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ОглавлениеTelevision
Television is an industrial product and presentational device, a communication technology with visual and auditory components that is accessed via broadcast. When discussing television and its effects, we speak of it less as an artifact and more as a mass medium with broad cultural and political impacts. As the Media Ecologists (Innis, McLuhan, Carpenter, Ong, Postman, et al.) have pointed out, television, like all communication technologies, is not a neutral conveyor; TV delivers information beyond the content of its programs. Keeping that in mind, it is necessary to consider the messages communicated by television about rock ‘n’ roll, both in the content and formal features of its programs, and in the myriad choices made by programmers about what was presented, when, and how.
Television came at the tail end of a remarkable run of technological developments, enumerated by Postman: the telegraph, the rotary press, the camera, the telephone, the phonograph, the movies, and radio (Disappearance 72). One can hardly overstate the impact of television on American and world culture. One sample statistic conveys television’s ubiquity: by the end of twentieth century more than 98% of U.S. households had at least one television set (https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf), more than the number of homes with indoor plumbing (Rural Community Assistance Partnership). Richard Jackson Har←59 | 60→ris notes that television became both the main window through which we view the world and the door through which a world of images and ideas enters our minds (3). Going further, Postman indicates that television did not simply reflect, extend, or amplify culture, but gradually became our culture, its physical characteristics and symbolic codes accepted as natural (Amusing 79). As television became the primary source of information for most Americans, it framed their reality.
The technology for broadcasting pictures was developed in the 1920s, but the device was not widely known until it was publicly unveiled at the 1939 World’s Fair.1 Although few people could afford television sets at that point, the commercial and cultural potential was sufficiently obvious that the Federal Communications Commission adopted national standards for the medium in 1941. In 1946, the number of television sets in American homes could still be measured in thousands, but by 1950, the medium had reached critical mass. In 1956, television sets were being purchased at the astonishing rate of 20,000 a day (Miller and Nowak 338); the question was never whether TV would “catch on” but whether manufacturers would be able to make it affordable enough to satisfy demand. It took television only a few years to outstrip all other media in terms of influence and barely longer to achieve market saturation.
There were pockets of resistance. The sudden ubiquity of television, combined with the uneven quality of the programming (the demand to fill air time far exceeded supply in the 1950s), fostered skepticism. Some found in television a convenient scapegoat for a range of social ills, from declining literacy rates to violent crime. But despite the anxieties, Americans proved to be congenitally incapable of the one act that would mitigate the problem: turning the thing off.
If the phonograph, radio, and telephone represented the first incursions of technology into American homes, television constituted a full-scale invasion. While viewers marveled at the sights and sounds beamed into their living rooms, there was a tradeoff: they were connected to the world, but increasingly likely to settle for a second-hand experience. They liked to stay home and watch. Raymond Williams used the term “mobile privatization” to describe this melding of mass and private experience. Film offered similar stimuli and had been exerting a powerful impact on American society for decades but, as Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, television had different properties from film, and neither was just radio with pictures. In addition to entertainment, television carried all manner of cultural information and delivered it in a more compelling and domineering manner than anything that preceded it.
It is important to remember that, as rock ‘n’ roll music emerged, the television networks were still establishing its command-and-control model of broadcasting. But viewers were generally trusting, too enthralled to question medium←60 | 61→ or message. After the initial novelty wore off, television was thought of less as an activity than as a faithful companion. Television producers fostered this affinity by importing many of the genres, programs, and aesthetics from radio that, in turn, had adopted many of its presentation modes from vaudeville. This bond between medium and audience discouraged critical analysis; one does not question the motives of a friend.
Figure 3.1: The 1950s American family gets programmed.
