… the world as experienced by human beings is always multi-tracked and multi-mixed.
—Richard Middleton, “Introduction,” Reading Pop1
A metaphor is at once proposition and resolution. …
—Roy Wagner, Symbols That Stand For Themselves2
Among scholars, popular music studies continues to grow as an interdisciplinary project. A cacophony of approaches now exists, perhaps because, as the critic Greil Marcus has written, “Music is fundamentally ambiguous.”3 The challenge remains to make sense of this ambiguity without narrowing the study of music. How might we organize popular music studies as a field in order to further our collective understanding of pop? Taking the investigation of 1960s rock as a case study while mapping out similarities and differences among academic disciplines, this essay suggests that the metaphor of the multitrack might serve as one way to conceptualize popular music studies.
For the most part, the methodological debates about pop within academia have been three-sided affairs. First, coming to the topic from the formal training of Western art music, musicologists have concentrated on sounds themselves: they emphasize close textual analysis of pop music. Second, embedding their analysis in specific contexts, ethnographers have drawn upon the practices of cultural anthropology to make visible the surroundings of music. Third, by exploring the paradigms and logics through which pop resonates, theoreticians in cultural studies have connected popular music to questions of political ideology and social power. Each of these approaches has provided deep insights into popular music.
Moreover, scholars from each side have increasingly reached across disciplinary divides to generate new strategies for understanding pop. Musicologists draw upon ethnographic interview and connect their focus on sounds to theoretical inquiry. Ethnographers pay close attention to music as sound; so too, they embed interviews and participant-observation in theoretical paradigms. Theoreticians utilize musical texts and contextual evidence to articulate the abstract categories and forces in which they locate pop. However, disagreements across disciplinary boundaries have also limited the development of pop music studies as a field.
As is often the case, interdisciplinarity has been both a blessing and a curse. Musicologists, ethnographers, and theorists have pursued an almost dizzying array of methodological combinations. Yet scholars of popular music still often talk past each other. There is little overarching coherence because the intellectual rewards of the different approaches ultimately drive scholars down divergent paths. The challenge remains to keep popular music studies a wide-open field of inquiry while providing common arenas for debate and discussion. Can we hear the whole song without reducing its many component parts to a monolithic drone?
One place we might start is with a metaphor that comes from the very core of popular music-making: the recording process. As Steve Jones argues, “the technology of sound recording … organizes our experience of popular music.” Jones’s point is that, “Without electronics, and without the accompanying technical supports and technical experimentation, there could not be the mass production of music, and therefore there would not be mass-mediated popular music, or its consumption.”4 From the technology so central to popular music, the multitrack offers a means for conceptualizing interdisciplinary work in popular music studies.
The multitrack allows musicians to record parts of a song separately and then arrange the results into an endless set of mixed and remixed performances. Since this essay is only a preliminary, a rough mix of the multitrack model—a “demo”—what follows is a consideration of but four tracks in relation to my own research on the connections between 1960s rock music and the counterculture movement. This rough mix brings together the three main academic approaches to popular music—musicology, ethnography, and theory—while including a crucial fourth track: cultural history. Of course, there are many other tracks one might add to a fully-conceived multitrack model: non-academic studies by journalists; the thoughts of musicians themselves; the perspectives of engineers, producers, roadies, groupies, collectors, archivists, educators, curators, and others; a focus on the structural, economic dimensions of popular music; and examinations of fiction, poetry, video, and film.
Additionally, one might arrange the tracks differently, isolate or consolidate certain approaches, emphasize a different set of boundaries between tracks, or focus on the common aspects of various methodologies. The multitrack as a metaphor also may not suit all types of music or musical study. Especially as music enters the realm of digital production and consumption, and as musical forms from around the world increasingly intersect and overlap, new metaphors for the study of popular music might be worth exploring. Nonetheless, I hope the multitrack can provide one useful trope for fostering an inclusive interdisciplinary methodology that honors differences among many approaches while insisting on their commonality in the shared pursuit of understanding popular music in all its reverberations.
A word about the fourth track: cultural history. While musicology and ethnography often seek to recapture the meaning of music in the moment, and theory often imposes current concerns onto past sounds, history continually emphasizes the interaction between then and now, past and present. Cultural history serves as a kind of echo track, incorporating the focus of the other tracks into a final layer that completes the overall mix.5 By itself, this historical track would sound quite odd, a mere whisper of musicology and ethnography’s ability to render pop’s immediacy in performance and in everyday life. It would also only provide a meek theoretical analysis of music’s fully-considered ideological capacities. However, because history considers changes and continuities over time, it provides a perspective on the interaction between immediacy and distance, as well as between practice and theory.
Musicologists, ethnographers, and theorists have always been conscious of history to some extent, but cultural history as a discrete track presents one way to mediate among the three other approaches: musicology’s focus on sounds themselves; ethnography’s privileging of the voices of participants in order to grasp the surroundings of sounds; and theory’s reach to articulate abstract logics, paradigms, and ideologies. By providing a perspective from which to negotiate the other tracks, history helps emphasize the multi in the multitrack model. It integrates the other tracks without obliterating their distinctive qualities. More of this in the section on cultural history’s echo track; but first to the musicologist’s illumination of rock’s sounds themselves.
… as if sound were the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or harpsichord interjection.
—Geoffrey O’Brien, “Burt Bacharach Comes Back”6
For musicologists Sheila Whiteley and Michael Hicks, the sound of rock itself contains a bevy of information. Whiteley’s The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture and Hicks’s Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions utilize innovative transcription techniques and close textual readings to analyze rock music’s sonic relationship to the social codes of the 1960s counterculture.7 By staying close to the music while incorporating limited aspects of ethnographic, theoretical, and historical approaches, they produce rich sonic accounts of rock that begin to reveal the music’s larger significance. Their books demonstrate the ways that pop musicologists have moved beyond the traditional question of their field, which was what makes this particular piece of music great, to issues of social meaning-making. But Whiteley and Hicks continue the best practices of musicology, repeatedly grounding their observations in close listening to the sounds of rock themselves.8
In The Space Between the Notes, Sheila Whiteley focuses on “progressive rock” and the British counterculture. The concept of homology, in which specific sounds map directly onto particular meanings, serves as Whiteley’s crucial analytic device. Taken from the theories of British subcultural studies, homology allows Whiteley to interrogate sounds as if each expressed a precise idea.9 This allows her to utilize a theoretical notion from the third track of the multitrack model while honing in on close textual analysis of the sounds themselves, the first track. Whiteley hears “a homology between musical and cultural characteristics” in “the association of acid and universal love with sounds in the music.”10 Asking how “a musical language” can “express an alternative ‘progressive’ viewpoint,” Whiteley decides that there was a “psychedelic coding” in the music.11 This coding correlated to the countercultural search for a “progressive” mind-expanding consciousness. According to Whiteley, six aspects of the music connoted the “trip,” as participants called their search for new modes of imagination, self-expression, and behavior. The musical aspects were: 1. manipulation of timbres (blurred/bright/overlapping); 2. upward movement (connoting “psychedelic flight); 3. harmonies (oscillating/lurching); 4. rhythms (regular/irregular); 5. relationships (foreground/background); and 6. collages (compared to “normal” treatments).12
Whiteley focuses on songs by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and other groups to demonstrate various incarnations of the six aspects of “psychedelic coding” and how they directly represented countercultural yearnings for expanded consciousness and freedom. For instance, she closely analyzes the harmonic and rhythmic progressions of the song “I Feel Free” by Cream. The title and central lyric of the song, of course, suggest its meaning. But Whiteley goes much further, demonstrating how the music evoked, even produced, the countercultural ethos. “The song is based on two contrasting styles,” Whiteley explains, “the first a gentle and floating around the beat, the second more didactic with a strong emphasis on the vocal and the walking bass line. A sense both of freedom and of continuity is achieved by the subtle interplay of the basic motifs established in the introduction.”13 By closely analyzing the music of “I Feel Free” as sound, Whiteley is able to show how the sounds embodied meaning for the 1960s “progressive” counterculture.
