Original subtitles

www.titlovi.com

Rock 'n' roll music.

It was the single thing that was able to reach down, communicate...

and give you a sense of the world outside.

It's not even recognizable as the same thing that people called...

"this rock 'n' roll that won't survive."

Mystery and mischief are the two most important ingredients in rock 'n' roll.

This great music we've discovered, this great music which is still growing...

which now you can write songs about what's really happening deep inside you...

and what's happening around you in the world...

can also sound extraordinary.

There's no reason why it shouldn't sound as good...

as Mozart, or Beethoven, or a great Ellington gig.

People let bands change them in their lifestyle.

There's people who listen to music ritually.

"God, I need to listen to Metallica when I wake up. It's my coffee."

Or something like that.

There's people that just flip on the radio...

and just... as they go to work.

Rock 'n' roll is fun. It's full of energy. It's full of laughter.

It's naughty.

Music is like sex.

You spend more time talking about it than you actually do doing it.

Jazz was for the brain.

And blues, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll...

was from the groin, from the belly.

Between wanting to make money and wanting to meet women...

is why we got into rock 'n' roll in the first place.

We loved music. We wanted to express ourselves.

But anyone who says he didn't get into rock to get laid is lying.

In the '90s, we've had time to look and inspect...

and analyze everything and be influenced by everything.

There's not a whole lot of pioneering going on right this minute.

The pioneering went on earlier.

There's nothing but rhythm and blues.

That "R" and "B" stands for Real Black.

Rock 'n' roll is rock 'n' roll.

And you're not going to beat rock 'n' roll music.

If you do, I want to hear it.

Juvenile delinquents played rock 'n' roll in the '50s...

and wore leather jackets.

In the '60s, hippies played it.

In the '70s, there was juvenile delinquents...

but that was an old word, so they used "punk."

Then they cleaned it up with new wave and put a tie on...

but it's all about music and songs...

and what songs are popular to people at the time.

You roll with it. You rock with it. You move it.

You feel it. And you believe in it.

Rock 'n' roll is a commitment.

Rock 'n' roll is passion...

and spirit.

If I defined rock 'n' roll, it would be freedom and rebellion.

It's what it's all about.

It's performing that which you feel strongly about...

to other people, because the songs just come alive then.

That's when they live and breathe.

And rock 'n' roll is something that's hardcore, rough...

and wild, and sweaty, and wet, and just loose.

I think there needs to be a certain amount of outlaw to rock 'n' roll.

And at that time, we were at that age where we really were those outlaws.

If we had been in the Old West, we would have been bank robbers, I'm sure.

But luckily there was music around, so we ended up being musicians.

Rock music is high-velocity folk music.

It is our life and times, but with fury and some passion.

Rock 'n'roll is such a strong medium...

that it's almost too good.

It's forced to keep itself alive in any way, shape, or form.

It does that through its agelessness...

its capabilities of being so euphoric...

that it can get anybody stoned and caught and brought into its web.

To tell you the truth, that's what I think drives the greatest music:

Simplicity and truth.

It's a threat, really. I think that's really the key of it.

Most kids hate their parents' artists...

their big sisters' and brothers' artists.

They want to get away from that more than anything.

It's supposed to shake you...

out of your establishment place and say:

"Gee, I really don't understand that."

Exactly. That's the point. You're not supposed to.

This is the next generation taking over.

And I can remember the same exact words that they're saying...

that I hear a lot of my contemporaries saying, like:

"That's not music. There's no melody. And there's no words."

Rock 'n' roll started out on a corner of the street, just like hip-hop.

A few Black people get together.

It's devil music.

About every 10 years...

everything breaks down to the lowest common denominator...

and then it builds back up to the same old shit.

But the only thing that survives is rock 'n' roll.

You're talking about music...

that was bred from Africa to the Black Church...

and over to gospel, which turned into blues...

and jazz and country music.

And it cross-pollinates, and that's the way it ought to be.

That's how it started.

It's only now, later on, that I look back and say:

"I didn't start listening to music in 1956. I was listening to it in 1946."

Without even me knowing it. I was listening to my mom's stuff.