Source: The Story of Television, produced by William J. Ganz Company, Inc. for Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 1956. https://archive.org/details/Story_of_Television_The
One would be hard-pressed to find a single sphere of public or private, conscious or unconscious life that has not been dramatically affected by television. Neil Postman says that “television has achieved the status of ‘meta-medium’—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well” (Amusing 78–79). Jody Berland notes that television is “a producer of practices which are (re)articulated spatially in both production and reception,” creating a “visual rhetoric of ‘us’” (37). Joshua Meyrowitz describes television as the most dominant component in a “media matrix” that not only influences our perceptions by virtue of content, but alters the “situational geography” of our society (No Sense 6).
As Richard Lanham, Jay Bolter and others have observed, when people are first exposed to a new medium, they are enthralled by the technology, deriving←61 | 62→ great satisfaction from their awareness of the interface between themselves and program content. Gradually, people begin to “see through” the technology to the content, and the existence of the medium recedes beneath consciousness. McLuhan uses the phrase Narcissus Narcosis to describe the state people reach in which they are so entranced by what is happening on the screen that they forget that there is a technology involved at all. This leaves consumers of the technology defenseless against the effects of the delivery system, the underlying technology.2 Television producers designed programs with broad appeal, hitting established cultural buttons (home, honesty, honor, etc.). Beloved family sitcoms such as I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best became touchstones for millions. Rock ‘n’ roll, on the other hand, emerged from the youth culture, a collective as well as an individual expression that appealed to (and helped to define) a broad but differentiated audience. Rock ‘n’ roll is a folk art that has no meaning apart from the popular culture that produced it; when it is mediated through television, we are presented with only those elements that fit into the conception of corporate TV decision-makers as to what the undifferentiated audience will find appealing or palatable.
Every television program is, first and foremost, a television program; before it is about sports, weather, news, drama, or comedy, the primary referent of television is television itself. As David Marc notes, there is a self-reflexivity that rewards heavy viewing; the more you watch, the more you get the inside jokes and cross-references. This recognition heightens the sense of realism which viewers impart to television, and obscures the fact that what they are watching may be naturalistic, but not natural. Television programs are based on narrative conventions more than on reality. According to Myles Breen and Farrel Corcoran, “…the thoroughly familiar conventions of film and television realism hide the fact that the very mode of narration, as well as the story content, is arbitrarily structured…Realism presents itself not as one way of seeing but the way” (134).
As the 1950s media world focused increasingly on the world of their sons and daughters, dominated by rock ‘n’ roll and other manifestations of youth culture, parents were bewildered, but the networks toiled mightily to offer reassurance, to maintain the TV room as an adult comfort zone. As Trav S. D. puts it, “the aesthetic values being embraced by younger people—openness, freedom, honesty, egalitarianism—were in direct opposition to the prevailing culture of enforced and restricted norms of behavior that dominated television” (266). What television had to “say” about rock ‘n’ roll through content, genre, and what might be considered its “hidden curriculum” was almost unrelievedly negative. Variety shows and sitcoms generally portrayed rock music as absurd and trivial, while news coverage emphasized the dangers lurking in the rock ‘n’ roll “lifestyle.”←62 | 63→
But even as the networks catered to the older generation and the status quo in terms of program content, there was a veritable obsession with the behavior of young people. The burgeoning consumer culture of the 1950s was increasingly oriented to youngsters; this was, at best, a mixed bag for adults, for whom the proliferation of transistor radios, hula hoops, and other new products inspired equal parts fascination and annoyance. Every appearance by a rock artist on television was a minor insurrection, disturbing the status quo of home and hearth. The spectacle of their offspring giving themselves over to new fads and fashions, and swooning over swivel-hipped rock stars on TV, inspired what Lawrence Grossberg referred to as “a distinctively ‘American’ brand of political, moral, and cultural conservatism” (We Gotta 146). The onslaught of novel products and amusements contributed to a retrenchment on the part of the older generation.
