Music: Down to Old Dixie and Back

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Behind them all, Garth Hudson rolls his bewhiskered, bearlike head from side to side and pedals his organ with stockinged feet. Garth is beyond question the most brilliant organist in the rock world. His improvised variations, drawn from a vast knowledge of popular and classical music, provide both decorative scrollwork and depth to The Band's total impact. He also sprinkles each number with unexpected and attractive sounds that always seem to come as a predictable surprise, like the emergence of a cuckoo from a cuckoo clock. The drone of a jew's-harp, which serves as a musical bridge in Up on Cripple Creek, is actually produced by the wah-wah pedal on Garth's clavinette. But what ever they do, The Band tends to treat the audience as they would themselves. That means no cutsie-pie patter, no use of microphones as phallic symbols a la Mick Jagger—and no pelvis-pushing onstage or in the aisles.

Can this be rock? The straight, the uninformed or the middle-aged may ask. What happened to all those groups whose names sounded like Self-Adoration, Pathetic Fallacy, or the Small Bores? The answer is: nothing. They're all still there blasting away at a decibel rate that is really delectable only if the listener is high, so that his senses are transforming sound into a mind-blowing experience. Hard rock, acid rock may never die—for one thing because their main constituents, groupies and would-be groupies, are now and always will be less interested in music than in the male personalities of the performers.

Yet rock music today, some 15 years after it first laid siege to the heart and middle ear of youthful America, is a various and many-splintered thing. This is partly the result of wealth (which allows experimentation). Partly it is the result of refinement. There are tens of thousands of rock groups. The most musically gifted players are developing and growing up.

Blending Styles

Musical mergers have bred mixtures that all but defy Mendel's law. Groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, and Simon & Garfunkel practice folk rock. Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin lean toward soul rock. Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago are into jazz rock, and that is just a beginning. In such groups, the influence of classical has brought about blends of jazz and rock rhythms with composers as diverse as Satie and Bach. Even the classical violin, or rather its electrified sister, has made the scene in the playing of a hard new blues band called The Flock.

Beyond style, rock is blending with other forms—in rock-backed ballet, and in attempts at creating rock opera. Despite a pretentious libretto and hardly any structure (it is really a song cycle), The Who's Tommy has profoundly stirred millions of listeners with a story about parental hatred and the resulting rise and fall of a pop-generation dictator. Lately, considerable air time in the U.S. and England has been devoted to Superstar, a soaring, foot-tapping single from a rock opera about Jesus Christ, now being written in London. Sample lyrics:

Did you mean to die like that? Was

that a mistake or

Did you know your messy death

would be a record-breaker?

Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Who are

you? What have you sacrificed?

Jesus Christ Superstar Do you think

you're what they say you are?