Whatever she wanted to hear, I had to hear.

And so I was brought up on a lot of very good jazz...

a lot of good vocalists, and good guitar players.

And if you turn out to be a musician, anything you've ever heard...

comes out in what you play.

You only need a few geniuses and great musicians here and there.

That's enough to play it.

The real beauty and art in music is listening to it.

In a way, Muddy Waters was the focus...

perhaps of all the good things about that Chicago Blues era.

He had a great voice. He was an interesting guitar player.

He used to play harmonica. He had a wonderful band.

He was a big influence for me.

I knew him before The Rolling Stones existed.

He meant a great deal to me...

and his music still does, probably more than anybody else's.

I don't know why. It was the first, really, that got to me...

and it still is the most important music in my life today:

The music of Muddy Waters.

Everything that I have heard in my life is rooted in the blues...

except Johann Sebastian Bach.

I'm a big blues fan. I'm more of a blues fan than a jazz fan.

A lot of people might say, "You must be into jazz."

No, that's somebody like Gang Starr...

or Tribe Called Quest that entered the jazz field.

But me, it's almost like if I was brought up in Memphis.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago...

and the blues, naturally, was a huge part of my life.

The blues and jazz were both...

If it hadn't been for Black Americans...

we would be doing the minuet and dancing on our tippy-toes.

I have vivid memories of my uncle...

my mother's brother...

and my grandmother's brother, who's my great-uncle...

humming and singing in the fields.

Picking cotton, trying to get them 100 pounds...

before you went to the weigh-in scales.

They would just make up songs, like...

'"I'm so tired...

'"I'll be so glad when the sun goes down.

'"And when I get home, I just want to lay down my head...

'"and sleep until tomorrow. '"

John Westbrook was an old Black man...

who lived across the field from me.

He worked in the cotton fields...

which, by the way, is the hardest work in the world.

One day in the cotton field, he said:

"Child, I want you to take your little fingers and do this."

I said, "Uncle John, do that again."

I hated picking cotton and chopping.

The sun was so hot. I dreaded those times.

That's the only thing that made me change my life.

I knew that I couldn't do that. That was something that, as a child...

I knew the beginning of dislike, and hate, and "cannot do"...

and "don't want to do," and "will not do."

Country music is gospel.

Country music is the soul of the country.

Let's go back to that word "soul." It's the soul of country music.

When you listen to country music, you listen to the stories.

You listen to the actual hurt, the real pain.

I wanted to be the first singing Black cowboy.

I never thought about singing. Never thought I could sing until I heard:

Back in the Saddle Again.

Peace in the Valley and all those songs.

That's why I like country music today. This is my influence.

This is the beginning of Hank Ballard's singing career.

Gene Autry, ladies and gentlemen. I love this man.

I treasure this photo. I take it everywhere I go, Gene!

Both Keith and I like country music a lot.

It's the same kind of musical form as blues.

I used to like George Jones...

Johnny Cash...

Hank Snow...

Hank Williams...

I got very interested in Hank Williams...

because I saw him when I was very young, at the Opry.

The Friday Night Frolics, actually, was the first time I saw him.

And I just thought the way he approached his singing...

and the rhythms and stuff that he did astounded me.

He was not like anything else that was going on at the time.

I remember when I was 18, I had one Hank Williams record.

And I liked it, but it didn't really hit me...

until I was probably 26 or 27.

And then I got into everything he did.

The country guys bred guys like Buddy Holly.

Buddy Holly was a little bit more of a...

little sweeter kind of music.

It was the country ballad with a rock 'n' roll base.

Buddy Holly had a fantastic effect on people...

because he had great guitar technique. And the songs were good.

I remember learning to play Rave On, the piano bit in the middle.

And if you could play it, you felt it was great. It's accessible.

If you can play it, it means that you're in tune with him.

When you talk about gospel, gospel is the truth.

And country and western has always been the truth.

But just because the brogue or the accent is a little different...

city folk made fun of that.

It's like a fever.

You catch the fever, and it's like a gospel experience...

when you go into a church with Black people.

They whip up this choir feeling.

