By John Scanlan
Forthcoming from Reaktion Books, May 2022.
In the fifties, when rock-n-roll first burst into life the shockwaves reverberated around the world, aided by images of untamed youth brought to life on screen. But for rock's performers showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. That world was blown apart by the events of the sixties and the decades that followed. Artists and documentarists merged music and image, rock stars used film to mythologise themselves, movie directors plotted stories inspired by rock, while low-budget auteurs and video enthusiasts pursued new possibilities.
A riveting cultural history, Rock-n-Roll Plays Itself plunges into an ocean of images produced over seven decades to explore why it was that inventing the means through which rock was able to play itself would help to ensure it existed into old age and well beyond the seemingly disposable impulses that first gave it life.
From Bo Diddley and Elvis Presley to David Bowie, Patti Smith, Nico and the video stars of the 80s, and from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese, Pennebaker and DIY documentarists like Amos Poe, Don Letts and Target Video, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock – from birth to old age – through its onscreen life.
Chapters
Prologue: Look Out
1965
Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and D.A. Pennebaker make a scopitone short in a London alleyway. The significance of birth moments in rock ‘n’ roll mythology and the role of screen culture in their making.
1: Exploding Tomorrow
1955-1963
Bo Diddley meets Ed Sullivan and TV launches rock into the American mainstream. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. The birth of ‘rocksploitation’ movies. Presley conquers America on TV and suffers death on the big screen. Alan Freed’s jukebox musicals. The end of the fifties and retrospective tales of rock's first era. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.
2: Untamed Youth
1959-1966
Expresso Bongo and the grubby reality of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. The Beatles take America in fact and fiction in the Maysles’ What's Happening! and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gales’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand and play themselves in A Hard Day’s Night. Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert try to make a rock movie but end up managing The Who. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones and Peter Whitehead makes Charlie Is My Darling.
3: Altered States
1960-1967
Pennebaker, Leacock and the Maysles’ brothers. Don’t Look Back. Andy Warhol deploys the Velvet Underground to promote his films. The Yardbirds in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London and emerging psychedelia. The Who blow themselves up on TV. The Beatles’ global broadcast with ‘All You Need is Love’. The Human Be-In and the San Francisco scene. Hendrix in Monterey Pop.
4: Making Movies
1967-76
John Milius scripts a ‘rock’n’roll war movie’ while listening to the Doors. The Doors and UCLA film school. Coppola’s realisation of Apocalypse Now. Jean-Luc Godard, the Rolling Stones and One-Plus-One. Martin Scorsese, Michael Wadleigh and Woodstock’s triumph. Scorsese’s use of rock in film. Simon and Garfunkel inspire Mike Nicholls’ The Graduate, Robert Altman constructs McCabe and Mrs Miller around the songs of Leonard Cohen. Easy Rider. The Band in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz.
5: The Aftermath
1969-1973
Barbet’s Schroeder’s More, the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter and Simon and Garfunkel’s Songs of America and the end of the sixties. Message to Love, the last great hippie era gathering and audience chaos. Nic Roeg’s Glastonbury Fayre. Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, the London Rock and Roll Show and Let The Good Times Roll signal changing times. Eat the Document, Stardust and American Graffiti look back, while David Chase’s Not Fade Away shifts backwards and forwards in time.
6: The new people
1973-1979
David Bowie and Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The Man Who Fell to Earth. Derek Jarman films the Sex Pistols and television fires them to instant notoriety. Don Letts’ Punk Rock Movie. New York’s No Wave scene feeds on the promiscuous interplay of film and music. Debbie Harry, Amos Poe and Jim Jarmusch. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Punk’s movie stars and The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. Wim Wenders inspires Chris Petit’s Radio On.
7: Video Vortex
1979-1990
Blondie’s video album Eat to the Beat. Todd Rundgren’s early attempts to combine music and video technology. San Francisco’s Target Video documents the underground scene. Bruce Conner’s ‘Breakaway’ and other forerunners of music video. Devo, The Cramps and The Residents. MTV’s AOR origins and the battle for black music artists. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. David Byrne and Prince become screen stars. Lou Reed hits the dance floor and turns up in a TV ad. The films of Nic Roeg merge with the music of Big Audio Dynamite in ‘E=MC2’.
8: Do it again
1970-2017
Let It Be and the prematurely aged Beatles. The decadent Mick Jagger in Performance. The Rolling Stones discover the secret to eternal youth. Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony and rock as the preserve of the young. Metal fatigue in This is Spinal Tap, Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster, Anvil: The Story of Anvil. A surprising reversal of the ageing process in Last Days Here. Ozzy Osbourne and family become TV stars. Age, experience and rock longevity in Nico 1988, Patti Smith: Dream of Life. Inside the mind of Nick Cave in 20,000 Days on Earth.
Epilogue: look back
Fact and fiction in Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Rock film and rock mythologising in an age of screen saturation.
afterword: fans
Rock fan obsessions in Yesterday, Groupies, Almost Famous, High Fidelity, School of Rock and others. The fan as detective in The Ballad of A.J. Weberman, Velvet Goldmine, Searching for Sugar Man. Stella Street and Yacht Rock as rock fan creative vehicles.