In addition to bringing a sometimes unsettling new world into the home, television also became the foremost catalyst for a process of nationalization and homogenization that continues today on a global scale. The trend began with earlier advances in transportation and communication (i.e., train and telegraph, car and telephone), and took a giant leap with radio, which created broadcast audiences (today they would be called virtual communities) that transcended geography. As James Carey summarizes, the United States has tended to view communication as a form of power, and as long-distance communication became dominant, “Individuals were linked into larger units of social organization without the necessity of appealing to them through local and proximate structures” and the trend was towards “new things thought about—speed, space, movement, mobility; and new things to think with—increasingly abstract, analytic, and manipulative symbols” (156). Carey was among the first scholars to recognize that the transmission model of communication, which simply followed information from point A of production (encoding) to point B of reception (decoding), was no longer sufficient in the era of mass media. Television does not just reflect the culture, it makes culture.
Compared to television, radio remained a predominantly local enterprise until satellite technology and lax regulation over ownership brought about rapid consolidation in the 1980s. This local orientation was reflected in radio programming. Also, the relative proliferation of radio licenses created a competitive environment in which the need to distinguish one’s station in the marketplace led to variety and experimentation. The investment costs were significantly higher for television due to the technological demands of transmission, and the 1950s was a period in which there were few licenses due to limited airwave space. These expenses left television entrepreneurs drawing the lines of acceptable programming narrowly enough so as not to alienate viewers or prolong the time lapse between up-front expenses and revenues. Moreover, the potential audience for television←63 | 64→ was so vast that producers felt the need to use demographic data and other market research tools to identify the audience so that they could more efficiently cater to it. Although some local stations and affiliates enjoyed considerable autonomy in the 1950s, television presentation was increasingly dominated by a national perspective and risk-averse policies. Noting the reluctance of TV producers to reflect dissenting views or creative expressions, McLuhan dubbed television the “timid giant” (Understanding 411).
Television and Rock ‘n’ Roll
The most salient precedent for the presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on television was the video jukebox. Beginning in the 1930s, having already established an audience for coin-operated phonographs, the Mills Novelty Company developed a video jukebox called the Panoram and the music industry began to produce soundies, films of popular artists designed specifically for these new machines. The soundies were shipped weekly, with eight shorts on one continuous reel, and tailored to specific audiences, showcasing such artists as Louis Jordan, Les Paul, Count Basie, Merle Travis, Spike Jones, and Fats Waller. Soundies generally coincided with hit recordings, fulfilling the combined entertainment and promotional function that would later be served by television. The music was generally recorded first (usually in one take) and filmed afterward, with artists doing their best to synchronize their on-camera performance to the recording. Many of the expectations that Americans still have for filmed musical performance were established by the soundies, which highlighted extroverted showmanship and tolerated considerable sexual suggestiveness. For many people who did not live in urban centers, the soundies were their first exposure to authentic jazz and rhythm & blues. A case in point is Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, a link between the boogie-woogie piano of Meade Lux Lewis and the later pumping styles of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Gibson had several hits that were filmed for soundies, and although he might come across today as a wide-eyed jester, he was an accomplished player and a harbinger of performance conventions to come.
In the mid-to-late 1940s, the coin-operated soundies were beginning to suffer from competition with television sets that were popping up in public places. By the time soundies got into public establishments, the songs had often lost their freshness, and television offered more timely content. In 1947, the Videograph Corporation developed a system that combined television and jukebox, as well as a limited selection of radio stations. Tradio, which made coin-operated radio sets for hotels, produced a similar system, with expanded radio capabilities. A third←64 | 65→ company, Speedway Products, made a deal with RCA and Wurlitzer to make what Variety called “pay-for-play tavern tele.” Also, between 1950 and 1952, Louis Snader produced hundreds of “visual records,” coupling silent films with hit records, which were used primarily by TV stations to fill airtime between programs.