Continuing in this vein, Whiteley transcribes and describes “Astromony Dominé” by Pink Floyd, tracing how, “the dip shapes in the guitar solo create a strong feeling of floating around the beat, and this is reinforced by the lazy meandering around the notes, again suggestive of a state of tripping where the fixed point takes on a new reality.”14 To Whiteley, the sonic and the cultural come together in music. She documents a similar “trip” in Jimi Hendrix’s guitar improvisations. Utilizing the standard staff notation of Western musicological transcription, Whiteley innovatively adds boxes of text that mark the ascent “into trip,” the “start of trip,” and finally the “climax.” In the box about the climax, she offers textual description as well as musical notation: “climax: electronic manipulation and bending of notes: bending of notes: tripping around notes: high excitement bars 6-7.”15 With this transcription, we can literally see the sounds of countercultural rock mapped out in an updated form of traditional Western notation. We can follow with our eyes as well as our ears the visual representation of psychedelic music, annotated with descriptive text.
Overall, Whiteley’s study is rich in this sort of sound-based analysis. But she never delves particularly deeply into the social milieu through which rock music loudly reverberated in the 1960s. Her musical analysis describes a number of the ways that rock communicated “psychedelic” notions through aural signals, but it only begins to explore the actual spaces in which rock seemed to open up psychedelic alternatives. We can follow the notes on paper, but we have little sense of the environments in which they were first produced: London’s UFO Club or countless individual hi-fi systems, headphones, and bedrooms around the United Kingdom and beyond. We can hear the correlation of sounds to “psychedelic codings,” and this helps to deepen our appreciation of the sounds, but the larger context remains at a remove. Whiteley’s attention to rock music as homological text lets us hear the society as it was represented in the sounds, but it does not reveal with any depth the sounds as they moved through the society.
Like Whiteley, Michael Hicks explores the sonic incarnations of psychedelia. Adopting an emphasis on the circulation of certain key songs, he focuses on the musical journeys of widely covered tunes such as “Hey Joe” and “Light My Fire,” which he tracks through close sonic analysis. To this focus on the sounds, Hicks adds an attention to genre. By addressing the names, origins, and histories of two ambiguous genres in rock, “garage” and “psychedelic,” Hicks begins to uncover the ways that music helped to define, even create, a kind of vernacular, youth-led avant-garde movement in the United States. The history of music genres, rooted in Hicks’ focus on the sounds of rock themselves, is then able to feed into a larger history of social transitions and connections during the 1960s.
Hicks’ chapter on “Avant-Garage” is especially insightful. Drawing upon the art-historical theories of Renato Poggioli, Hicks explores how during the mid-1960s, “activism and antagonism, hallmarks of avantgarde movements, permeated garage rock and the mentality of those who played it.” Hicks continues: “it was the music that bound the participants together in a cohesive, symbol-laden community.16 Though he focuses on the sounds, Hicks utilizes the notion of genre and Poggioli’s theories of the avant-garde to begin to move toward a fuller multitrack version of 1960s rock. The idea of genre contextualizes the sounds of garage and psychedelia, while Pogglioli’s theory locates the social use of the sounds in a larger ideological paradigm.
First, Hicks examines garage rock. The genre’s “musical traits express activism and antagonism yet serve to build a community,” Hicks notes of garage’s seeming contradictions. “In garage rock,” he explains, “riffs, fuzz, and other musical details serve as musical signs, conversational details passed from recording to recording in a way that tied the whole garage movement together.”17 Sensitive to the circulation of “musical signs,” Hicks primarily concentrates on the sounds themselves, but links the sounds to other aspects of the multitrack: the surroundings fostered by shared sonic traits and theories guiding the making of these common sounds.
Tracing garage’s links to psychedelic-rock, Hicks is then able to tell us something new about the genealogy of the counterculture movement in America. He conveys how garage and psychedelia, though distinct genres, were marked by similar sounds of “activism and antagonism” that were able to foster “community.” The fuzz-toned, overdriven sounds in common heralded a politics of egalitarian participation and noisy dissent emanating out of cheap guitar amps. Though psychedelia has often been conceptualized as a highbrow reaction to the more gritty, working-class form of garage-rock, which is interpreted as more authentic, Hicks traces the sonic links between psychedelic-rock and garage to argue that, in many ways, pyschedelia was an extension and elaboration on garage. As Hicks puts it, the counterculture as expressed in rock was the “flip side,” the b-side, to garage’s a-side.18
Letting the musical sounds of rock guide him, Hicks navigates countercultural connections such as these, which involve contextual and theoretical issues of class, race, gender, and generational identity. Yet his art-historical-based analysis of genre only begins to move from the sounds themselves to their larger social situatedness. We might ask many questions that Hicks does not address. What was the relationship of garage rock and psychedelia to the marketplace? Were the communities these genres enabled “consumption communities,” to borrow a phrase from Daniel Boorstin, or were they political communities, or both?19 The relationship of the marketplace to genre is not explored in detail.
Other questions emerge: what racial issues did garage and psychedelic rock musicians and fans negotiate (or fail to negotiate) in borrowing ideas from the free jazz of John Coltrane and others?20 How did questions of gender and identity affect avant-garage and psychedelic rock?21 What do we make of the class issues involved in the fact that, according to Hicks, “garage rock showed contempt for the trappings of middle and upper-class society,” while “psychedelic rock was more subversive, using new forms, unusual chord progressions, sophisticated technology, and novel gadgets to undermine the conventions of popular music and, implicitly, of the whole cultural environment”?22 A close analysis of the sounds and the genre configurations of 1960s rock is crucial, but questions about context and theory remain even after we scan our eyes over Hicks’s transcriptions of the lengths of various performances of “Light My Fire” by The Doors.23
Whiteley and Hicks insist that the sounds of rock in the 1960s mattered as sounds. Even as they begin to bring context and theory to bear on rock, they go far beyond simply treating the music as if its sole purpose was to be the background for socially conscious lyrics.24 And in their close textual readings of particular songs, Whiteley and Hicks flash strobe lights on the larger cultural context of rock music in the 1960s. But because their musicological methodology focuses so intently on sounds themselves, a deeper, richer accounting of the counterculture remains at a distance. How do we get more inside this experience?
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the Instruments ….
—Walt Whitman, “A Song for Occupations,” Leaves of Grass25
Just as musicology helps us hear the sounds of popular music in richer ways, ethnography assists in hearing the wider context within which those sounds exist. Ethnographic methods point to the value of carefully studying the surroundings in which humans create, receive, reject, share, celebrate, and use music. Of course, ethnographers have little interest in sacrificing the musicological understanding that the direct study of sounds conveys, nor are they interested in separating the contextualized experiences of sound from larger theoretical notions of popular music or severing those experiences from history. But most of all, ethnographers seek to deepen our perspectives on the social worlds in which sounds resonate. They can turn us more fully from the musicological focus on sound to a sense of music as social experience. As the second track of this multitrack model, ethnography emphasizes the reception of sounds and the ways in which popular music is embedded in the lives of its makers and listeners.
Recent ethnographies present methods and approaches that might apply to 1960s rock. Barry Shank’s emphasis on the constitution of a local “scene” in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s and 1980s helps us think more about the creation of scenes in 1960s rock locales. Based on his intensive participant-observation, Shank argues that, “The rock ’n’ roll scene in Austin, Texas, is characterized by the productive contestation between these two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace.”26 This collision between, on the one hand, the ground-level energies of scene creation centered around remaking the self and, on the other, participation in national and international flows of capital through the mass media and the mass distribution of consumer goods reminds one of earlier musical settings such as San Francisco in the 1960s. While one obviously cannot draw upon direct ethnographic evidence as Shank did in his study of Austin in the 1970s and 1980s, the careful use of source materials and participant interviews can begin to contextualize the music of the “San Francisco Sound” along ethnographic lines.
Shank himself does not rely only on ethnographic interviews. To develop his suggestive findings, he incorporates the history of Austin music-making, issues of Texan identity, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a multitrack-like approach he calls “critical cultural studies ethnography.”27 But above all, he honors his ethnographic evidence, even when it is in tension with other aspects of his interdisciplinary method. For instance, when the musician John Croslin tells Shank that Croslin’s group, The Reivers, “are a band that thrives on personality … the most important part of the band is our personalities going back and forth,” Shank takes care to note that, “The local language of ‘personalities’ … conflicts with my language of subject positions and enunciative possibilities.”28 For Shank, the challenge in Dissonant Identities always becomes how to find a way to connect the theoretical and historical dimensions of his study to the viewpoints of his interviewees. No matter how far away he reaches for analytic tools to help him grasp his topic, everything must return to the ethnographic track: the concrete, lived experiences of participants in the Austin scene.
