Music Magg

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The first 10 years after World War I! — 1945 to 1955 — were a bizarre period of ferment for the music industry in the United States. White mainstream pop music was dominated by solo singers — women like Rosemary Clooney (George Clooney’s aunt), Peggy Lee and Patti Page, men like Frankie Laine, Tony Bennett, Buddy Clark and Guy Mitchell — who had taken over the top of the charts after the demise of big-band swing and would in turn be dethroned by rock ‘n’ roll. White country music was going through a similar change, as the so-called “Western swing” style that fused country and jazz faded under the onslaught of the rawer, simpler “honky-tonk” style and its principal exponent, Hank Williams. Jazz was fading in popularity among Black record buyers, too; they were picking up records in the style then known as rhythm-and-blues and later the basis of rock and soul. The years after World War II...

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The first time I ever heard the Ace of Cups, an all-woman rock band from San Francisco in the mid- to late-1960’s, was in 1968 when I saw a TV documentary on KQED, the San Francisco Bay Area’s public television station, called West Pole. Co-produced, written and narrated by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz and pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, West Pole was an hour-long telecast devoted to Gleason’s insistence that the center of creative rock music in the late 1960’s was San Francisco. Gleason’s advocacy of his city as the source of all rock creativity was way overstated. The San Francisco scene produced one great band, the Jefferson Airplane; one mediocre band that lucked into a fabulous singer, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin; one band that became an institution and created a cult following while most non-initiates considered them boring, the Grateful Dead...