But customer preference for free television was clear, and bar and lounge owners responded accordingly. Jukeboxes also lost business during this period, but were revived in the early 1950s when the transition from 78 rpm records to 45s allowed jukeboxes to hold more records, giving proprietors the flexibility to mix current hit records with R&B and proto-rock ‘n’ roll songs that young people were hearing on the radio. Teenagers flocked to malt shops and diners where they could, as Chuck Berry suggested, “drop the coin right into the slot…[to] hear something that’s really hot” (“School Days”). Two technologies emerged in the 1960s that retrieved the soundies concept: tele-records and scopitones. Tele-records were films of artists lip-syncing to their records, with the sound dubbed from discs in an attempt to create the illusion of liveness. Beginning in 1959, the Tele-Records company produced video disks by artists such as The Platters (“Enchanted”) and Annette Funicello (“Tall Paul”), and built a distribution network of more than 200 TV stations. Reportedly, the disk-by-wire marketing plan was modeled on the flowers-by-wire system of FTD. But, while the company continued to provide other products and services into the 1970s, targeted teen-oriented shows used tele-records sparingly; the rudimentary discs did not hold as much interest as just watching kids dance to hit records.
Like the soundies, scopitones were short musical films viewed in jukeboxes equipped with projectors. Developed in France, the first scopitones appeared in the U.S. in 1963 but featured European artists with limited appeal to Americans hanging out in bars and diners. Among the artists who made scopitones were Debbie Reynolds, Neil Sedaka, Nancy Sinatra, and The Hondells. The hope was that the scopitone jukeboxes would be more appealing to café and bar owners than TV sets because patrons would have to pay to watch and the films could be accompanied by advertising. But the content was problematic, developing narratives that were fragmented and nonsensical, and the juxtapositions were often jarring, pairing staid artists like Kay Starr and Brook Benton with scantily clad dancers. In one of the great prognostication mis-reads of all time, a Billboard article suggested that “if the insertion of advertising [into scopitones] is successful it promises to replace TV altogether because of its revenue-generating advantage” (“Ad Tests”).
As Amy Herzog notes, perhaps the greatest significance of these visual experiments was that the songs were emphasized and the images were “driven by a purely music logic” (31), an orientation that would not necessarily be carried over in later decades in the production of music videos. But neither the scopitone nor←65 | 66→ the tele-record made much of an impression, for two main reasons. First, they were behind the musical curve, favoring performers more associated with Tin Pan Alley than rock ‘n’ roll. Second, they were unable to compete with the music-related visuals that were increasingly available, free of charge, on television.
When rock ‘n’ roll first gained popularity in the 1950s, television was still a nascent institution, just beginning to assume its cultural dominance, and by no means secure of its status. Music was a staple of television programming from the outset, in part because it was less expensive than scripted shows, and precursors to rock ‘n’ roll popped up occasionally, but almost exclusively as novelties. As Tom McCourt and Nabeel Zuberi write, “the networks were concerned with ‘cultural uplift’ during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they viewed ‘high culture’ as a way to add cultural legitimacy to the new medium” (“Music on Television”). But even as NBC’s early broadcasts of classical music attracted sizable audiences, the emphasis on celebrity conductors Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski was a clear indication that the television camera privileged charisma over musical content. Apart from overestimating the American appetite for high-brow fare, the idea that television would serve to filter out undesirable ideas and people created what Lynn Spigel calls a “fantasy of antiseptic electrical space” (35).
Some “serious” jazz was deemed acceptable by television producers, at least in part because many in the generation of TV executives had grown up with it. A good example is the 1957 Seven Lively Arts Sunday afternoon series on CBS hosted by TV critic John Crosby, which included an episode entitled “The Sound of Jazz” that featured Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, Jo Jones, and Thelonious Monk.3 Another episode was devoted to folk music, hosted by Theodore Bikel. The following year, NBC ran a 13-part series developed by Gilbert Seldes called The Subject is Jazz that also drew on top talent.
