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Seven Ages Of Rock - on VH1 Classic-- Pearl Jam Mentioned
Bathgate66
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VH1 Special on Rock n Roll
Bruce Headlines This Special.
VH1 'Rock' history hits huge sour note
Monday, December 17th 2007, 4:00 AM
Mazur/Getty
Bruce Springsteen (l.) and Steven Van Zandt perform a number in 'Seven Ages of Rock.'
SEVEN AGES OF ROCK. Tonight at 9, VH1 Classic
"Seven Ages of Rock," an ambitious week-long documentary that kicks off tonight, delivers a fast-paced, entertaining ride through rock music from 1965 to the present.
So it's very tempting to just sit back and enjoy it, except that's hard when it's all built on a lie.
At the beginning of the first installment, a Bobby Vee song plays in the background while narrator Dennis Hopper explains that before Jan. 1, 1965, popular music was bland, sanitized and largely irrelevant to a restless audience that was thirsting impatiently for something more.
This view can be explained partly by the fact "Seven Ages" is primarily a BBC production, so it looks at popular music from the perspective of Great Britain, where until the '60s pop music fans had only the ultrabland BBC.
The fact that this premise largely ignores the Beatles is a little more perplexing. But it forges on, arguing that "rock" as we know it really took off in 1965, when the Rolling Stones started doing their own material and the Who found their voice and Bob Dylan went electric.
So okay, you could argue that the "British invasion" bands started to rock harder that year. But "Seven Ages" doesn't phrase it that way. "Seven Ages" gives the distinct impression that the first real voice of rock was the Who smashing guitars.
To find where that voice came from, the show suggests, you have to go back to black American blues. It underscores this argument with a marvelous scene in which Keith Richards plays "Satisfaction" as a slow Delta blues.
But the implication is that nothing else came between John Lee Hooker and Eric Clapton, that no other music affected these early Brits.
That's just plain wrong. It's a lie, and any of the musicians here would tell you it's a lie.
To talk about the dawn of "rock" without factoring in Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Fats, James Brown and a hundred others doesn't just ignore history. It sneers at history.
The people involved here should know it - from their own clips. In the first two performance shots of the Stones, they're singing "Not Fade Away," a Buddy Holly song, and "Around and Around," a Chuck Berry song.
"Seven Ages" tells a good story, with great music and incisive and amusing comments from the likes of Clapton, Richards, Springsteen and Ozzy Osbourne.
But the fact that it ignores the entire decade when so much of this music was built - ignores Little Richard, the Beach Boys and Four Seasons, Phil Spector, Bo Diddley, rockabilly, early Motown, dismisses everything that went on before 1965, suggests by omission that it doesn't matter - sheathes the whole production in a cloud so dark that Keith, Eric, Bruce, the Clash, Pearl Jam and Oasis all together can never quite bust it out.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
Bruce Headlines This Special.
VH1 'Rock' history hits huge sour note
Monday, December 17th 2007, 4:00 AM
Mazur/Getty
Bruce Springsteen (l.) and Steven Van Zandt perform a number in 'Seven Ages of Rock.'
SEVEN AGES OF ROCK. Tonight at 9, VH1 Classic
"Seven Ages of Rock," an ambitious week-long documentary that kicks off tonight, delivers a fast-paced, entertaining ride through rock music from 1965 to the present.
So it's very tempting to just sit back and enjoy it, except that's hard when it's all built on a lie.
At the beginning of the first installment, a Bobby Vee song plays in the background while narrator Dennis Hopper explains that before Jan. 1, 1965, popular music was bland, sanitized and largely irrelevant to a restless audience that was thirsting impatiently for something more.
This view can be explained partly by the fact "Seven Ages" is primarily a BBC production, so it looks at popular music from the perspective of Great Britain, where until the '60s pop music fans had only the ultrabland BBC.
The fact that this premise largely ignores the Beatles is a little more perplexing. But it forges on, arguing that "rock" as we know it really took off in 1965, when the Rolling Stones started doing their own material and the Who found their voice and Bob Dylan went electric.
So okay, you could argue that the "British invasion" bands started to rock harder that year. But "Seven Ages" doesn't phrase it that way. "Seven Ages" gives the distinct impression that the first real voice of rock was the Who smashing guitars.
To find where that voice came from, the show suggests, you have to go back to black American blues. It underscores this argument with a marvelous scene in which Keith Richards plays "Satisfaction" as a slow Delta blues.
But the implication is that nothing else came between John Lee Hooker and Eric Clapton, that no other music affected these early Brits.
That's just plain wrong. It's a lie, and any of the musicians here would tell you it's a lie.
To talk about the dawn of "rock" without factoring in Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Fats, James Brown and a hundred others doesn't just ignore history. It sneers at history.
The people involved here should know it - from their own clips. In the first two performance shots of the Stones, they're singing "Not Fade Away," a Buddy Holly song, and "Around and Around," a Chuck Berry song.
"Seven Ages" tells a good story, with great music and incisive and amusing comments from the likes of Clapton, Richards, Springsteen and Ozzy Osbourne.
But the fact that it ignores the entire decade when so much of this music was built - ignores Little Richard, the Beach Boys and Four Seasons, Phil Spector, Bo Diddley, rockabilly, early Motown, dismisses everything that went on before 1965, suggests by omission that it doesn't matter - sheathes the whole production in a cloud so dark that Keith, Eric, Bruce, the Clash, Pearl Jam and Oasis all together can never quite bust it out.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
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Comments
and for some reason they never appeared online :(..so if anyone want to put them up
I understood though that they concentrated on Nirvana for that period...surprisingly.. not.. :rolleyes:
actually read an article somewhere saying they could have done a whole episode just on PJ