The people in the audience are right with it.

It's just gospel, know what I mean?

You let loose.

The piano was talking. The drums was walking.

Everybody was gone.

People shouting all over the place.

And if you didn't understand what it was...

you thought you was in a rock 'n' roll concert.

That's the way Black gospel was when I was a boy.

We called the church '"the sanctified church. '"

And then they had that holler.

And I loved that.

They were just screaming. I said, "Oh, my Lord."

It made my big toe shoot up in my boot.

So music out of the church has always been my influence.

And even now...

I still say that there's such a fine line...

between gospel and R & B.

Many songs came out of the church and ended up in the nightclubs...

like Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean.

When you hear Ruth Brown sing, you know there's some gospel there.

So it involves, you know, automatically...

and you can hear it. You can feel it.

That's what made the character of rhythm and blues so popular...

because people who had that spiritual feeling and background...

knew that there was something there that drew you to that music...

that just made you wanna dance, made you wanna move.

You know, R & B was a huge fire.

But then you start mixing in the country...

the best of the country, the sort of really swinging country...

and gospel, can't forget gospel...

and to some extent jazz, I think.

Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan were probably the first rock 'n' roll bands...

that were really conscious of what we call "the big beat."

And it was ironic because these were both bands...

that had their roots steeped in jazz.

And Louis Jordan was a monster.

All during World War II...

when he did Caldonia and Beware...

and Salt Pork, West Virginia, Choo-Choo Ch'Boogie.

He did shuffle boogie and everything else...

with backbeats and everything else that were all elements of rock 'n' roll.

I think he was really one of the first crossover artists.

Louis Jordan had a great white following.

Louis Jordan was not only the first rock 'n' roller...

he was the first rapper.

You got to dig some of those old Louis Jordan records.

In the mid '40s and early '50s, there were four major record companies:

RCA-Victor, Columbia Records, Capitol Records, and Decca Records.

They were all very tightly controlling what you heard...

and that was the blandness.

There was a thirst for different kinds of niche music...

basically what they call '"Race music, '" rhythm and blues.

It was controlled by a handful, and all of a sudden...

they built this interconnected network of independent distributors.

We could make records in our garage...

ship them out of our trunk, and become multimillionaires overnight.

That was the fun period.

It was full of imaginative entrepreneurs who became very wealthy.

Now you had the big corporate types at RCA and Columbia and so forth...

who were playing the game according to Hoyle.

These guys weren't gonna play it that way...

because it was their money on the line.

Their survival depended on getting their records played and sold.

So they started paying off disc jockeys.

They started off cutting deals with record stores.

You buy one, you get one free.

They just kicked the hell out of the major labels.

People like the Chess Brothers started Chess Records.

Lew Chudd started lmperial Records. Nathan started King Records...

and Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler started Atlantic Records.

Nowadays, people have schools they can go to and study all this music.

But in those days we had records.

All over the world, people used to collect those records.

The people that we worked with on Atlantic Records...

for example, were from Turkey.

They came here with a knowledge already of what was happening here...

because they were able to get these records.

In those days, those records were like gold.

Atlantic was a label run by jazz buffs and record collectors.

Two of the company's executives, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun...

were sons of the Turkish ambassador to the United States.

They called their label '"Atlantic'" for the ocean they'd crossed to reach America.

In the '50s, they made records...

with some of the country's most gifted Black artists.

I felt that I knew what Black life was in America...

and I knew what Black music was in America...

and I knew what Black roots and what Black gospel music...

and Black blues from the Delta that went on to Chicago...

and the Texas blues that went on to the West Coast.

I knew what they were, and I knew all about that...

and I loved all of that.

So in loving America, I thought I loved something more...

than the average American knew about.

We placed such an emphasis at Atlantic Records on bel canto...

on great ability...

on a Joe Turner, who could have been an opera singer...

with that beautiful, great big rolling, tumbling voice of his.

Big Joe Turner was a man who could have crossed many lines.

He was a great blues man, rhythm and blues man...

rock 'n' roll man, and a reputation in the jazz field.