While Shank keeps his focus on social life in one specific place, other ethnographers have explored the manner in which social surroundings connect to more spiritual, ethereal realms. Without losing site of the insider’s perspective on the direct contexts in which sound is experienced, these studies examine the ways in which sound transcends immediate settings. The social meanings of sound in these ethnographies become not merely their place in an economic system or a network of music makers and consumers or a particular “scene” (important as those are), but the deeply affective religious qualities of sound that contributes to music’s power. At once social and transcendent, these religious qualities are significant because they embody how, through music, insiders reach outward, away from surroundings to forces that feel as if they exist beyond the social.
Daniel Cavicchi’s study of contemporary Bruce Springsteen fans presents the ability of ethnography to deepen our understanding of how insiders experience their fandom along religious lines.29 While Cavicchi insists that fandom is not the same as religion, he argues that the parallels “point to the fact that both fandom and religion are addressing similar concerns and engaging people in similar ways.” Among these, Cavicchi notes, are an intense experience of “turning” or conversion; the interest in applying the signs and symbols discovered in a body of materials (whether it be liturgy or Springsteen’s songs) to their own lives; the urge to belong; and the creation of shared rituals of devotion.30
Cavicchi’s parsing of the religiosity of Springsteen fandom suggests the kind of careful analysis that historians might develop about past music such as 1960s rock. Many participants in 1960s rock music described their experiences in religious terms. For instance, the critic Albert Goldman characterized the New York rock club the Electric Circus as, “a votive temple to the electronic muse, crammed with offerings from all her devotees.” Goldman provided a striking description of listening to rock at the Electric Circus, offering details about its qualities that might serve as ethnographic evidence. “Magnetized by the crowd,” Goldman wrote, “impelled by the relentless pounding beat of the music, you are drawn out on the floor. Here there is a feeling of total immersion: you are inside the mob, inside the skull, inside the music.”31
Linking a religious framework to hunches about underlying, deeply felt erotic impulses and desires, Goldman continued, “Strangest of all, in the midst of this frantic activity, you soon feel supremely alone; and this aloneness produces a giddy sense of freedom, even of exultation. At last you are free to move and act and mime the secret motions of your mind. Everywhere about you are people focused deep within themselves, working to bring to the surfaces of their bodies deep-seated erotic fantasies.”32 If we treat Goldman’s writing as ethnography, it articulates musical experience not only as socially constituted, but as a medium between the concrete social world and subconscious desires and yearnings. The music also pointed toward religious transcendence, the “giddy sense of freedom, even of exultation” that Goldman mentions. Barry Shank’s use of psychoanalytic theory offers one way of interpreting the unspoken, even unconscious, dimensions of musical experience to which Goldman alludes. Add to this Cavicchi’s approach to Springsteen fandom and Goldman’s observations suggest that there is much interpretation to be drawn from careful readings of the religion-tinged language used to describe the experience of 1960s rock in its day.
“At issue here,” Glenn Hinson writes in his ethnography of African-American gospel music, “is transcendent encounter, the experience of the holy, a feeling that so transcends the everyday that it grants certain knowledge and rounds ardent faith. Without addressing such encounter, and without according it the essential centrality granted it by the saints, ethnographic inquiry—like religion without feeling—would be a hollow exercise.”33 Ethnography has tended to emphasize everyday life and has produced many insights into daily practices. But, as Hinson suggests, grasping the transcendent nature of music is also essential. Ethnography can be effective in the ways it locates sounds in their immediate social contexts; but these microscopic studies of participants also illuminate the ways music moves between specific surroundings and the transcendent realms toward which sound can leap.34
Music, like cartography, records the simultaneity of conflicting orders, from which a fluid structure arises, never resolved, never pure.
—Jacques Attali, Noise35
While theorists borrow from the methods of musicology and ethnography, they interpret pop music’s sounds and surroundings as particular manifestations of larger forces at work in society. More than any other segment of the multitrack model, theory concentrates on revealing these larger forces, often drawing upon Marxist or other visions of the hidden ideological powers that lurk beneath the surface of everyday life. The theories of popular music might be thought of as schemes in both senses of the word: first, as schemata, or the mapping out of the deeper cultural forces that theorists perceive as driving musical expression and experience, and, second, as blueprints or proscriptive efforts to shift society in new directions.
Theoreticians of rock have been especially interested in articulating the ideologies and politics within which sounds and their surroundings have existed. In doing so, they have not only wanted to understand the history of the music, but also to present normative valuations for future experiences of the music. This interest in grasping rock within its larger ideological forces in order to attend to current political and ideological concerns has led certain theorists to declare rock “dead” as a genre, while others have reaffirmed its continued relevance. It has all depended upon which theoretical paradigm the theorist has located rock.
The groundbreaking theoretical scheme for rock put forth by Simon Frith set the stage for arguments both for and against rock’s future. Rejecting both the belief that rock was a revolutionary folk music of the young that emerged outside the mechanisms of consumer society and the counter-position that it was merely commercial manipulation foisted on listeners by corporate powers, Frith argued that rock revealed the dialectical struggles at the heart of late twentieth-century consumerism. Rock was a musical form generated from the contradictions of capitalism.36 “We have to try to make sense of rock’s production and consumption on the basis of what is at stake in these processes—the meanings that are produced and consumed,” Frith writes. “Rock is a mass-produced music that carries a critique of its own means of production; it is mass-consumed music that constructs its own ‘authentic’ audience.” Caught between its exchange value as a commodity within capitalism and its use value as a form of expression linked in fundamental ways to identity, community formation, and aesthetic power, rock could help constitute certain types of politics, but only within the ideologies of the economic system that produced it. For Frith, “the needs expressed in rock—for freedom, control, power, a sense of life—are needs defined by capitalism.”37 If authentic community and the politics that might spring from it were to be found in rock, to Frith the music had to be understood as a commercial medium with powers that could, at times, seem to momentarily propel itself beyond the marketplace alone.
Expanding upon Frith’s positioning of rock within the ideologies of capitalism, both Lawrence Grossberg and Theodore Gracyk explore 1960s and post-1960s rock music within other political frameworks. Grossberg explores rock as a popular music that could have possibly produced a democratic socialist consciousness within the fragmenting, postmodern context of late twentieth-century capitalism—a moment when stable individual identities and communal affiliations were being ruptured by new economic processes. He is most interested in how 1960s rock failed to foster socialist beliefs in the postmodern moment, and how advocates of progressive, socialist values might learn from rock’s shortcomings. In particular, Grossberg examines how rock ironically wound up asserting and consolidating a cultural hegemony of passivity and conservatism by reshaping what constituted “the popular.”
Gracyk, by contrast, examines rock as a form of mass culture rather than of “the popular.” He is interested in rock’s relationship as a commodity form to the ideologies of modern liberalism, particularly its conceptions of individual freedom, and puts forth normative models of understanding rock in the spirit of liberal pluralism. Grossberg focuses on how rock’s collective possibilities were contained and limited while Gracyk explores rock’s capacities for individual flexibility in the making of hybrid identities. That the same music could lead to such different interpretations tells us something about the slipperiness of theory. As a track by itself, theory can become abstract to the point of pure speculation; but in connection with the tracks of sound, context, and history, theory can become a significant mode of grasping music at its most expansive.
Lawrence Grossberg is explicit about his theoretical project. He is most concerned with the overarching cultural paradigm that guides rock. “I have never been interested in the concrete as a local, empirical phenomenon,” he explains, distinguishing his work from musicologists and ethnographers, “but in the formation of rock culture at the broadest level.”38 Grossberg argues that at this overarching position, we might grasp the logic of what he terms the “rock formation,” a mode of thinking and being that shaped particular instances of musical experience in relation to feelings of political empowerment and impotency. Grossberg’s goal in discussing the abstract idea of the “rock formation” is to “propose a strategy that will allow us to map out the positive differences between major forms” of rock.39 Offering explanations and charts that schematize how various “apparatuses, scenes, and alliances” within rock music relate to the larger “rock formation,” Grossberg provides a model of how rock music, in all its guises, has operated through a linked paradigm. Particular rock performers, songs, albums, and receptions of the music are marked by “articulations” of authenticity, rebellion, affirmation, negation, fun, pleasure, and boredom within the vectors of the larger “rock formation.”