Television viewers were also introduced to Martha Davis, a transitional figure who bridged the jazz and jump blues of the 1940s with the more insistent beat of the 1950s. Hot on the heels of Helen Humes’s “Be-Baba-Leba” in 1945 (which some consider the first rock ‘n roll record), Davis’s 1946 “Same Old Boogie” dropped the names of many of the hot jazz bands of the day. The title notwithstanding, Davis was pointing the way toward a new boogie. Unfortunately, commercial success eluded her and she was reduced to doing comedy, billed as Martha Davis and Spouse (with husband/bassist Calvin Ponder), as much as music. In 1954, however, she was booked for three appearances on The Blue Angel Show, a CBS variety show hosted by Orson Bean with a nightclub setting designed to suggest the high-tone club featured in the 1930 film The Blue Angel. That led to appearances on the Perry Como and Steve Allen shows and to a recurring spot on The Garry Moore Show (CBS 1958–67). According to biographer Dave Penny,←66 | 67→ these TV appearances allowed Davis and Ponder to make three times as much money in 1958 as they made from all their recordings combined.4
But these performances of precursors to rock ‘n’ roll were exceptions. Overall, the music favored by teenagers was considered antithetical to the goal of civic improvement. As rock ‘n’ roll became more popular and prevalent, the antipathy towards it also gathered steam, and the last thing most parents needed to incite their paranoia were televised pictures of gyrating musicians and teens. So much of rock ‘n’ roll was inexplicable to adults that to have it on display in their living rooms felt like an affront. As Harry Bannister, general manager of WWJ-TV in Detroit, put it after censoring the novelty song “Sweet Violets” from the regional The Wayne King Show in 1951, “This television business is not radio. It’s too powerful, too vivid, too compelling to be allowed to run loose”5 (Pondillo 118–19).
What followed was a bifurcation of the American music audience into adult and youth camps. If rock ‘n’ roll caught the American public between two impulses, one to stifle it and the other to dance to it, there was little doubt which impulse the television networks would obey. Citing a study by Chudacoff, Kier Keightley describes how music appealing to the older faction was generally described as “sophisticated” and understood to be played on LPs, giving rise to a “timeless” radio format unambiguously called “good music.” By inference, music aimed at young people was amateurish, played on expendable 45s, and suitable only as fodder for the ephemeral “Top 40” radio format. The use of the term “standard” denoted not only commercial success based on sales and radio play over time, but a cultural seal of approval. The “standard” label gave radio and television programmers, publishers of sheet music, and other gatekeepers a benchmark that denied the cultural contribution of novelty, shock, nonsense, absurdity, and pure play—all salient attributes of rock ‘n’ roll. Keightley cites critics Dwight MacDonald and Alec Wilder among the culture warriors who held up theatre music and other “adult” pop fare as “a bulwark against the other, more debased end: television and rock ‘n’ roll” (11–12).6
But the juggernaut of television was building its inexorable momentum and popular music was an integral programming ingredient. Even before rock ‘n’ roll coalesced, television exerted a significant effect on musical tastes and record sales. A glance at the number one records from 1950 to 1954, when rock ‘n’ roll began to show up on the Billboard charts, reveals that artists who enjoyed high television profiles, such as Gene Autry, The Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Patti Page and Eddie Fisher, are disproportionately represented. A fair indication of mainstream tastes is reflected in the fact that when Arthur Godfrey started playing the ukulele on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (CBS 1949–59) in the early 1950s, the plastic Maccaferri Islander Model he recommended sold millions.7←67 | 68→
In 1949, The Kirby Stone Quintet began performing jump-style music in the style of Louis Jordan, along with novelty songs and skits, on a 15-minute weeknight show called Strictly for Laughs (CBS). The next year, the group had become the main feature and the program was re-titled The Kirby Stone Quartet. On the strength of the show, the group started getting better live bookings, performed before larger audiences, and landed a recording contract. They were described by John Wilson of Down Beat as “probably the first musical combo to be developed into a name act solely as a result of their work on television.” Stone summed up the economics, saying “One night on TV is worth weeks at the Paramount” (4). While live performance never stopped being a lifeline between musician and audience, and has always been a fallback for artists whenever sales of recorded music sag, television established itself in the 1950s as the preeminent means of exposure and promotion. As Murray Forman notes, “In this transitional period, television itself, rather than Broadway, nightclubs and ballrooms, gradually became the primary referent for many musicians seeking their big break in the industry” (“One Night” 273). Television had become a short cut to stardom.
