I know. My first wife was surnamed Lopez and she was as white as the background on this page but her father looked as if he had worked in the fields his entire life.
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The Day The Music Died
- Thread starter landtuna
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I know. My first wife was surnamed Lopez and she was as white as the background on this page but her father looked as if he had worked in the fields his entire life.
Those record companies certainly didn't spend a lot of money promoting their rock & roll artists. The Winter Dance Party toured the upper Midwest in the dead of winter in a broken down bus without a heater! They would have never treated Bing Crosby (Decca) and Teresa Brewer and The McGuire Sisters (Coral) like that.
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We're talking about a genre of music that is 60+ years old. The first five years would certainly qualify as the "birth".
Unless it was Buddy's tour, not a label promo tour. Buddy chartered the plane and the bus, not the label. The Big Bopper was on Mercury and Valens was on Del-Fi, so they were competing labels.
By this point in his career, Buddy's relationship with the label was going south. He had split with the Crickets, he was living in NYC, and was having some money trouble. That's why he did this tour.
No, the first five years would be the genre's infancy.
The "birth" was about 5 years earlier. The previous years prior to that birth were a period of gestation where the elements that created rock & roll were in the process of fusion to spawn the "new" styles which, in fact were just a progression.
It's even sadder that the record companies wouldn't want to have any input (financially or otherwise) in the tour. They certainly had a vested interest in the artists. Dick Clark started his own "Caravan Of Stars" in 1959 with artists from various labels. Knowing his business skills, I'm sure that Clark persuaded the record companies to help support those tours.
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O.K. Let me re-phrase the post. Are you trying to compare what happened during the INFANCY of rock & roll to the money machines that promoted the artists you mentioned in the 1960s?
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Not sure how true that is. As I said, Holly was on the outs with Decca at this point. So he'd look sideways at any "input" they attempted to give.
But I agree that rock & roll was a very, very small part of these labels at this time. Things didn't change for at least another ten years.
As BigA said, the labels regarded rock & roll to be of lesser importance during the mid to late 50's and early 60's than after the Motown and British Invasion periods began.
There are lots of reasons, ranging from the commercialization of the LP Album, the fact that most rock & roll sales were at first lower margin 45's and the mindset that rock would, hopefully, fade away.
Touring was not the general interest of the labels except for the promotional aspect. It would be years before the labels became really active in that aspect of music. So if an artist on the decline wanted to rent a run-down bus and drive in the snow, that was not anything they much cared about.
How would the record company "support" a tour? Unless they got a share of the revenue, there was no payback. Sure, a tour sold a few more records in each market but other than helping artists get an interview on a Top 40 station, labels just did not go there at the time.
Touring is the domain of the artist. Always has been. Some labels have even been expected to pay face value for radio promo and contest tickets. But all of this is negotiated during contract time.
And even today, labels don't get involved unless the label is an adjunct to a 360 deal with the artist.
I went to many country shows in the late '80s and early '90s while reviewing them for the local paper. The label's involvement began and ended with the introductory announcement "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome MCA/Mercury/Capitol/Columbia recording artist George Strait/Mary Chapin Carpenter/Travis Tritt!" Once the act was no longer selling records and being heard on the radio, it was bye-bye nice tour bus, not because the label couldn't afford it but because the artist couldn't.
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I saw this somewhere else but will take it here: No, it was closer to the first "doldrums" period, apparently brought on by the payola scandal thus creating "safe" artists but this was probably a little early in the year for that.
I agree. The "doldrums" really began late '59/early '60. This was a topic of discussion at our recent high school reunions. In particular people disliked the girl groups more than anything else.
??? I guess that's why they had so many hits, and the "girl group" style lasted into the mid '70s.
But as far as "the rock & roll doldrums," generally defined as the era between the death of Buddy Holly and the arrival of the Beatles, go, I don't think the music was all that bad. Sure there was some awful doo-wop in that era, but some of it was so bad, it was great. There was good doo-wop, too. Then you had the beginnings of Motown and surf music, as well as some great music coming from Stax Records in Memphis.
And, most importantly, Elvis got out of the Army.
According to Billboard the first Surf song (Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari) hit the 1961 charts as #100.
Surf music took off the next year - 1963.
Uh huh. Here's the period you defined as "the doldrums:"
So that would appear to include 1961, right?
But the other thing to consider is it may have been "the doldrums" for teenage white music on pop radio, but it was a boom period for black music that became influential for the second coming of rock & roll in the later 60s. Some of the dirtiest music one could imagine, and Top 40 radio was afraid of it. But it got airplay after 11PM by DJs in Cleveland and Memphis. It was also a boom period for country music. This was the era of Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, and Johnny Cash. No doldrums there. The end of the country boom was when The Beatles arrived, and Chet Atkins sought to attract younger listeners with "countrypolitan." So nothing stands still. There still was exciting music to be found if you looked for it.
Motown was kind of a paradox where I lived. The RnR covers of former R&B hits generally did very well in the late 50's even if they were performed by Black artists but Motown, not so much. I even remember some of my friend's parents, people who had albums of Black groups of the 50's (Ink Spots, Platters, etc.) didn't like Motown. One of the Motown girl groups performed at my 30th reunion and was so unpopular the organizing committee apologized afterward and specified "no more Motown" at subsequent reunions.
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