equally brave blasphemy. He actually reports on popular music as it was lived and played, not as it was viewed by the Academy.
He shows the history of jazz as a funky dance music for decades before a French critic and a scion of the Vanderbilts made it into an "Art Form," and by trying to save it, petrified it.
Wald spends a lot of pages on the mechanics of popular music, using Musician Union records to show the actual impact of Prohibition and of juke boxes, for example. He is an inspired and careful researcher, not easily led astray by the awesome dictates of his betters. He has some gentle words of correction for the critics, very few of whom were actually able to play with any facility.
For nearly 100 years, critics have decreed that every choice a musician made was aesthetic or political, when the actual impetus was more often financial or personal.
He does signal service rehabilitating many great working musicians who have been given short shrift and been denigrated by the critics for being too commercial, as if making a living, or even staying alive and sober, was a disqualification from being an artist. Paul Whitman is given a lot of respectful space, even though he is dismissed as a villain and hack by the critical canon.
Other familiar names such as Mitch Miller, Perry Como, Jo Stafford and Frankie Avalon are given their due. Who knew that the much mocked Frankie Avalon was a legitimate jazz virtuoso at age 14 in 1954?
There is far too much in these 300 pages to even summarize here. Wald is an economical and lucid writer with an amazing grasp of his subject. I know quite a lot of musical history, and I did not find a single clinker in this symphony of renewal and re-examination.
Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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