Turning toward the normative analysis of how rock has failed to communicate or enact progressive, socialist political beliefs and values, Grossberg develops an argument about what he sees as the end result of the “rock formation”: instead of a receptivity to more progressive socialist attitudes and policies, its cultural logic led to a mood of “popular conservatism.” In Grossberg’s account, rock music provided its makers and fans with powerful shared emotions of rebellion and authenticity, which Grossberg calls “affective alliances.”40 The music especially allowed its participants to mark themselves as different from parents, and from other music fans. But, limited by the “rock formation,” the music offered no truly sustainable alternative outside of the dominant structures of society: it only could articulate difference from family to school to mass consumerism and leisure; it proffered mobility, but with no place to resettle but within the existing lifeworld; it gave pleasure and respite from boredom, but only in temporary doses. The music, for all its furious energy, ultimately expressed the feeling of having nowhere to go. This fostered a “postmodern” sense of futility in which all authenticity felt beyond attainment, and hence a passive, conservative posture seemed to be the most sensible stance for fans to adopt. Grossberg’s somewhat pessimistic sense of rock music culture’s political efficacy stems from his probing for the music’s socialist possibilities, especially rock’s potential capacities for collective transformation in the face of postmodern fragmentation and futility. Grossberg concludes that rock represents an expression of the turn toward passitivity and conservatism.
Coming at rock not as a herald of progressive politics but as an aesthetic form deeply linked to the liberal tradition, Theodore Gracyk reaches quite different conclusions: he hears rock as a startling expression of liberal pluralism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and freedom. As a philosopher, Gracyk creates a different scheme in which to understand rock, and from this scheme, he offers an alternative vision of the normative ways in which rock should be heard and interpreted.
The different schemes of Grossberg and Gracyk have their origins in different conceptualizations of the music’s form. Grossberg thinks of rock as an ideological and affective “formation” that is part of the larger political struggle to shape what feels popular.41 Gracyk, by contrast, interprets rock as a form of mass rather than popular culture. To Gracyk, rock is a commodity form that expresses a continually renewed commitment to liberalism’s articulation of the autonomous, free individual in the face of postmodernism’s claims that this individual no longer exists: “When rock songs proclaim that rock will never die, this now looks less like a claim about the enduring attraction of the music and more like an expression of commitment to a liberal ideology at odds with the main themes of postmodernism,” Gracyk writes.42 To Gracyk, the guiding paradigm of liberal individualism motors rock music; it is the source from which rock music springs and to which it returns. In this way, according to Gracyk, “rock’s continued vitality depends on the continuing power of an ideological abstraction. In its turn, liberalism is refreshed with new modes of expression.”43 Rock depends on liberalism’s abstract ideal of the independent individual; simultaneously, this abstract ideal is reenlivened by rock’s ability to give it material and aesthetic expression.
While Lawrence Grossberg believes that larger forces of the “rock formation” shape individual being, Gracyk argues that rock continues to promulgate the opportunity for individuals to control the making of their own identities. As recorded sound created through innovative uses of the mass-production technologies in studios rather than as a work of music meant to be performed from written notation, rock points the way toward a range of personal expression far richer than traditional Western classical music. Not just musical notes, but sonic qualities of echo, reverb, distortion, and electronic manipulation become essential to the defining qualities of rock. From what Gracyk emphasizes as the ontological diversity of rock as a recording medium, “musical pleasure positions listeners to share community with persons performing otherwise threatening or previously unimagined identities.”44 According to Gracyk, even the most powerful stereotypes, such as gender identities, can go by the wayside. “The very breadth of subject positions,” Gracyk concludes about a Bonnie Raitt vocal performance, “has the effect of challenging the stability of any identity that we might assign to her.”45
In Gracyk’s schemata of rock, the music becomes a resource for destabilizing identity without fracturing it into postmodern despair. “The real contribution of popular music may be its power to expose listeners to a vast arsenal of possible identities,” Gracyk argues. “In allowing a listener to ‘inhabit’ new positions without bearing any of their real-life consequences, mass art can suggest life options that were previously unthinkable.”46 For Gracyk, rock conveys the liberal ideology of a pluralistic society in which independent subjects are able to alter and change their identities through profound aesthetic experiences. Offering a normative, prescriptive political position of “disinterested listening,” Gracyk puts forth a scheme for rock in which, “those who bother to listen and look will find that rock exhibits a staggering variety of identities that can serve as models in the performance of personal identity.”47
Whereas Grossberg hears the politics of rock as a formation of cultural artillery fired across the war-torn landscape of battles fought over popular culture, Gracyk hears the politics as a costume party in which mass culture makes available a proliferation of identities to autonomous individuals, and the masquerade can perhaps lead to new modes of equality and freedom of choice. For both these theorists, popular music takes place within larger cultural logics and paradigms, schemes that provide the framework for the making and experience of music, and schemes that also provide blueprints for the ways in which popular music might function in the future.48 There is a history to rock, of course, and a wider context that both Grossberg and Gracyk are concerned in tracing, but the complexity and contingency of this history and historical consciousness are subordinated to schemes of the music’s abstract ideological underpinnings.
The cultural historian does not seek to know past experience, that is, to reexperience it in any sense. Rather he seeks to discover the forms in which people have experienced the world—the patterns of life, the symbols by which they cope with the world. … But the problem is a complicated one for the historian, for in order to do his job he must, as a matter of fact, also create forms so that he can best understand the forms that make up the culture he is studying.
—Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformations of
American Society in the Twentieth Century49
If theorists such as Grossberg and Gracyk scheme with ears cocked toward the future, historians listen more intently back in time. What they hear there is less an orderly scheme than a cacophonous echo of sounds, contexts, actions, interactions, accidents, ideas, beliefs, values, attitudes, emotions, fantasies, dreams, and doubts. As Warren Susman points out, obtaining knowledge about the past is always difficult. It is informed by the historians’ starting position in the present. Moreover, points in the past are themselves affected by earlier cultural forms and layers: the past has its own pasts. Cultural historians of popular music can harness this ongoing negotiation between past moments and present reference points to evoke a rich description of the relationship between music and history. This dialectical movement back and forth, between perspectives of then and now, creates an echo track that serves as an effective final layer in the multitrack model.
Because it continually moves between positions, cultural history never rests comfortably in any one mode of analysis. In the spirit of musicology, cultural history pays close attention to sounds themselves; it also concentrates on ethnography’s pursuit of immediate cultural surroundings; and history always explicitly or implicitly involves theory’s wide-angle lens on the conceptual paradigms in which popular music has existed and continues to reverberate. Scholars in musicology, ethnography, and theory have, of course, already been integrating these different approaches. So too, they have been aware of history. But thinking of a special echo track of cultural history offers a particularly effective way to incorporate approaches without obliterating their differences.
Two examples of cultural history’s echo track can be found in Dominick Cavallo’s A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History and Nick Bromell’s Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Pyschedelics in the 1960s.50 Cavallo seeks to place the efforts of 1960s rock musicians along with other radical youth culture participants of the era “in the American grain”; Bromell attempts to elucidate the kind of historical consciousness that rock music and psychedelic drug use helped spark in the 1960s. Cavallo’s book is a good example of well-researched historical inquiry into social practices, cultural forms, and their effects; Bromell’s is a striking meditation somewhere between memoir and historical analysis. Both books suggest the value of listening carefully to the echo track.
Dominick Cavallo seeks to integrate the radicalism of the 1960s youth movement into larger strands in United States history. He explains that “the goal … is to weave the radical youth culture into the American experience.” Exploring the influence of everything from the romanticization of the Wild West in film to child-rearing practices, Cavallo argues that, “The sixties of youthful rebellion has not been sutured to the country’s past. Rather than being explained and made a crucial part of that history, this crucial aspect of the decade dangles in time. It is generally unhinged from what went before, and painfully alien to what followed. It remains, therefore, inevitably misunderstood and misinterpreted.”51
Most histories of the 1960s position rock music as a sphere of leisure, pleasure, and consumption, but Cavallo looks to the productive sensibilities informing musicians. He detects deep-rooted, pre-corporate American values of artisinal control over labor resurfacing among 1960s rock musicians. Of the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and Neil Young, he writes, “Most of them wanted money and fame. But these artists were equally intent upon achieving personal autonomy through their labor.”52 Exploring the language and practices of 1960s rock music-making, as an ethnographer might, Cavallo is able to illuminate the lingering ideologies of autonomous labor on which a theorist might concentrate. Moreover, moving between his own perspective and the 1960s moment, and more significantly, between the 1960s and perceptions of history available during that era, Cavallo is able to demonstrate how what seemed new and futuristic in the 1960s—rock music’s electronic sounds—also possessed deep historical roots.
