Text and Video by Larry Freeman
The boiling, tempestuous energy, innate wanderlust and search for self of teen youth collides with the culture bending power of rock and roll music.
In the 1950’s, teenagers asserted and informally cultivated a media catalyzed identity and, for the first time, became a distinctive, recognized culture unto themselves in the change driven times between childhood and adulthood.
This panoply of print materials and record jackets gives a brief chronicle on the ongoing battle between inherent and socialized teen traits to stand out, bust out and push the boundaries vs elder society’s eternal bent towards keeping those kids in line and out of trouble. A perpetual control battle is at the heart.
How did the forces of social conformity try (in vain) to keep the “teen scene clean”, as the menace of teen ‘centric music shaped teen culture?
This video just skims the surface on how rock and roll led and licensed them to lose control.
Such nuance as when did rock and roll really begin (ie Billy Ward and The Dominoes in the more than risque’ old school R & B tune, “Sixty Minute Man” –“I rock ’em, roll ’em all night long….I’m a sixty minute man”) does not get its due.
The rather lengthy, push pull infusion of African American music’s influence slowly desegregating white mainstream music, is also not emphasized, though that force of tunes and message is a truly remarkable, deep and important deep history story unto itself (maybe someday I will tackle it)
There are also plenty more omissions for you purists and encyclopedic deep dive snipers .
Yeah, Dick Dale and The DeL-Tones– don’t get mentioned in the context of electric surf music and I messed up saying that Elvis’ post Hay Ride record debut was 1940, not 1954, and I shoulda’ mentioned Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger service as additional, seminal SF Electric Acid Rock bands and on and on and on.
But you can do that on your own to your heart’s content….
Enjoy this 14 minute potato chip view that showcases some truly eclectic material in a flowing narrative which also skims the dreamy, idealistic notions of 50’s white middle class society in their American Dream ethos.
Of course, America was never really like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver and The Andy Griffith show portrayed it. Still, if nothing else, this vid hearkens back to a simpler time in teen life years less punctuated by so many of the contentious social issues and darker behaviors that are part of the new teen habitat of their external and internal worlds. ( For better or worse, this is a one take, extemporaneous, free flowing piece where the image selection more or less dictated the narrative.)
As a final note, the candy-varnished group id of the teen –overly idealized and broad-brushed– stands out as a sort of dissonant, symphonic ode to something that never really was quite like that. Not so happily, it offers a bittersweet contrast to the new era of an anxiety diagnosed and dosed generation of teens, swirling in a world of hot button polarity and confusing clashes of role and identity types for youths. Now, far too many of them live in a deeper dive world of external identity media, paradoxically driven partly by their own inner angst and self uncertainty.