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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs #2
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs Volume 2: From the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four
In this series of books, based on the hit podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey analyses the history of rock and roll music, from its origins in swing, Western swing, boogie woogie, and gospel, through to the 1990s, grunge, and Britpop. Looking at five hundred representative songs, he tells the story of the musicians who made those records, the society that produced them, and the music they were making. Volume two looks at fifty songs from the origins of rock and roll, starting in 1956 with the Million Dollar Quartet session at Sun Studios, and ending in 1962 with "Love Me Do" by the Beatles. Along the way, it looks at Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Wanda Jackson, the Chantels, Little Richard, and many more of the progenitors of rock and roll.
- GenresMusicNonfictionHistory
690 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 5, 2021
47 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Hickey
45 books83 followersI had a biography here but it was very out of date. Currently my main work is my podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. The New Yorker compared that to the Bible, Oxford English Dictionary, and the works of Gibbon and Pepys, and said it "will eclipse every literary project in history". So that's nice.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 29, 2025
These books (first one 550 pages, this one 650 pages, each covering 50 songs) are more or less transcripts of Andrew Hickey’s podcast, which began life with 30 to 60 minute episodes. But I saw that one recent episode on the Grateful Dead was 4 hours 40 minutes long, so it seems that future volumes of this Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire-length history of rock will need like 1500 pages to cover their 50 songs…. In a recent interview Andrew says he thought this project would take him 10 years, now he thinks 20.
Everything’s getting longer. Mark Lewisohn’s first volume of the Beatles biography was gigantic (1700 pages taking the story up to 1962). Last year’s best picture at the Oscars was Anora (2 hours 20); other shortlisted movies were The Brutalist (3 hours 30), A Complete Unknown (2 hours 20) Dune Part 2 (2 hours 50) Emilia Perez (2 hours 12) and The Substance (2 hours 20). Wasn’t the internet supposed to be wrecking people’s attention spans?
This volume 2 goes from Matchbox by Carl Perkins in 1956 to Love Me Do by the aforementioned in 1962. Some big names pop up more than once, but most get to strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more – The Bobbettes, Lloyd Price, Vince Taylor and the Playboys. They are included because Andrew, after much cogitation, has deemed their story to be significant. Consider them like those odd bit players tumbling about at the side of Pieter Breughel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels, or perhaps like the melancholy flotsam found by Robinson Crusoe on his island in the mouth of the Orinoco.
This is pretty much a must have series for any music obsessive. Now I guess I better catch up on all the podcasts. I don’t need to listen to the first 100, so that leaves 78 and counting.
Everything’s getting longer. Mark Lewisohn’s first volume of the Beatles biography was gigantic (1700 pages taking the story up to 1962). Last year’s best picture at the Oscars was Anora (2 hours 20); other shortlisted movies were The Brutalist (3 hours 30), A Complete Unknown (2 hours 20) Dune Part 2 (2 hours 50) Emilia Perez (2 hours 12) and The Substance (2 hours 20). Wasn’t the internet supposed to be wrecking people’s attention spans?
This volume 2 goes from Matchbox by Carl Perkins in 1956 to Love Me Do by the aforementioned in 1962. Some big names pop up more than once, but most get to strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more – The Bobbettes, Lloyd Price, Vince Taylor and the Playboys. They are included because Andrew, after much cogitation, has deemed their story to be significant. Consider them like those odd bit players tumbling about at the side of Pieter Breughel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels, or perhaps like the melancholy flotsam found by Robinson Crusoe on his island in the mouth of the Orinoco.
This is pretty much a must have series for any music obsessive. Now I guess I better catch up on all the podcasts. I don’t need to listen to the first 100, so that leaves 78 and counting.
November 10, 2025
See some notes under Volume 1 which really belong under this volume.
Disclosure: I’ve been listening to the podcast but really don’t see any difference with each episode of this being a chapter in an audiobook.
I’m apparently still ahead of the books (I’m beyond episode 130 as I write this) but want to capture some notes along the way
One approach that Hickey uses that I really like is to overlay two pieces of music so you can hear how similar they are, or similarly play back to back short excerpts;
and when he can’t do this, he’ll sing a part, after self-deprecatingly giving us fair warning about his vocal abilities.
I particularly liked in episode 132 on The Four Tops he apologizes for doing a bad Dylan impression, “everyone thinks they can impersonate Dylan, everyone’s imitations of Dylan are cringe worthy, and mine is worse than most” but goes on to exaggeratingly sing “Reach Out” like Dylan, elongating each word at the end of the line…and it’s perfect: you can really hear how Dozier had Dylan in mind when he crafted the lyrics and melody for this song. Hickey ends with “Let us never speak of that again. I think we’d better hear Levy Stubs sing it again to take that unpleasantness away.”