Perhaps even more than Cavallo, Nick Bromell’s study of the experience of rock music and psychedelic drug use in the 1960s is marked by sensitivity to time. Bromell’s title, Tomorrow Never Knows, taken from the Beatles, speaks to the historical consciousness that permeates his study. Developing readings of rock songs themselves, as musicologists would, while paying close attention to the words of rock critics and his own memories of the era, as a memoirist might, Bromell outlines a theory of how “the fusion of rock and psychedelics either inaugurated a way of being in the world, or simply coincided with it, and in either case helped articulate and objectify it.”53 This way of being in the world was most of all a sensibility about history. “It was the widely shared sensation that history was ending in the ’60s,” Bromell decides.54 And yet, alongside this apocalyptic mood, rock music and drugs inspired a feeling of joining an immense flow of time.
Bromell believes that this combination of millennial fervor and an expanded awareness of being embedded in time’s ceaseless waves profoundly radicalized its listeners by heightening their historical consciousness. Rock and psychedelics seemed to accentuate the utopian potential of the moment, but also provided, “a way of seeing and being in the world that underwrites the possibility, indeed declares the inevitability, of rapid and ceaseless social change.” To Bromell, “it is here—where the vision of existence as a profound instability looks liberating at one moment, then suddenly malevolent the next—that 60s rock and 60s politics flowed into each other.”55
To Bromell, popular music and drug use help reveal the criss-crossing of cultural and political energies in a manner typical political histories cannot. “Because these complex feelings are seldom named by conventional politics and political language,” Bromell writes, “they have been omitted from the picture of the 60s given to us by historians concerned with the New Left and other political movements.” Understanding rock and drugs more clearly, however, helps emphasize the uncertainty, the contingency of past moments in history—a feeling of instability that Bromell argues was especially key for grasping the meaning of the 1960s. “Historians of the 60s who have caught hold of the terms ‘breakthrough’ and ‘breakdown’ have tended to arrange them in a neat linear sequence,” Bromell explains, “from Woodstock to Altamont, or from the Summer of Love to the Chicago Convention. But at the time, as … many … songs of the 60s show, these two states were inseparable, concurrent, interpenetrating each other and forming one feeling-state.”56
The notion of a “feeling-state” in which breakthrough and breakdown were part of the same process reflects not a linear historical progression, but an awareness of the ironies and strangeness of history. One irony that Bromell argues is essential to understanding 1960s rock is the manner in which rock’s predominantly young, white, middle-class rock fans were so moved by a music that was, largely, an extension of the African-American blues form. The blues, according to Bromell, presented a past mode of musical expression that resonated for rock listeners because it gave expression to the alienation, loneliness, and longing for authenticity that rock’s listeners themselves felt. There were troubling problems with this appropriation of culture across the boundaries of race and time. But there was also communion.57 As a blues-descended music, rock became a resource for countercultural rockers to grapple with their own experiences. “The blues (like all forms of music),” Bromell argues, “are a force, not a mirror. They do much more than merely ‘reflect’ certain historical conditions.” Instead, the blues provided, “a way to work through … responses to those conditions.” For the adolescent counterculturalists seized by rock, the “force” of the blues form was its ability to resonate with their own historical moment while also feeling like it linked them to a deep tradition.58 To Bromell, rock became a music both of immediacy and roots; in the process, it enlivened its listeners sense of being embedded in time. Rock, as a blues-descended form, produced a “feeling-state” of historical consciousness.
In Bromell’s study, the sounds, surroundings, and theories of 1960s rock lap backward and propel forward in time. As with Dominick Cavallo’s study, Bromell is sensitive to the reverberations of earlier cultural forms on 1960s rock. So too, he is quite aware that he is considering the music of his own youth as it recedes into the past. As he considers the tricky ways in which 1960s rock drew upon its own constructions of the past, and the fact that he himself only can hear the music through the passage of time, Bromell mingles musicological, ethnographic, autobiographical, and theoretical approaches effectively. He listens carefully to songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, contextualizes them within materials from the 1960s such as criticism, film, literature, and significant political events, and develops theoretical schemes about the music as it related to the expressive form of the blues and the widespread usage of drugs among rock’s participants. As Bromell claims of his methodology, “this book isn’t conventional history or cultural studies or popular culture analysis or musicology or memoir, but a hybrid of all these.”59 In the historical echoes that this hybrid approach addresses, we can hear popular music more fully.
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.”
—Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”60
The many ways of approaching popular music can begin to create too much confusion and demand some relief. Methods overlap. Sounds quickly lead to surroundings. Surroundings wind up rooted in theoretical paradigms. Theories must rely on historicization. History returns to the sounds themselves for evidence. To cope with the intersections that occur in the study of popular music, academics across disciplines have increasingly borrowed methodologies from one another. The multitrack can help to sort out this interdisciplinary project.
So too, the multitrack might be an effective tool for guiding future research. We might utilize the multitrack to analyze the biographies of particular artists, the study of specific scenes, the mutations of genre definitions, the changing global networks and structures of the music industry, the relationship of music to political forces, the meanings of popular music to various audiences, and the shifts in pop music’s power and significance over time. Even one song’s many levels can be revealed through the multitrack. If we examine “All Along the Watchtower,” we might think of the sounds, surroundings, theory, and history of this song in 1960s rock in order to identify its many dimensions.
First, we might consider the sounds of “All Along the Watchtower” more closely. Written by Bob Dylan and released on the album John Wesley Harding in 1967, the most famous version of the song was recorded by Jimi Hendrix and released on his album Electric Ladyland the following year.61 Comparing the sound of the two versions illuminates the relationship between the genre of folk music and the “psychedelic coding” of rock that Sheila Whiteley examines. The song itself is built from three chords (C-sharp minor, B major, A major in Dylan’s original) that descend and ascend repeatedly, like a man climbing up and down a stepladder. Dylan’s version is performed on acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, with Dylan’s voice a tense, throaty mutter. The song has a thudding, restrained, wooden quality. The lyrics, an inscrutable parable about a joker, a thief, a prince, and a confrontation that beckons but never arrives, conveys a sense of rubble-strewn trails and stormy forests. As a whole, Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” evokes a sense of the American primitive: folksy but taut with anxiety.
By contrast, Hendrix’s version of the song booms into sonic overdrive from its first chord. His version of “All Along the Watchtower” embodies a “psychedelic coding” rather than a folk music ethos. Emphasizing the song’s chord pattern in a rhythm that hints at flamenco, with its castanet-style rattle, Hendrix and his band immediately push harder at the song, with a fuller reverb and echo that signals a much larger sense of scale. The drumming is much more aggressive and active. Hendrix’s singing is more open and direct than Dylan’s elliptical, grunted style. Additionally, adopting a practice from his rhythm and blues days, Hendrix has tuned his guitar strings down a half-step (meaning he is playing the same frets on the guitar as Dylan but the resulting tones are a half-step lower in pitch). This incremental change perhaps helps accentuate the warbling quality of the guitar since the strings are looser. And it gives the notes an extra bite when Hendrix bends his guitar strings.62
The resulting mood of the song is one of disorientation: are we in the ancient land of medieval Spanish castles or in outer space? Is this tomorrow or just the end of time? Taking us through this time warp, Hendrix’s electric guitar soars, swoops, buzzes, crackles, and twists around the song’s insistent up-and-down chord repetitions. In his guitar solo midway through, Hendrix takes a solo using a wah-wah pedal, a foot device that manipulates the electronic signal generated by the guitar. The notes open and close in tones at once robotic and yet emulating a crying human voice. Compared to the original version of “All Along the Watchtower,” in which Dylan’s harmonica evokes the smallness of the human voice as Dylan puffs out single plaintive notes, Hendrix’s guitar dizzies the mind with its epic might. Dylan evokes intimacy, almost whispering to us from close by; Hendrix conveys a voice blasting through the power grid, an electronic roar screaming across the circuitry, panning from stereophonic speaker to speaker, announcing its dislocating movement across our consciousness. As the “power trio” of Hendrix, Noel Redding on bass, and Mitch Mitchell on drums crash and thunder toward the song’s conclusion, the guitar lines crescendo and peak, taking us up to the stratosphere in one last sudden rush higher.
