Free for All

With bands like Grand Funk Railroad, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Alice Cooper plying their trade around the stadiums and arenas of midwestern America, it was clear that a new clientele for rock ‘n’ roll had appeared and become viable. Who were the fans of these artists, and what were they getting from the music? How did the music industry cater to these fans among the populations of the heartland and the mill towns? In what ways were the musicians connecting with their public? And why did the players mean so much more to the punters than to the critics?

One in a Million

Since the 1990s, various forms of popular music have become associated with values few could have foreseen decades earlier: militarism, misogyny, nativism, and outright racism. Historic changes in geopolitics, economics, technology, and culture have redefined rock’s assumed role as the soundtrack of rebellion and dissent. As acts both progressive (Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Green Day) and regressive (Guns n’ Roses, a revived Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the indestructible Ted Nugent) win fans, and as white rappers like Eminem and Kid Rock have upset old stereotypes, it is clear that rock ‘n’ roll has changed as much as its consumers have.

Wrote a Song for Everyone

Led by John Fogerty, Creedence Clearwater Revival had a breakthrough when they recast rock music as an unpretentious voice of ordinary people, at a time when many acts were preaching psychedelic revolution: not everyone who enjoyed rock ‘n’ roll was necessarily an enemy of the Establishment. Through songs such as “Fortunate Son” and “Proud Mary,” the music’s vocabulary could now include stoicism, integrity, and class consciousness, along with rebellion, indulgence, and radicalism. The appearance of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, and others during the time that President Richard Nixon was invoking the American “silent majority” signified a looming schism within the rock audience

Swamp Music

Southern rockers such as the Allman Brothers, Black Oak Arkansas, ZZ Top, and the doomed Lynyrd Skynyrd transformed the popular image and reputation of their home territories and their musical genre. As country music had moved a little to the left, some brands of rock moved a little to the right. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant, in particular became a symbol of a just slightly more enlightened Dixie generation: with southern rock, a region long thought of as a backwater with a dark history was reinvented, and a strain of rural, good-ol’-boy white populism became forever tied to the music.

Workin’ Man Blues

While musicians such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent took rock ‘n’ roll back to the masses, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Merle Haggard, were transforming the genre of country music, making the medium more original and more relevant as America’s cultural center of gravity was shifting south and west. Country now expressed its own forms of rebellion, against both the strictures of its industry and the condescension of outsiders. As country became a little bit cooler, it was inevitable that cool rock ‘n’ roll in turn would become a little bit country.

Introduction

After opening at the 2016 Republican convention that nominated Donald Trump as presidential candidate, and where the sounds and images of rock were on prominent display, the book’s premise and scope are outlined. The pop culture that once stood for protest and provocation now signifies a very different set of values, embraced by a very different audience, which can tell us much about the ways the values and the audience have evolved in the last five decades. How has something as rebellious as rock ‘n’ roll become associated with political conservatives and the stolid working classes? Have right-wing populists co-opted the music, or has the co-optation gone the other way?

Salt of the Earth

This chapter traces the history of the socioeconomic leanings of rock ‘n’ roll, from the poor rural origins of early figures such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the complex mix of hippie idealism and earthy rootedness of the late 1960s, with everyone from the Beatles and the Byrds to the Band and blues rock wrestling with the fraught left-right dynamics of the era. As the boldest era of rock innovation peaked, some performers and listeners began finding a curious sense of tradition within a hitherto experimental genre.

For Those About to Rock

If Bach is the sound of God whistling while he works, then AC/DC is the sound of God ordering another round in a strip bar on a Saturday night. Led by the inimitable Bon Scott, AC/DC and hard rock acts of the second half of the 1970s established the macho sensibilities of the genre, while the appearance of 1950s nostalgia, American punk and new wave, and the anti-disco backlash were indicative of further trends affecting politics and pop culture. Deepening divisions of class, gender, and race—some of them ugly—were now being mirrored by all strands of the entertainment industry.

Youngstown

Over a long career, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen became the poet of the working poor, just as Indiana’s John Mellencamp became the voice of embattled farm families and Bob Seger the rock ‘n’ roll bard of the Midwest. Springsteen’s stature became such that, against his own intentions, his appeal was invoked by Republican conservatives during the transformative Reagan era. The success of these artists, singing about the hopes and fears of ordinary citizens whose communities and livelihoods were besieged by globalization, was directly tied to the sweeping shifts of labor and governance that affected the industrialized world in the 1980s.

British Steel

Across the Atlantic, Britain in the 1970s was wracked by economic and social crises even harsher than those besetting the United States, and the heavy metal, punk, and skinhead rock that emerged from rusting English mill towns—Black Sabbath, Slade, Thin Lizzy, Nazareth, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motörhead and others—articulated the angry, defensive outlook of listeners whose prospects had turned gloomy as the postwar boom died down. The international success of British heavy metal bands, singing of frustration, despair, and of a mythic past whose triumphs were lost to history, told of dimmed generational futures and alienated youth worldwide.