Andrew Hickey’s project “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” “is so vast that it can only be compared to, say, the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary,” BillMcKibben writes.
going door to door in Santa Monica offering to sell housewives lessons in music and art appreciation. Hickey plays no interviews—it’s just his research, painstakingly arranged to make a point. At first, these essays were of manageable length—half an hour for Episode 4, discussing “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” by Louis Jordan.
Oh, and that summation doesn’t include the bonus episodes of the podcast that he’s doing for his Patreon subscribers—an extra song roughly every two weeks, the minor songs that don’t make his list of five hundred immortals but which he can’t bear to ignore. For instance, recently Hickey covered “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” by the Bonzo Dog Band, in a bonus episode that weighs in at forty-three hundred words and explores, among other things, the group’s important influences on “.
The question of where rock and roll begins is, of course, as imponderable as the source of the Amazon, and Hickey has reverent fun knocking down all the possible contenders . But his exploration of the tributaries is endlessly illuminating—he begins with Benny Goodman’s “Flying Home” and his concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938, which also featured Count Basie, Lester Young, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa.
[This solo] is unlike pretty much anything ever played on guitar in the studio before. Christian’s short bursts of single-note guitar line are, to all intents and purposes, rockabilly—it’s the same kind of guitar playing we’ll hear from [Elvis’s guitarist] Scotty Moore sixteen years later.
The electric guitar is the through line here, if there can be a motif for a symphony this absurdly massive. Through the forties and fifties, Hickey follows this fuse as it sputters and flares, until finally, in October, 1962, it explodes with a bang that we still can hear—that was the month the
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