We have briefly considered the sounds of “All Along the Watchtower” in order to think about the ways in which Dylan’s version clings to certain folksy tropes, while Hendrix’s interpretation pushes toward the disorientation of “psychedelic coding.” Investigating the song’s surroundings, however, offers a means of placing “All Along the Watchtower” more fully into context. The reception of Dylan’s album and Hendrix’s cover version provides one way of accessing this ethnographic information. We turn to the second track of the multitrack model.
Critics heard John Wesley Harding as a return to Dylan’s early career as a folk balladeer in the tradition of Woody Guthrie after his mid-1960s leap into electric rock: Dylan was harkening to the more traditional world that folk music sought to symbolize, with its connotations of small towns, farms, itinerant hoboes, and outlaws in the hills. But they also sensed in this the album’s commentary on the state of the United States and the world in 1967. Ellen Willis heard in the album, “folk lyrics. Or more precisely, affectionate comments on folk lyrics—the album is not a reversion to early work but a kind of hymn to it.”63 Yet in this awareness of memory and the past, Willis and others heard John Wesley Harding as very much about its contemporary moment, especially the Vietnam War. Jon Landau states, “Dylan manifests a profound awareness of the war and how it is affecting all of us. This doesn’t mean that I think any of the particular songs are about the war or that any of the songs are protests over it. All I mean to say is that Dylan has felt the war, that there is an awareness of it contained within the mood of the albums as a whole.”64 By trying to “not speak falsely,” Landau claims, alluding to a lyric from “All Along the Watchtower,” the album explored the complexities of morality in folk-like songs that, despite their rootsy sounds, served as allegories for 1960s American and the Vietnam War.
If Dylan’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” merely alludes to the Vietnam conflict, Hendrix’s interpretation seems to place us in Vietnam itself. With its soaring, jet fighter guitar lines and mood of impending doom mixed with grizzled self-confidence, Hendrix’s take on “All Along the Watchtower” intersects with his other songs about the United States and Vietnam: his startling version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and his song “Machine Gun,” which Hendrix explicitly dedicated to Vietnam soldiers when he performed the song in concert. The static crackle, Doppler-effect sounds, and lyrics about fighters approaching and lookout posts seem sonically to transport a listener to the Vietnam frontlines.
Indeed we know from memoirs and journalistic accounts that the song—and Hendrix’s music in general—was quite popular among American fighters in Vietnam itself. In Dispatches, the journalist Michael Herr describes a black soldier in the 101st Airborne Division (which Hendrix himself had been discharged from in the early 1960s), listening to Hendrix on a portable cassette player while on a mission in Vinh Long.65 Veterans recall hearing Hendrix on portable record players and underground radio stations.66 A “Top 30 Countdown” from October of 1968, broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Network in Vietnam, finds disc jockey Scott Manning introducing “All Along the Watchtower” by speaking of “the electric Jimi Hendrix,” who is “watching for you.”67
This contextual evidence points to the ways in which 1960s rock was not just part of a counterculture movement against the war in Vietnam, at least not in any simple way. A careful consideration of the surroundings of rock suggests that songs such as “All Along the Watchtower” expressed a more complex mood for listeners on the home front and in the war effort. The song did not stop the war but rather helped give musical expression to contradictory feelings about Vietnam. Perhaps “All Along the Watchtower” mingled anxieties about war with a sublime feeling of the drama of battle; it launched a listener into an expansive, reverberating soundscape. It reproduced the excitement of being enmeshed in something grandly historical where life was on the line; the song even signaled that one might gain access to the tools of war, to the power of automatic rifles and bomb navigation systems whose sounds seemed embodied in Hendrix’s explosive electric guitar solos. As the rock critic Albert Goldman wrote of listening to Hendrix in general (he does not specify what song he was listening to), “In the tight little world of the earphones, I heard thunderous sounds like salvos of howitzers. … I began to cringe as the roar of a jet engine mounted in my ears—but something magical happened. The intimidating sounds became an esthetic object; impulsively I thought, How beautiful are our noises!”68 True, just one listener’s experience, but it provides one piece of ethnographic evidence of the complex manner in which Hendrix’s music was received. A song such as “All Along the Watchtower” could communicate the terror and the attractive beauty of warlike sounds and feelings all at once.
Backing away from direct experiences of “All Along the Watchtower,” from an ethnographic approach to the song, in what kinds of paradigms can we interpret “All Along the Watchtower”? We arrive at the multitrack’s third band: theory. One area of consideration scholars have considered is the racial logic in which Jimi Hendrix functioned, and against which he struggled. Viewing Hendrix as abandoning the pop orientation of early 1960s black rhythm and blues for the sonic experimentation of psychedelia and the large mass audiences of rock, the historian Brian Ward hears Hendrix as “succumbing to, but playing with, white expectations.” This, to Ward, “was ultimately a pyrrhic victory; a temporary mental survival ploy wrapped in a sound commercial strategy which left pervasive white assumptions unchallenged and tacitly endorsed.” Ward dismisses as “mostly just hippie doggerel” Hendrix’s attempt toward the end of his short life to develop and advocate a kind of protomulticultural philosophy that Hendrix called the “electric sky church.”69
But other scholars, such as Lauren Onkey, take Hendrix’s later musical and philosophical ideas seriously. Onkey theorizes that with the electric sky church, “Hendrix suggests here that if the revolution were to succeed, it would need to take hold in the imagination apart from the commercial and political realms.” Beginning with his own multi-ethnic heritage as Native American, African American, and Caucasian American, Hendrix took seriously music’s ability to open the heart and mind to new ideas and perspectives, according to Onkey. Sensing in the psychedelia of the counterculture a strand of empathetic pluralism, “Hendrix held out the possibility of a psychedelic, imaginative reordering of the world.” To Onkey, Hendrix was able to model a spiritually bold vision of cosmopolitan, hybrid identity that was liberating for individuals and groups alike. Hendrix, in her analysis, sought for us all to be “Stone Free,” as the title of one of his songs put it.70
Ethnicity as well as race certainly figures in a song such as “All Along the Watchtower.” A song written by a Jewish Midwesterner (who adopted a Welsh surname) and made most famous by an African American/Native American/Caucasian Northwesterner (whose first success came in England), it resonated with long-running exchanges of culture across racial and ethnic lines.71 Charles Shaar Murray alludes to this in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop by emphasizing how deeply influenced Hendrix was by Dylan’s new mode of surrealist, symbolist songwriting in the mid-1960s when Dylan went electric.72 In a presentation at the 2003 Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project, Hendrix biographer Charles R. Cross made even more of the connection between Dylan and Hendrix, arguing that rather than being the “black Elvis,” as a number of critics called him, Hendrix longed to be the “black Dylan.”73 Though Cross does not place his biographical work on Hendrix in a larger theoretical analysis, one might think of a song such as “All Along the Watchtower” as a crucial point of transit between black and white participants in the counterculture movement: the song is informed not only by the ambiguous relationship between folk music and psychedelic rock, but also the kinds of exchanges rock opened up across the color line, and the kinds of blockages it either maintained or created. Whether one adopts Ward’s critical position or Onkey’s more celebratory argument on the topic (or pursues still another interpretation), one can certainly spot ethnicity and race as theoretical constructs operating in “All Along the Watchtower.”74
The song also heralds another cultural paradigm that the theoretical track can reveal. “All Along the Watchtower” seems to manifest a larger cultural logic of conspiracy that arose in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. The song’s lyrics hint at nefarious collusions and sinister forces operating in mysterious ways, but we aren’t quite sure how the pieces of the narrative puzzle fit together. We are able to hear bits of an elliptical conversation between a joker and a thief, two figures who seem to be a team, but who may not entirely trust each other. “Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,” the joker complains. “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke,” the thief responds. But, there is “no reason to get excited,” since “you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.” The thief insists to the joker that they should, “not talk falsely now” because “the hour is getting late.” Meanwhile, as this strange conversation occurs, suspicions arise on the parapets of the watchtower, where “the princes kept a view” and “all the women came and went, barefoot servants too.”
