One of the developments that influenced the music that was played and heard over the past fifty or so years was the change away from a music industry where the direction that music took was largely determined by professionals to one where the consumers (the people) were driving decisions about what was heard and played.

That’s the key point in the keynote essay in a book by Ian MacDonald called The People’s Music.

The late Ian MacDonald, journalist, songwriter and record producer, produced some of the most literate discussions of twentieth-century music I’ve read. The People’s Music collects articles from a variety of sources, discussing artists as diverse as John Fahey, the Beatles, Cream and the Supremes. The final chapter Exiled From Heaven: The Unheard Message of Nick Drake is particularly noteworthy. Although Paul McCartney takes issue with a number of MacDonald’s assertions in Revolution In The Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties the book is essential reading for anyone who wants to delve into the minutiae of the Beatles’ catalogue. MacDonald is also the author of The New Shostakovich, a work on which I am completely unqualified to comment.

Nit-pickers won’t necessarily agree with some of the points MacDonald makes there, and an initial look at the title of the book would lead one to suspect that what is being discussed is some form of folk music, probably written by someone with a leaning towards the political Left.

The next couple of themes/tracks tie into this development in some way, so it’s possibly worth looking at MacDonald’s article in some depth so that we’ve got a framework to see how these tracks fit into a broader flow of ideas and music.

First, we’re looking at the emergence of small groups that were, reasonably, self contained. There are any number of other bands I could choose as the example apart from The Small Faces, but Tin Soldier in my mind, being one of the classics of blue-eyed soul, links back to the previous article and other bands who could be slotted in here will get a guernsey further down the track as other matters come under consideration.

After that, we’ll be looking at the development of rock music as a spectacle. Again, there are any number of examples you could choose, but Bruce Springsteen’s Rosalita ties back to the themes that have been emerging in these pieces in a way that, say, Pink Floyd doesn’t. Again, if I decide to look at the Floyd there are other avenues down which that pursuit can proceed.

From there we’ll go on to consider the performer as an artist whose instincts regarding his work aren’t always in tune with those around him. He’s still coming out of the same sort of background, playing the clubs and dance halls of a major city, as the artists in the previous couple of articles but as things moved into the world of the self-contained entity with either its own resident genius or some poor journeyman who’s been handed the responsibility of coming up with the original material things moved into a corresponding area of artistic and creative expression that wasn’t always in line with commercial viability or the personal relationships between members of the group.

Those considerations will lead to a discussion of something resembling a rock music songbook, a repertoire of great songs that stand out from the crowd. That doesn’t always mean they’re seen as standards in the way that the works of Cole Porter and others are perceived, a vein of material that can be churned through over and over when the Rod Stewarts of this world need a new album, aren’t inclined to dig too far when it comes to new material and want something where people already know the tune.

With my rock music songbook it’s more a matter of hearing something that makes you stop, listen and exclaim Wow! That’s a great song!

From there we’ll go on to look at performers whose work is a fusion of diverse elements, which will lead us into looking at some of the elements that go into the mix that characterized rock music from the late sixties onwards.

First we need to consider the notion of popular music. While not necessarily heading down the same path as Richard Thompson’s excellent 1000 Years of Popular Music which takes things back to the twelfth century and includes elements of what might be classified as baroque- and classical-lite, it’s fairly clear that the rise of mass society that followed the Industrial Revolution brought with it the development of a popular mass culture, and that music was a considerable part of that mass culture.

We tend to forget that, prior to the middle of the eighteenth century, most of the world’s population lived in small, mostly self-contained communities, and that the rise of the cities we know today could only occur once developments in industry, agriculture and transport had reached the point where large numbers of people could live and work in densely settled areas that were far larger than the cities we see when we look back to Renaissance or Roman times.

In those communities, the need to provide for their needs took up most of the family’s waking hours for almost the whole year. While there would have been musical and spoken traditions kept alive within those small communities, higher forms of cultural expression were the realm of a leisured aristocracy who did not have to concern themselves with mundane considerations of day-to-day survival.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Agrarian Revolution started to consolidate landholdings into larger farms where machinery rather than human labour provided the muscle that tilled, sowed and harvested. That allowed things to happen as the Industrial Revolution produced factory cities where the displaced rural population could find work, and the development of the steam engine provided the means to move large quantities of agricultural produce into the cities to feed the growing urban work force. Those two processes sowed the seeds that resulted in the rise of a mass culture that is still with us today.

That mass culture took a number of forms, and included the development of public education, the rise of the popular press which in turn led to the mass media we know today, and the emergence of sport and entertainment as important leisure-time activities for the people who were now crowded into the tenements of cities like London, Manchester, New York and Chicago.