As eager as most artists were to take advantage of television’s unprecedented capacity for creating “overnight sensations,” the promotional power was offset by various restrictions and injunctions. Appearing on television required a near-total surrender of control over artist’s presentations. In exchange for their moment in the spotlight, rock musicians were subjected to numerous indignities, being hustled to and fro, told what to wear, where to stand, what to say, and how to say it. Since the popularity of these artists was due in part to their physical movement as well as their sound, this straight-jacketing was often counterproductive, making most television appearances static, pale imitations of the bands’ live performances.
Perhaps the most obvious and annoying practice demanded by television was that of lip-syncing. Although it is difficult to be certain when this technique was used for the first time, Los Angeles disc jockey Al Jarvis is often credited as the pioneer. Listeners had become accustomed to music in recorded form, which made them less tolerant of the inconsistency and unreliability of the live performances they saw on television. They wanted to hear the same polished version of songs they had heard on the radio. Jarvis solved this problem by asking artists to do what must have at first seemed a curious thing: pretend to sing the words as he played their records. Thus was born the technique of lip-syncing, which became a favored practice in television and movies.
When he was first booked to appear on American Bandstand, Chuck Berry refused to lip-sync the words to “Sweet Little Sixteen” and his appearance was cancelled. Although Dick Clark characterized Berry’s reluctance as a matter of inability, Berry says that he was simply unaware of the costs involved in live←68 | 69→ singing and unwilling “to try something for the first time in front of a nationwide television audience” (Berry 185). Berry’s record sales were so strong and his performances so engaging that both parties relented; Clark hosted him on Bandstand numerous times and Berry mastered the art of lip-syncing and faux guitar. On a 1957 appearance singing his hit “School Days,” Berry agreed to perform in front of a cheesy backdrop of a school, wearing someone’s idea of a professor’s gown.
Figure 3.2: “Professor” Chuck Berry sings “School Days” on American Bandstand.
Source: American Bandstand. Aired November 8, 1957, on ABC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmOdtG9ymMA
Chuck Berry was hardly the last rock ‘n’ roll artist to express displeasure with the absurdity of being invited to perform music on television only to be required to fake it. According to Clark, “We used lip-sync primarily because it was cheaper, but also because it was impossible to duplicate the sound of the record—and it was the record that kids wanted to hear” (71). This was true to a point, but conveniently ignores how the issue of liveness is different for television than music. As Simon Frith indicates, both television and rock ‘n’ roll promise their audiences “a←69 | 70→ sense of something happening here and now” (“Look! Hear!” 284), but on television liveness is self-evident; even if the performance is taped, people are shown in the act of doing something that had been captured in real time. With rock ‘n’ roll, liveness is equated with authenticity, and the effect is undercut by lip-syncing and other televisual effects. The notion that Clark did not understand this distinction is belied by the fact that he made a few exceptions to his lip-sync policy, notably the estimable bluesman B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Sam Cooke, a gospel singer with The Soul Stirrers before he got his first national exposure as a pop/R&B artist on The Guy Mitchell Show (ABC 1957–58), is another case-in-point. According to biographer Daniel Wolf, Cooke appeared at the end of The Ed Sullivan Show in November 1957 and had just begun to lip-sync his big hit, “You Send Me,” when the recording was cut short, leaving Cooke mouthing the words before a national audience with no music. “Cooke’s disastrous [appearance] exemplified the desultory manner in which rock ‘n’ roll artists were treated on adult-oriented TV shows in the 1950s” (Jackson 75).8 Beyond any single mishap, the reliance on lip-syncing was another indication to the rock ‘n’ roll fans that what they were being fed on television was counterfeit.