The song seems to emanate from an overarching mood of distrust. Knowledge fragments and perspectives shift in a manner linked to the sense of fissure, rupture, and crisis that Frederic Jameson identifies in his work on postmodernism. We are being watched from the watchtower, or we are doing the watching ourselves, a conspiratorial regime that Stephen Paul Miller has explored in his book on the decade following the late 1960s, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance.75 “All Along the Watchtower” can be heard as embedded in a framework of conspiracy, or perhaps adrift in a swirl of conspiratorial chaos might be a better way of phrasing it. As the song concludes, we are left with ominous lines that seem to circle us back to the beginning of the story. Having started out by listening in on an inscrutable conversation between a joker and a thief, we leave learning that “two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl.” Trapping us in its endless loop, “All Along the Watchtower” conveys a world in which devious forces plot from on high, looking down upon us as from a panoptic tower. There are stirrings of rebellion among the “women” and “foot soldiers,” but all we can hear are a few incongruous quips and comments as the wind begins to kick up and we wonder when the apocalypse will rain down upon us.76
Theoretical paradigms such as race, ethnicity, and conspiracy already suggest a historicization of the 1960s era. But how might we further historicize the song? We can better hear its echoes on the fourth track of the multitrack model if examine the many cover versions recorded since the 1960s. Of course, Dylan’s original itself already sounds like a cover of a lost nineteenth-century badman tune from frontier days in the United States, with stories of outlaws and bandits reverberating in its lyrical and musical tensions. The song’s allegorical nature and Dylan’s instrumentation flood the original version with its own sense of the past.
Once he heard Hendrix’s cover version, however, Dylan intriguingly chose to perform his own song along the lines of Hendrix’s interpretation. Captured live with the Band on the album Before the Flood (1974), on Live at Budokan (1979), on Dylan and the Dead with the Grateful Dead (1988), sung by Neil Young on The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (1993), and on Dylan’s MTV Unplugged appearance (1995), one hears “All Along the Watchtower” interpreted and reinterpreted again as an echo of Hendrix’s cover version. From Jerry Garcia’s lilting homage to Hendrix’s guitar playing on the version with the Grateful Dead to Neil Young’s sneering version at the 1992 celebration of Dylan’s thirty years in the music business to Dylan’s terrified vocal performance at the Unplugged session, one hears a song that seems to reexamine the lessons learned in the 1960s in light of newer aesthetic and historical situations. The Dead sound festive, nostalgically remembering their survival, celebrating and perhaps even recreating the communal joys of the 1960s counterculture. Young’s angry, gut-wrenching performance perhaps expresses a feeling of failure about the utopian dreams of the 1960s. Dylan’s own reinterpretation of the song, in which his bleary voice rushes toward the end of each vocal line, ominously lowering the notes, sounds as if he has turned headlong toward the future and finds himself staring directly at the final conspiracy: old age, mortality, and death itself.
Add to these versions the many other cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower” and one can hear the song as a meditation on the 1960s as a whole. As both Simon Frith and George Lipsitz have argued, rock music in particular (and popular music in general) are particularly powerful conveyors of memory.77 Bobby Womack, a friend of Hendrix’s the early 1960s rhythm and blues circuit, performs a straight-up soul version, as if the song could help recover the memory of Hendrix’s pre-psychedelic persona.78 Meanwhile, younger musicians, such as U2, the Indigo Girls, and the Dave Matthews Band, among others, especially seem to play “All Along the Watchtower” as a way of signaling their allegiance with the anti-establishment politics of the 1960s counterculture. Ironically, they also use the song to brand themselves as part of “classic rock,” that is as part of the very heart of the music business establishment.79 “All Along the Watchtower” continues to serve as contested terrain for understandings of 1960s rock as both an oppositional music and an expression of success in the dominant mainstream of commercial society.
In these multiple ways, “All Along the Watchtower” has become a key text in the historical consciousness of the 1960s and the counterculture as a whole. As Nick Bromell writes in his afterword to Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Pyschedelics in the 1960s—tellingly titled, “‘Our Incompleteness and Our Choices’: Forgetting the ‘60s and Remembering Them”—he listens now to “All Along the Watchtower” and believes that “Hendrix playing Dylan represents the consummate fusion of the blues tradition with the psychedelicized hunger of white youth enmired in loneliness and looking for a new self, trapped in history and looking desperately for some way out of here.” The song’s persistence down to this day speaks to the fact that, “teenagers still stand there on the watchtower and wait and wonder.”80 Trapped in history, yet empowered by the consciousness it can invoke, we continue to reflect on the 1960s, rock music, the counterculture, and popular music as a whole through songs such as “All Along the Watchtower.”
Putting together the four tracks—musicology, ethnography, theory, and history—allows us to hear even this one song with a richness and depth that interdisciplinary study can offer. The multitrack presents one metaphor for managing this interdisciplinarity. Of course, I have left out many other positions that one might incorporate into the model.81 So too, by focusing on 1960s rock as a case study, I leave to others the development, revision, or rejection of the multitrack metaphor with regard to different musical forms. That said, I have especially attempted to show how cultural history offers a special track—an echo track—that enriches the multitrack as an interdisciplinary endeavor without obliterating the other modes of analysis.
Music and history have a special connection. As Gene Santoro writes, “Music not only captures time; it mimics time. The ebb and flow that shapes the emotional tension between sound and space, spiked by dynamics and tonal colors, creates a rhythm analogous to the way we pass through history.”82 My hope is that as a mode of interdisciplinary analysis, the multitrack model can make the “ebb and flow” of both music and history more palpable and powerful to our ears.
1. Richard Middleton, “Introduction,” in Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14.
2. Roy Wagner, Symbols That Stand For Themselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 11. Quoted in Steven Feld, “Aesthetics As Iconicity of Style (Uptown Title); Or, (Downtown Title) ‘Lift-Up-Over Sounding’: Getting Into the Kaluli Groove,” in Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, ed. Steven Feld and Charles Keil (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 115.
3. Greil Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleases: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), republished as In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 213.
4. Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology, and Mass Communication (Newbury, CA: Sage, 1992), 1.
5. For useful descriptions of cultural history as a methodology, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History: Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
6. Geoffrey O’Brien, “Burt Bacharach Comes Back,” New York Review of Books (6 May 1999): 48.
7. Sheila Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Michael Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999).
8. John Covach writes eloquently about the study of rock music in terms of the more traditional musicological question, what makes this sound great, arguing that musicological “theorists should pay more attention to rock music because it is interesting” [italics in the original]. See John Covach, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. Anahid Kassabian, David Schwarz, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997): 85. For additional examples of this sort of methodological argument, see John Covach, “Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 452–70; John Covach, Graeme M. Boone, eds., Understanding Rock: Essays In Musical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Kevin Holm-Hudson, ed., Progressive Rock Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Wilfrid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973; reprint, New York: Viking, 1974). Also see essays in Richard Middleton, ed., Reading Pop. For a critique of the traditional musicological approach from within musicology as a field, see Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Start Making Sense!: Musicology Starts Making Sense,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (1995; reprint, NY: Routledge, 2000), 277–292.
9. Paul Willis traced a homological relationship of expressions of style to class identity in his groundbreaking study, Profane Culture (New York: Routledge, 1978). See also, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (1975; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1995). For a complication of the homological approach using the notion of bricolage, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2002). For a critique of homology, see Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 23–24.
10. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 2.
11. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 2.
12. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 4.
13. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 7.
14. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 32–33.
15. Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes, 21.
16. Hicks, Sixties Rock, 27.
17. Hicks, Sixties Rock, 38.
18. Hicks, Sixties Rock, 59.
19. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 89–164.
20. An intriguing book from the 1960s on the connection between rock and free jazz is Jon Sinclair and Robert Levin, Music and Politics (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971).
21. Among others, Sheila Whiteley has addressed the issue of rock and gender in Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2000) and in her edited volume, Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
22. Hicks, Sixties Rock, 73–4.
23. Hicks notates various recorded and live performances to trace the different ways the Doors presented their hit song, reading into the performances their perspectives on their mainstream success. Sixties Rock, 82.