Whether public education emerged from humanitarian concerns about child labour in the mines and mills of Industrial Britain, or as a means to supply a workforce with the knowledge and skills to work in the factories and offices of these new conurbations is a matter for historians and educationalists to debate, but it led to the emergence of a public where illiteracy was the exception rather than the rule, and once people had the skill of reading, books and literature could become a form of entertainment as well as, or instead of, a form of art or culture.

Once there was a public able to read for entertainment, the rise of the popular press was inevitable, and the use of reading as a form of relaxation meant that the presses produced books and magazines that were as much concerned with entertainment as they were with providing news and information.

At the same time as people were starting to read for entertainment, the urban masses found other ways to fill in their spare time. Most major sporting codes in the Western world emerged as in the second half of the nineteenth century, and games, rather than being a part of rural village life became a form of entertainment.

At the same time, in the cities theatres developed forms of mass entertainment that hadn’t existed before. While theatrical performances went back to the age of Shakespeare and beyond, the new forms of entertainment in the vaudeville houses and music halls incorporated elements of song, dance and speech into a new form of performance.

Listening to Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music there is a change in the music around this time, with stage presentation of the songs becoming as important as the lyrics and tune. You can hear the theatrical possibilities in Waiting At The Church - the jilted bride playing up to the audience, the warped humour of the chorus (I can’t get away to marry you today, my wife won’t let me) and the chorus with its singalong possibilities. The same elements are there in Trafalgar Square. In a more theatrical mode there were the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan represented on Thompson’s disk by There Is Beauty...

Of course, none of these came from ordinary people. They were written for the stage performers by professional writers or developed specially for their stage acts by the performers themselves. As the ways of distributing music diversified into song books, sheet music, player piano rolls and, eventually, recordings we see the rise of something that is recognizable as the prototype of the music industry we know today.

Until records became the most common way to distribute music, most of a songwriter’s income came from mechanical royalties associated with sheet music. That explains why people providing the raw materials singers and musicians needed tended to congregate in places like the Brill Building and Tin Pan Alley.

I’m not, however, suggesting music publishing companies were totally in control of the directions the music was taking. In a fictional account of America in the twenties such as Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing the reader can sense something of the excitement of jazz in live performance but the story also has forces attempting to channel and control the direction that the music was taking so that its commercial possibilities were maximized.

So through the Jazz and Big Band eras we can see the mixture of (largely instrumental) original material from the musicians and the lyrics from professional writers that led to much of what is now regarded as The American Song Book.

There were other elements bubbling away under the surface. While mainstream white bread America tuned in to Tin Pan Alley there were people travelling the back blocks recording the blues, folk songs and other music that had its own market once people could afford to buy phonographs. Those elements came together with the emergence of Elvis Presley and the early rockers, although in practically no time the music industry had recruited the rebels and placed them firmly in the mainstream.

There was a message there for anyone who wanted to look. The music industry didn’t always know what people wanted to hear, and even music the industry rejected as too primitive for the mainstream could sell, provided there was someone willing to give audiences a chance to hear it.

Although it was almost entirely an English phenomenon, the emergence of Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle bands changed the direction of popular music, although not many people noticed at the time. The example of Elvis had would-be musicians racing out to buy guitars and the rough and ready nature of skiffle meant that you didn’t have to be very good to start playing in public.

Anyone wanting to understand why the Beatles revolutionized things when they shot to prominence in the early sixties need look no further than a generation of teenagers playing guitars in bedrooms, cellars and school dormitories in the years leading up to 1963. Most of what they were playing came from the early rockers or the old blues men who inspired Lonnie Donegan, but as they fooled around learning new chords some of them started stringing them together into tunes and adding words.

So the beat groups that sprouted in the wake of the Beatles weren’t the heirs of the skiffle boom, they were the kids of the skiffle boom grown up and developing their own repertoire, much of it at least partly road-tested in front of audiences that weren’t excessively critical because they weren’t expecting virtuoso performances.

There was, however, one problem that all these groups kept coming back to and that was the limited repertoire available to the groups of the day. While they could cover the early rockers and continue playing the folk-blues stuff that had come through in the skiffle era, they all needed new material that would be unfamiliar to their audiences.

One source for new material was the blues and R&B records that were starting to appear in British record shops, and were being brought into the country by sailors from merchant ships. While I’ve often wondered about how New Orleans R&B managed to grab a foothold in New Zealand I have a suspicion that it had something to do with an air base around Christchurch that was apparently a staging post for servicemen and other personnel in transit between the United States and Antarctica.