With a Joe Turner song like Shake, Rattle and Roll...

and a Louis Jordan song that's rocking...

before you know it, you're putting rocking and rolling together.

And rockin' and rollin'...

was a not-so-subtle way...

of talking about...

having a good time, dancing, and sometimes it meant sex.

Thanks to Big Joe Turner...

Atlantic was present at the creation of rock 'n'roll.

But the label's presiding genius was the blind singer and pianist...

Ray Charles...

who blended jazz, gospel, and blues...

into an urbane, yet earthy new style of Black popular music.

Ray Charles' playing is so superb and he's just so good.

So I can't pin him down to just saying this is church or...

Ray does it all.

Ray Charles is without a doubt, as they say, a genius.

To me, he is even more so.

Ray and I became good friends.

We thought he was something from Mars.

We were 14 years old...

and we were still living at home.

Ray had his own apartment. He had three suits.

And he had these older girlfriends. He was unbelievable.

He'd have record players, electric record players...

and Ray would take them apart, glass tubes in record players...

and he knew how to take everything apart and fix it and everything else.

I met him in Austin, Texas...

and I was supposed to be just the traveling vocalist...

and work with his band.

I'll never forget the first day when I showed up for rehearsals...

and I raised sand. I said to my road manager:

"How's he going to play for me? He's blind."

Because I had all these charts.

And I remember he said to me, "Don't worry about it."

And the first night we were together, Austin, Texas...

he played everything that I had done like he had been in a recording session.

At about 17, he went down to California...

and when he came back, he was so different.

It was just like another person. He was singing different music...

and he was singing the gospel thing then.

It was like he had found this light.

I always wanted The Band to make a record as good as Ray Charles.

He always made the best records as far as I was concerned.

He had the best band in town at the same time.

Anything to do with Ray Charles was all right.

I remember the first time I heard Ray Charles sing.

He was singing...

And my mama said, "Now that's a shame.

"That man has taken that gospel song...

"and turned it into the blues." Because the original lyric was...

And then when she found out he was blind, she really went off.

Oh, my God. This was sacrilegious.

In Chicago, yet a different style of Black music evolved.

In search of work, bluesmen throughout the 1940s...

had journeyed north.

In the noisy nightclubs and juke joints of Chicago's South Side...

the harmonica players and guitarists plugged in...

and produced an electrifying new brand of blues.

Dad would take me down to Maxwell Street...

which was kind of like, I guess, Portobello Road in London or something...

but it'd be street musicians and just wonderful sounds.

Everything.

Living in Chicago was quite a rich environment.

Chicago is also a place...

that you learn to play many different types of music...

because you have jazz clubs, blues clubs.

All the different types of music are very popular there.

And I got a job at Chess Records.

I was a studio musician, studio drummer.

Working at Chess was a very interesting time of my life.

Anything could happen.

I remember Bo Diddley because I used to run into him in the studio all the time.

Leonard Chess loved the blues.

Any time they had a session, they would call Bo Diddley in...

and Bo Diddley was like an A and R man.

Because he lived in Chicago...

Leonard Chess could not A and R a session.

They ran the technical side...

but Bo Diddley was really the man who set down that pattern.

Bo's one of my favorite guitar players.

He only plays one chord, but I can listen to that for days.

It's just so cool.

Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley.

I remember listening to it in one of those earphones.

A friend of mine in high school said, "Have you heard Bo?"

I says, "No." And it changed me.

The beat and the rhythms and the things, it haunted me.

So I tuned my guitar to G and everything because of that.

Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino.

This is like the air we breathe, you know?

As far as I'm concerned, this is our classical music.

Fats Domino, of course, inspired me...

because he can make three chords sound so good.

Instead of, like, you know...

He did it in a nice, picturesque way...

as to bring out the beauty of just three chords...

almost like a blues singer.

But at the same time, an R & B singer.

Boy, when I heard that guy doing that...

Fats and all his trills that he would do, he was absolutely brilliant.

All guitar players were influenced by Chuck Berry.

Chuck Berry is one of the founders...

of what came out of rhythm and blues and became known as rock 'n' roll.

How big an influence?