24. The lyric-driven approach dominated much of the early work on rock music. See, for example, James T. Carey, “The Ideology of Autonomy in Popular Lyrics: A Content Analysis,” Psychiatry 32, 2 (May 1969): 150–164.
25. Walt Whitman, “A Song For Occupations,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editions, 1959), 158.
26. Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1994), x.
27. Shank, Dissonant Identities, xi.
28. Shank, Dissonant Identities, 138–139.
29. Dan Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Cavicchi participated in an earlier project along similar lines. See Charles Keil, Susan Crafts, Dan Cavicchi, My Music (1993; 2nd edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 2002). For other inquiries into pop music fandom, see Lisa Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).
30. Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us, 186–187.
31. Albert Goldman, “The Emergence of Rock,” in Freakshow: Misadventures in the Counterculture, 1959–1971 (1971; reprint, Cooper Square Press, 2001), 14.
32. Goldman, “The Emergence of Rock,” 14.
33. Glenn Hinson, Fire In My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 8.
34. For additional examples of the range of pop music ethnography, see Sara Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jeffrey Arnett, Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1999); Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); and David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Ethnomusicology offers another vast literature of ethnographically-grounded research. Among many worthy studies, see Feld and Keil, Music Grooves; Charles Keil, Urban Blues (1966; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paul F. Berliner, The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe (1978; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Charles Keil, Tiv Song: The Sociology of Art in a Classless Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); John Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982; reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music And Technology In North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Timothy Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
35. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; trans., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996), 45.
36. For more on the contradictions of capitalism as, on the one hand, demanding a productive code of restraint and discipline and, on the other, promoting a consumer drive toward gratification and excess, see Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
37. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 11, 272. For an overview of the popular music studies debates between “cultural Marxists” and “material Marxists,” see David Sanjek, “Funkentelechy vs. the Stockholm Syndrome: The Place of Industrial Analysis in Popular Music Studies,” Popular Music and Society 21, 1 (1997): 77–98.
38. Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 16–17.
39. Grossberg, Dancing, 49.
40. For Grossberg’s explanation of “affective alliances,” see especially Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life,” Popular Music 4 (1984): 225–258.
41. Grossberg draws on theories of cultural hegemony articulated by Antonio Gramsci and expanded by Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. See Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (1988; reprint, New York: New York University Press, 1999). Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (1971; reprint, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996). He also utilizes theories of power developed by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Random House, 1984). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
42. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 226.
43. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, 226.
44. Theodore Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 236.
45. Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me, 209.
46. Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me, 215.
47. Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me, 227, 217.
48. Of course, there are many other schemes. One of the most intriguing places rock within the framework of romanticism. See literary scholar Robert Pattison’s The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) for a negative interpretation, and Perry Meisel, The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over From Romanticism to Rock and Roll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) for a more positive interpretation. Peter Wicke’s Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, and Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) emphasizes the effects of mass-media and technology on the ideologies of rock: he claims they created a new cultural paradigm in which collective and individual liberation merged through a romantic ideology of creativity. Jason Toynbee’s Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (New York: Edward Arnold, 2000) expands upon Wicke’s ideas by examining the rhetorics and practices of creativity in popular music in more detail. A different scheme is put forth by the political theorist Carson Holloway, who argues that popular music can be heard through theories of classical republicanism. See Carson Holloway, Music, Passion, Politics (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company, 2001).
49. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformations of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 185.
50. Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
51. Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 9.
52. Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past, 146.
53. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 10.
54. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 19.
55. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 128.
56. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 87.
57. Bromell notes the outlining of these problems by Eric Lott, Steve Waksman, and others but argues that rock should not be interpreted as a kind of false consciousness; Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 194. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For more on the issue of race and music, see Ron Radano, ed., Racial Imagination and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Greg Tate, ed., Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (New York: Harlem Moon, 2003).
58. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 51–52.
59. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 6.
60. The song originally appeared on Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding (Columbia Records, 1967).
61. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, ElectricLadyland (Reprise, 1968).
62. I owe a debt of gratitude to Andy Flory, graduate student in the Music Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, for these observations on Hendrix’s guitar-tuning; email with author, 25 May 2004.
63. Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (1981; 2nd edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 24; from an essay originally published in Cheetah 1, 6 (March 1968): 34–37, 66–71.
64. Jon Landau, “John Wesley Harding,” Crawdaddy! 15 (May 1968): 16.
65. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 181–182.
66. Among other sources, see Lee Andreson, Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War (Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2000), and Stephen Roby, Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix (New York: Billboard Books, 2002), 96.
67. From “Top 30 Countdown with Scott Manning,” Armed Forces Radio Network Vietnam (AFVN) (October 1968). At one point, this archival recording was available in real audio format at the website, www.geocities.com/afvn.
68. Albert Goldman, “Superspade Raises Atlantis” (1968), in The Jimi Hendrix Companion: Three Decades of Commentary, ed. Chris Potash (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 60.
69. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 246–247. For a critique of Ward’s book, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Sole Response,” American Quarterly 52, 3 (September 2000): 533–545.
70. Lauren Onkey, “Jimi Hendrix and the Politics of Race in the Sixties,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2000), 209. For another interpretation of Hendrix and race, see Steve Waksman, “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, the Electric Guitar, and the Meanings of Blackness,” in Instruments of Desire, 167–206.
71. The literature on this topic is vast, but among other books, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991; revised, New York: Verso, 1999); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
72. Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop (1989; revised ed., London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 14.
73. Charles R. Cross, “Meet the Dylan: How a Chance Encounter Between Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix Forever Changed American Popular Music,” Paper delivered at Skip a Beat: Challenging Popular Music Orthodoxy, EMP Pop Conference, April 2003.
74. Among other inquires into Hendrix and race, see David James, “Rock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion of Vietnam,” Representations 29 (Winter, 1990): 78–98; David James, “The Vietnam War and American Music,” in The Vietnam War and American Culture, ed. John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 226–294; Mary Ellison, “Black Music and the Vietnam War,” in Vietnam Images: War and Representation, ed. Jeffrey Walsh and James Aulich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); and Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
75. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
76. One might develop a whole theoretical interpretation of “All Along the Watchtower” utilizing Foucault’s theory of the panopticon. See Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–228.
77. Simon Frith, “Rock and the Politics of Memory,” in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, et. al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 49–69. George Lipsitz, “Who’ll Stop the Rain: Youth Culture, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Social Crises,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 206–234.
78. Bobby Womack’s version appears on The Facts of Life (originally released on United Artists, 1973; re-released by The Right Stuff, 1994).
79. U2’s version appears on Rattle and Hum (Island Records, 1988); the Indigo Girls’ version appears on Back on the Bus Y’all (Epic Records, 1991); Dave Matthews Band performs the song on a number of live albums, among them The Central Park Concert (RCA, 1993), Live at Folsom Field, Boulder Colorado, 7/11/01 (RCA, 1992), and Live in Chicago, 12/19/98 (RCA, 1991). For more on this process of countercultural affiliation in relation to the music industry, see Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books, 1997).
80. Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 149.
81. To name but a few: Christopher Small’s notion of musical reception as an active social process that he calls musicking (a theory that Nick Bromell utilizes); John Shepherd’s similar work on the social dimensions embedded in musical performance; Shepherd and Peter Wicke’s careful inquiries into how music communicates not as spoken language but through its own non-semantic logics of discourse; Jacques Attali’s theories of music, noise, and social control; George Lipsitz’s utilization of the Bakhtinian idea of the dialogic; Harris Berger’s deployment of phenomenology; and perspectives on African-American music and expressive culture put forth by Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, Tricia Rose, and others. See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings Of Performing And Listening (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1998); John Shepherd, Music As Social Text (Cambridge: Polity, 1991) and Music Of The Common Tongue: Survival And Celebration In Afro-American Music (1987; New York: Riverrun Press, 1994); John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997); Jacques Attali, Noise; George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies,” American Quarterly 42, 4 (December 1990): 615–636; and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1997); Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1999); and Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro, Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act: Essays (1964; reprint: Vintage, 1995); Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (1970; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), Stomping the Blues (1976; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (New York: Vintage, 1996); Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; reprint, New York: William and Morrow, 1983); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
82. Gene Santoro, Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), iv.