Of course, if a band was going to cover material from those sources, there was a decided advantage if the singer sounded at least a little like the original performer. It can’t have been entirely coincidental that the early sixties saw the emergence of not just Mick Jagger, with his vocal mannerisms very heavily blues-based even if his voice didn’t quite have the same growl as a Howlin’ Wolf or the resonance of Muddy Waters, but also of Eric Burdon, Joe Cocker, Stevie Winwood and Steve Marriott,

For bands that did not have access to, or couldn’t afford imports there was another solution and that was to write your own material. If their earliest efforts might not have been all that brilliant as they found out what worked, the results improved fairly dramatically, particularly when they saw what their contemporaries and rivals were coming up with.

You could find any number of examples of that quantum leap in the discographies of bands who appeared in the wake of The Beatles, and you probably only need to look at the difference between Love Me Do and I Am the Walrus for an indication of how far the Fab Four had evolved in the space of five years, though Love Me Do actually dates back to 1958, well before the recording sessions supervised by George Martin in 1962.

Alternatively, you could look at the speed with which The Easybeats evolved from In My Book to Come In You’ll Get Pneumonia, though much of that possibly has something to do with Dutch-born Harry Vanda’s increasing English vocabulary.

At the same time, there was something in the musical air in the three years after 1965 that hadn’t existed previously as artists cast their nets into previously unexplored waters, at least as far as popular music was concerned. It was, after all the era that introduced doomy Gregorian chants into The Yardbirds’ Still I’m Sad, though that little effort was effectively trumped by The Bee Gees with an album track called Every Christian Lionhearted Man Will Show You, which was, in itself a remarkable progression from their earliest writing efforts back in the days when they’d just moved beyond playing Queensland coastal resorts and the Brisbane speedway circuit.

It was a strange time, and one can’t help suspecting that the musical monotony that set in after the end of 1968 was linked to a feeling that someone had already explored any avenue that was likely to produce something in the way of a commercially viable synthesis and the writers were more or less innovated out.

Although there is no way of proving it, I have a suspicion that many of the earliest original compositions these groups came up with were written for a particular part of the band’s stage act. I would suggest that when bands started out doing covers, they developed set lists that suited the audiences they were playing to, and that when they started writing original material, the new songs were designed to fit into particular places in the set or to appeal to a particular section of their audience.

There was, of course, a degree of what we’d nowadays describe as chick magnet potential in the fact that you’d written some songs, in much the same way that some of us found it handy to have some deep and meaningful poetry on hand when you were setting out to amaze and impress Year Ten high school girls.

One way of developing their original material for bands like the Yardbirds was to formalize some of their onstage rave-ups into new songs. In an environment where many of the groups were on the receiving end of considerable female fan hysteria, one of the things I suspect the bands’ writers were looking for was the perfect finale to a live set.

Unfortunately, when it comes to looking at a group like the Small Faces, and trying to place the inspiration for a song like Tin Soldier or Afterglow of your Love in some sort of context, the fact that both Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane are long dead might be seen as posing some difficulty. However, a quick look at the only Small Faces set list I could find at http://db.etree.org/bs.php has Tin Soldier right where I expected it to be at the end of the show.

On top of that, Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott quotes P.P. Arnold’s claim that the song was written for her but He liked it so much he kept it himself and gave me ‘If You Think You’re Groovy... (p.160) which leads me to suspect that the potential as a set-closer was recognized pretty quickly once it was written.

For most of the period in question as far as I can tell the preferred touring option for many of the bands attracting hysterical teenage fans was the package tour with half a dozen acts playing sets that ran to half an hour at the very most for the headline act.

That solitary set-list from Vienna in 1969 with the band as the headline act (Status Quo was further down the bill) reads:
You Need Loving
Song of the Baker
Long Black Veil
Every Little Bit Hurts
All or Nothing
Tin Soldier

So what do we see? The Willie Dixon track that got turned into Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love followed by an album track sung by Ronnie Lane, a murder ballad that’s a cover from Music From Big Pink, a slow soul ballad and a one-two knockout punch at the end.

In the context of the live performance, you’d expect that as the effects of mass hysteria took over, and certain tracks would have been ideal vehicles for vocalists to take off into the stratosphere. That’s not suggesting that there was a conscious plan to induce, say, be some of the physical and vocal effects associated with the whirling dervishes of the Sufi world, but the waves of hysteria were certainly headed somewhere that was significantly different from the prim and proper straitlaced world of the sixties generation’s parents and grandparents.

The call-and-response aspects of a track like Van Morrison’s Gloria were arguably at least partly designed to work performer and audience into a state which may not have been Sufi enlightenment, but had some aspects of it.