The rock ‘n’ roll artists who have fared well on television are those who understood that music was secondary. They knew how to be dynamic without becoming histrionic, accentuating visual trademarks such as Chuck Berry’s duck-walk, Elvis Presley’s hip-swivel, and The Beatles’s mop-top hair. The small screen adored these charismatic individuals, but the limited scope of television cannot contain a band. Most successful rock groups constitute an organic whole greater than the sum of its parts. In the 1950s, television had a limited palette, and wide shots were too distant to capture energy or personality, so teen dance shows relied heavily on close-ups that isolated fragments—fingers on a fret board, flailing drumsticks, or, most commonly, a singer emoting—but missed the whole. The effect was kaleidoscopic rather than integral. This televisual predilection for an individual rather than a group put pressure on singers to set themselves apart from their bands, and was part of the impetus for Buddy Holly getting star billing in front of The Crickets and singling out Paul Revere from The Raiders.
One might think that rock ‘n’ roll musicians would have benefited as television production values became more sophisticated but, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, techniques such as the use of multiple cameras often served to further undermine the immediacy and authenticity of rock ‘n’ roll on television. As Gary Burns and Robert Thompson relate, the single camera used on most variety shows allowed the lip-sync and other contrivances to be concealed, but on shows like American Bandstand the use of two or more cameras to create kinesis9 left singers←70 | 71→ and musicians no place to hide. “In such a case, sometimes it is obvious that the musicians are not playing their instruments, and occasionally electric instruments are not even plugged in. These pseudo-concerts are touted as high points of the show, even though the celebrity musicians may not do anything musical” (“Music, Television, and Video” 14). Only in the 1960s, with Shindig!, and on 1970s late-night shows such as In Concert (ABC 1972–75) and Midnight Special (NBC 1972–81), did producers make greater efforts to preserve the plausibility of “live” performance.
One rare instance of symbiotic alignment of television product and rock ‘n’ roll came on July 23, 1962 when the first international satellite broadcast was made via Telstar. In addition to predicable news coverage, producers played “Telstar,” an instrumental by the British rock band The Tornados. This exposure helped to make “Telstar” the first British record to become a #1 hit in the United States (the proverbial British invasion would come two years later).
Inherent Conflicts between Television and Rock ‘n’ Roll
For the majority of end-users, television and popular music are simply thought of as entertainment alternatives, two heads of a common media animal, one audio-visual, and the other strictly auditory. On the face of it, the affinity and synergy of rock ‘n’ roll on television seemed natural, the mutual benefit a foregone conclusion. Like the popular music of Tin Pan Alley, which generally fared well on television, rock ‘n’ roll comes in a short form ideal for sequencing and programming. Even more centrally, the baby boom generation was the first to grow up watching television and listening to rock, and a larger cohort was having its attitudes and opinions shaped by both media. When the Music Television channel (MTV) was established, one of the newly minted executives declared that they had “integrated the most powerful forces in our two decades, TV and rock ‘n’ roll” (Denisoff Tarnished 329). But MTV was not founded until 1981, nearly three decades after the coalescence of rock ‘n’ roll as a distinct form. Why did it take so long for this pervasive musical form to get its own platform on the television dial?
The simple answer is that the two media are inherently misaligned, divergent in terms of presentation, their intrinsic properties, and in the way they impact human senses. The chart below provides a visual overview of the dichotomies and incongruities between rock ‘n’ roll and television.←71 | 72→
Table 3.1. The Misalignment of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Television
| Rock ‘n’ Roll | Television |
| Folk Art and Popular Medium | Mass Medium |
| Ear / Sound | Eye / Sight |
| Non-Linear / Figurative | Linear / Literal |
| Kinetic / Mobile | Static / Fixed |
| Authentic | Illusory / Delusory |
| Democratic / Subversive | Autocratic / Conservative |
| Hot / High Fidelity and Definition | Cool / Low Fidelity and Definition |
| Discursive / Connotational | Non-discursive / Denotational |
| Appealing to Adolescents | Appealing to Pre- and Post-Adolescents |
Source: Author.