I don't know, but the first time I went to go sing a Chuck Berry song...

I'd never tried to sing one...

I realized that I knew all the words...

and I could play it without even having ever tried to play it before.

I knew when I first heard Maybellene.

I said, "Look out, here is a Black man that likes country music."

Without a doubt, the greatest poet in rock 'n' roll would be Chuck Berry.

I always felt that Chuck Berry was the poet laureate of America.

He probably was the best lyric writer I was ever around...

and he was awesome on the stage as well.

Chuck Berry was an act you didn't want to try to follow.

When he got out and did his duck walk with that out-of-tune guitar...

which most of the time it was, but nobody cared...

the crowd was making more noise than his guitar was.

Let's go back to who was the king of rock 'n' roll.

You know, you've often heard Little Richard...

come on television and say, "I was the king of rock 'n' roll."

I agree.

I also would like to add Chuck Berry with it.

But Little Richard was...

the star in that era with rock 'n' roll.

Little Richard was far and away the most flamboyant of the performers.

We just thought it was so against the rules...

that Little Richard would jump on the piano and dance...

wearing his cape and that wonderful pencil mustache...

and be so out there, and we all went crazy.

I danced then.

We'd get up in the balcony and jump around.

The balcony would shake...

and you'd feel, "This balcony is gonna crash."

But it's rock 'n' roll, and we're out there gambling.

Little Richard was Black rock 'n' roll.

I mean, we understand that Little Richard was Tutti Frutti, Good Golly Miss Molly.

He was all those things that everybody else wanted to be.

He was our Elvis Presley.

I think of Little Richard...

washing dishes in the bus station in Macon, Georgia...

and he knows that he's going to make it.

He made it out of that kitchen and into the history books.

That is great. His records are great.

They still sound great. They always will.

Black people, they drew out of their community...

this powerful, emotional, majestic thing...

called Black gospel music, and jazz, and blues.

All those elements combined, played a part...

in forming rhythm and blues.

And later, as the whites were attracted to it...

it began to be known as rock 'n' roll.

Rock 'n' roll is a misnomer.

There's no such music as rock 'n' roll.

Rock 'n' roll was something that, just out of necessity...

was termed rock 'n' roll.

There was a man by the name of Alan Freed...

who started playing rhythm and blues music...

after the classical music station went off the air in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi, everybody. How y'all?

This is yours truly Alan Freed welcoming you to The Big Beat on radio.

Every night at 10:00.

He called the show The Moon Dog Show.

He came to New York and there was an old beggar, a panhandler...

in this town by the name of The Moon Dog.

So Alan Freed couldn't call his show The Moon Dog Show anymore...

because the old panhandler sued him about the name.

So in a hurry to come up with a name...

bottom line was he decided that he was gonna call it The Rock and Roll Show.

I think that Alan Freed is important in the history of rock 'n' roll...

and I think I understand maybe a little bit why the other faction...

that doesn't want to acknowledge that, wants to discard him.

It's hard to allow a disc jockey...

to walk off with that mantle of importance.

He didn't write, sing, or arrange anything.

He got on the air and played some records.

When you're on in New York at night in winter...

there's mystery, there's romance...

there's danger in the air.

And that's what Alan Freed projected.

Now, Alan claims he started rock 'n' roll.

Alan did not start rock 'n' roll...

but he was the disc jockey. He coined the phrase.

It was real odd because we were listening to rhythm and blues...

and we knew the original artists: Fats Domino and Little Richard...

would rip it up.

And then the white artist would cover it, and it was...

We didn't know each other at the time...

but it was really frustrating...

to know the real record and then hear...

I mean, God love Pat Boone.

Anybody can have a hit record, God bless them.

But it just was real weird...

that that went on.

There was at that time...

an absolute wall...

an impenetrable wall between pop and R & B.

There were R & B stations, there were R & B artists...

there was R & B music but it was not gonna get played...

in its original form on pop stations.

It was just too ragged and too...

In some cases, it was a little suggestive or more.

Sometimes even explicit.