The use of Van Morrison as a reference point here is quite deliberate. Having heard a number of unofficial Morrison concert recordings, there are nights when Van idefinitely seems to be heading in that direction. His widely noted inconsistency as a live performer would, in such circumstances, be caused as much by the difficulty of consistently reaching that state as it would by his notoriously volatile personality.

The astute reader will, of course, have twigged to the fact that there's a much more obvious example of what we might term divine inspiration than Sufi mysticism, which is, of course, why I veered away from referring to the gospel roots of the old rhythm and blues.

You can see elements of that same losing yourself in the music side of things in soul and R&B, in Tin Soldier, the go with the flow scatting I heard in a Just Like A Woman on a Van Morrison bootleg from (I think) Bournemouth in the late nineties, the churning instrumental jams of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the whole Grateful Dead improvisational departure for points unknown, the Bruce Springsteen stadium concert experience, the sonic storm that comes at the end of a Derek Trucks guitar solo and the modal meandering guitar work you find on Richard Thompson's Calvary Cross or Night Comes In.

From which the astute reader will probably gather that Hughesy's rather fond of that sort of thing.

The astute reader would be right on the money. Through the musical dog days of the early seventies one of the few lights on the horizon were the performers who seemed to be communicating some of the same passion that you find in Tin Soldier. Much of what little excitement I could track down emanated from performers like Dr Feelgood, Graham Parker, Bob Seger, Southside Johnny, Willy de Ville and, of course, Bruce Springsteen.

Many of those performers rose to prominence around the time the punk/new wave movement was rewriting the definition of what amounted to commerciality, and it was the R&B derived end of the spectrum rather than the buzz-saw three chord thrash of punk that I really got into.

Around that time I had a long term unachieved dream of putting together a hard R&B band in Townsville. Not that I had any illusions about fronting the outfit myself. I envisaged myself as the svengali behind the operation, and put a deal of thought into ways in which you might be able to put the package together.

My theory was that I'd start with the rhythm section, working bass and drums together towards a situation where those two knew exactly where each was likely to go when things went off into extended jam territory.

From there I'd have added a rhythm guitarist, a keyboard player and finally a lead player before finally throwing the singer into the mix, preferably somebody with a throaty roar along the same lines as Paul Rogers, Rod Stewart, Gregg Allman or one of the performers name-checked a couple of paragraphs ago.

The idea, as far as I could see, was that the band would play pubs and clubs with minimal on the night setting and tuning up. They'd set up in the afternoon, with instruments carefully pre-tuned so that, for an eight o'clock start there'd be no one in evidence till seven fifty, apart from a certain supervisory svengali keeping an eye on things over a few chilled articles.

With ten minutes to go until kickoff the band would appear, devoting most of the lead-up time organizing vital matters like supplies of liquid refreshment. Two minutes out, there'd be a move to the stage, a brief check that things are the way they were when the setup process had been completed.

Right on the dot of eight the front man would sidle up to the microphone and, with a Good evening, we're Demon Rhythm and this one's called... before embarking on a forty-five minute set played as if it was the collective last three-quarters of an hour on earth.

Take a fifteen minute break at the end of the set and repeat until closing time.

Once you’d managed to put that outfit together, which wouldn’t have been the easiest of tasks in the first place, you’d have the problem of finding a way of getting the band noticed, and attracting enough attention to build the reputation as a live outfit that would deliver those gigs.

I figured that I had that side of things covered as well.

There was, from time to time, the odd multi-band charity show or Battle of the Bands and I suspected Demon Rhythm, as the newest outfit on the block would end up hitting the stage early in proceedings, which would, as I saw it, tie in nicely with a mission to blow anyone yet to appear off the stage.

OK, the attitude would have been. See if you can follow this.

Inquiring minds would, of course, be wondering what you'd choose as a three-song set in such circumstances. I'd have headed straight towards Small Faces territory for the set, starting with Afterglow of Your Love, following it with All or Nothing and concluding with (of course) Tin Soldier.

A reader who happens to have those tracks in their iTunes could sample what would be close to a perfect little ten minute mini-set, and if you were to set the crossfade in your iTunes Preferences about half way across the sliding scale, you’d see that the recorded versions crossfade rather nicely, and it doesn’t take much imagination to figure a couple of little adaptions that would work pretty well in the live setting.

But in that territory we’re still looking at an environment where the short set was the standard modus operandi. As we moved beyond that territory, and as ticket prices went, effectively, through the roof, a half hour set from a headliner isn’t going to be seen as acceptable, and even the hour-long show that sufficed for most acts through the seventies isn’t going to satisfy people who’ve paid over a hundred dollars for a seat, and have probably incurred other significant expenses along the way.

Of course, there are some artists who’ve been instrumental in lifting the bar (as far as concert duration is concerned) along the way.