When one medium is transmitted or otherwise filtered through another medium, the process is called remediation. When this takes place, both the original, filtered medium and the filtering medium are impacted. Building on the observations of Edmund Carpenter, Marshall McLuhan, and others, Joshua Meyrowitz suggests “seeing each medium as its own language” and focusing on its “unique ‘grammar’” (“Multiple” 99). He submits that television contains the grammar variables of audio plus many others, which means that someone listening to/watching rock music on television is asked to attend to multiple sets of potential presentation and production conditions. In contemporary America, we are invariably exposed to more than one medium at a time. We live in a world of what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call hypermediacy, the digital environment “in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media” (34). Hypermediacy can also refer to the constant movement from platform to platform, the non-linear logic of the digital link as opposed to the sequential, one-thing-at-a-time logic of the book.
The effects of remediation are minimized when the filtering medium is closely functionally aligned with the filtered medium. When we listen to a recording, for example, the transfer of content from artist to record to sound system is relatively seamless; the medium of the phonograph disappears. One of the reasons that surface noise and needle skips are annoying is because they force the remediation process back into our consciousness. The medium of television is not well aligned with rock ‘n’ roll, a marriage of convenience and commerce rather than function or aesthetics. Music on television generally attempts to recreate the elements of live performance, but Arnold Wolfe points out that the “in-concert mode of visualiza←72 | 73→tion is anomalous for television because it is essentially an attempt to reproduce a stage show [that is] blocked laterally, proscenium style” whereas television is “most effectively blocked for depth” (45).
In the post-War years, television was in transition from an immature, mostly live medium, to one in which programming became increasingly rationalized, formatted, and packaged. Rock ‘n’ roll posed significant challenges for television management in this regard. In addition to the technical difficulties involved in presenting a predominantly aural method of communication through a visual medium, musicians needed a crash course in the art of performance on a set as opposed to a stage. Although the networks were eager to attract young viewers, controlling the process and the product created a dilemma for television producers, especially compared to other types of programming. For their part, musicians were happy for the exposure but rarely thrilled with the way that they, or their music, came off on the small screen. As John Lennon put it during a 1968 interview on The Tonight Show when asked why doing a TV show made him nervous he replied, “Because this situation isn’t natural.”10 And Lennon, of course, was an A-list celebrity with some control over when and where he appeared; most musicians fortunate enough to get on TV were expected to comply with whatever demands were made of them. If television rarely achieved a true synthesis of sight and sound, it is partly due to the fact that it was rarely attempted. If television was a meal, rock ‘n’ roll was just a side-dish.
Lawrence Grossberg indicates that, although the cultural referents have often been similar, the audiences for television and rock are quite distinct. Television caters to viewers at the higher and lower ends of the age spectrum, seldom zeroing in on adolescents except as topics of amusement or derision. By virtue of its broad demographic and its place in the American living room, television was about domesticity, while rock ‘n’ roll was about mobility (think “I Get Around”). This helps to explain why, when rock ‘n’ roll began to pop up on television in the 1950s, there was a shocked, unsuspecting public of older people, and an eager, suspecting public of teenagers. “For many fans,” Grossberg says, “television has been often seen as part of the dominant culture against which rock culture is defined” (189). McLuhan borrowed the terms “figure” and “ground” from the vocabulary of painting to describe how the focus of the viewer is directed to the subject even as his/her perception is largely determined (literally “framed”) by the setting in which it is presented. As Jim Curtis writes, “rock ‘n’ roll is the figure, and we have usually perceived it against the ground of television” (12). Even if the primary conversation between musicians and audience took place on radio, records and concert stages, television became for many the foremost conveyor and arbiter of pop culture of which rock music is a part.