Now, Pat Boone...

here was a white guy that took my music...

and made my hit, and this was my chance...

to be a big star...

and he shortcut me and going to outsell me...

which he did with my song that I wrote.

You understand me? But by him singing it...

he really made it bigger and made me bigger...

but at the time, I didn't feel that way.

Rock 'n' roll...

is the greatest music that's ever been...

and ever will be.

Whether it was taken from gospel roots...

or whether it was taken from rhythm and blues roots...

or black roots, red roots, blue roots, or whatever roots...

rock 'n' roll is rock 'n' roll.

Bill Haley started as Bill Haley and the Saddlemen...

a country band in Chester, Pennsylvania.

He was one of the creators of rockabilly...

and it goes way back to '54, '53, on Essex Records.

All of those wonderful precursors of rock 'n' roll. Kids loved it.

Bill Haley was country to the bone.

He was really a country guy...

who had the saxophone...

and had that great record.

He had many, but Rock Around the Clock was a pattern-setter, let's face it.

I think one of the attractions of Bill Haley was that he was...

Apart from the great music and the new style of energy...

was that he seemed to be one of us. He seemed to be a normal guy.

Even though he had this funny curl and stuff...

and he was a little overweight maybe.

I specifically remember seeing Blackboard Jungle...

and going down the stairs in the cinema in Manchester, where I lived...

and seeing all the Teddy boys tearing up seats in the cinema...

and seeing people turn fire hoses on them.

It was quite wild.

I think he was more popular in England than he was here.

He was a god in England.

I didn't see that kind of energy until later when the Beatles first hit.

There was something about Bill Haley that was...

very close to our hearts and yet very unattainable.

I have in my wallet...

There's my ticket for the Bill Haley show in 1958...

at the Palace Theatre in Manchester that changed my life.

So when Elvis Presley came on the scene...

the only thing I can say is that he did it right.

He did it good, you know.

And again, where Elvis was concerned...

there was no color line because everybody liked his music.

And Elvis Presley was what they were looking for...

to get that music not necessarily accepted, because it had already been...

but permissible for the white kids to listen to openly.

People are amazed at Elvis, at his influence. I'm not.

And, honey, it didn't come just from his music.

It came from what he could say...

in just the little innuendoes of his voice.

He could do things that had to be something other than carnal.

It had to be a spiritual communication.

I listened to it, to where he was coming from when he was singing it...

and where the band were coming from...

and the way that they were playing and swinging...

and the way Presley was taking...

all that white poor-boy Tupelo, Mississippi guy...

and all the radio he'd heard...

Arthur Crudup, The Ink Spots, all that stuff is in his voice.

Elvis was so crucial.

I remember...

writing arrangements for Tommy Dorsey...

on the Saturday Night Bandstand...

which was the replacement for Jackie Gleason...

and one night...

this little kid came from Memphis and sang on the show.

The band was pissed off, you know...

and they couldn't play with each other or get into it at all...

and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey had the band.

I remember Sam Phillips said, '"We'll send for the band from Memphis. '"

They came back up, and Elvis played on that show.

And Tommy was upset.

He said, "Man, this dude, he'll be out of here tomorrow."

And two days later, they got 8,000 letters...

and it was over.

Three or four weeks later, he played on the Sullivan Show...

and Elvis was on that show, the Saturday Night Bandstand...

until it closed, you know.

See, in white society, movement of the butt, shaking of the leg...

all that was considered obscene for white folks.

Now here's this white boy...

up there grinding...

rolling his belly, and shaking that notorious leg.

I hadn't even seen the Black dudes doing that.

Elvis had some movements I had never witnessed.

One time I went to a country music show...

at Baton Rouge High School, and there was a guy in this pink suit...

with a guitar player and a bass player...

and it was Elvis singing Blue Moon of Kentucky.

I remember going with my friend back behind the auditorium...

after the show and standing next to this guy, going:

'"Wow, this guy is really cool. '"

Elvis, he was rock 'n' roll.

That's rock 'n' roll, you know?

Rock 'n' roll, really, I can get down to about six or seven people.

But he was above it all.

He was rock 'n' roll.

Preuzeto sa www.titlovi.com