The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock & Roll

The sound of a sax solo breaking loose from a series of driving riffs is one of the most exciting experiences of this century’s music.

But others, such as Carl Perkins’s “Dixie Fried”, used the aggressive sound of rock ’n’ roll to convey a violent mood of drinking and potential razor fights.

The adults who disapproved of the orgiastic dancing and deceptively simple rhythms of rock ’n’ roll could see in Latin music an extension of the dance music they were familiar with – partners dancing together.

With Little Richard, the rock ’n’ roll audience got the aggressive extrovert to enact their wilder fantasies, and his stage performance set precedents for anyone who followed him. Dressed in shimmering suits with long drape jackets and baggy pants, his hair grown long and slicked straight, white teeth and gold rings flashing in the spotlights, he s

“Alley Oop” sounded like a Coasters record, made while Leiber and Stoller were taking a lunch-break; it had some of the same ingredients, including an alley piano style borrowed from “Searchin’ ”, and a lyric about a figure from current American pop culture; but there was a sloppiness that Leiber and Stoller would have tidied up. And no wonder, as

Vincent had a definitive white rock ’n’ roll voice – reedy, urgent, vulnerable

But the songs for Presley’s films Loving You and Jailhouse Rock were worse. Written by Leiber and Stoller, they allowed Presley to indulge his tendency to exaggerate the importance of his feelings and began his decline towards melodramatic popular songs, a decline that became “official” when he recorded “It’s Now or Never” in a pseudo-operatic styl

Although he gave the impression of being as frantic and emotionally involved as Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the most controlled, self-conscious rock ’n’ roll singers, and introduced a sophisticated technique of varying the emotional pitch of his fast songs, building to intense peaks and then slackening off, dropping his voice to a wh

“It’s Only Make Believe”, and his gasping, end-of-the-world vocal seemed to bring an end to the era of innocence that had opened with “Young Love”. Now the message was, we can’t dupe them any more: People see us everywhere They think that you really care But myself I can’t deceive I know it’s only make believe