Episode 177? Part? The Stones “ Sympathy for the Devil” has its origins in Mick reading The Master and Margarita but as Hickey points out he is unable to ascertain which version of the book Mick read because “there is no canonical version of the book.”
Episode 177 part? : “Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, two years after the end of the Slave Holders Rebellion, later euphemized as the American Civil War.” I have never heard the Civil War (or as my grandmother would have said “the war between the states”) described as Hickey does here; and he’s absolutely correct. In edition, this episode made me completely reevaluate my perception of Lomax; I appreciate hearing the recordings, but, ugh, how he went about it…
Episode 177: “Conspiracy Theory is essentially a form of narrative pareidolia, the same kind of thing that means we see patterns in clouds or fireplaces…” [this is the best definition of conspiracy theories I’ve come across].
In this episode, Hickey warns that he’s going to spend time addressing minstrel shows and the like, and it is a fascinating and highly informative dive; I’d long suspected that many such songs had had different, racist, lyrics in their past and Hickey confirmed this (though he only mentions “Jimmy Cracked Corn” but doesn’t further explain the lyrics, and I wish he had)
Episode 176 “Sympathy for the Devil”: “Marianne Faithful was among the aristocratic circles the group now moved in…her mother was Eva von Sachor-Masoch…whose great uncle was the author of the novel Venus In Furs…which, around this time, inspired Lou Reed to write a song with the same name…von Sachor-Masoch was also the inspiration for the term “masochism” being coined, much to his own annoyance.”
Pledge week 2024: A Whiter Shade of Pale : group name comes from mishearing the name of a pedigree cat: “The cat was actually called Procol, the Latin for nearby, Harun, Arabic for lightbringer. (And song title from a comment about a girlfriend who looked ill)
Episode 171: Hey Jude. Well, this episode covers a lot more than just Hey Jude. I’m issue that Hickey discusses is the fingerpicking that Donovan showed/taught to John, Paul, and George, particularly what’s known as Travis style picking (which George already knew, having been a fan of C&W). “Donovan has said in his autobiography that ‘Lennon picked up the technique quickly…but that McCartney didn’t have the application to learn the style though he picked up bits.’ That seems unlike anything else I’ve read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney. No one has ever accused Lennon of having a(?) application. And reading Donovan’s book, he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison…”
As a guitar player, I can only add to this that the picking John does on Dear Prudence is full on Travis style picking, while McCartney’s Blackbird is pinching the two notes together then strumming in between instead of picking in between.
Episode 166: Cream. I really appreciate how Hickey tied Robert Johnson into this episode: amazing depth. But it’s one episode where he didn’t include some factoids: for the song “Badge” how it got its name (written by Clapton & G Harrison; one had hand written out the lyrics and the other asked “Badge? What’s the badge? {the Bridge}; and, although he repeatedly states There are no firsts, this is the first song I know of that for the guitar solo, the guitar was run through a Leslie Tone cabinet. And for the song “S.W.L.A.B.C.” he shares that they came up with that name based on a Monkees song, but doesn’t share what the letters stand for (She Walks Like…)
Episode 159: “Itchycoo Park” I love when i don’t recognize the name of a song, but then hear it and immediately recognize it. Hickey plays a clip in this episode that sounds exactly-exactly-like Led Zeppelin’s “whole lotta love” and dryly says, “you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott.” I also enjoyed how he ended this episode by leading up to The Faces (formerly The Small Faces) replacing their lead singer with…and then ending the episode without the reveal.
Episode 156: Stevie Wonder: “we’d heard in the last episode…how “No Where to Run” by The Vandellas had inspired The Stones’s “Satisfaction”which inspired Wonder to take the four-on-the-floor beat and bring it back to Motown …a conscious attempt …to appeal to white listeners …on the grounds that while black people usually clapped on the back beat, white people didn’t, so having a four on the floor beat wouldn’t throw them off…so Cosby…in trying to come up with a “Satisfaction” sound alike, we’re black motown writers trying to copy a white rock band trying to copy black Motown writers trying to appeal to a white rock audience…Wonder came up with the hook based on slang he heard [“Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”]. Hickey also mentions Wonder singing “High-heeled Sneakers” which I had only heard as a cover (a mediocre one) but some one-hit wonder white band.
Episode 154: The Turtles/Flo&Eddie: I knew big chunks of this, but not the legal wrangling. “The group split up and Kaylen and Vholman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters” then goes on to play an except from “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” - mind blown!
Episode 152: Buffalo Springfield: “Mr Soul” how did I never hear before how similar the guitar riff is to the Stones’ “ Satisfaction”? And for “Broken Arrow” before they had released it, they heard the crashing then diminishing chord at the end of The Beatles “A Day in the Life” so they took their crashing chord, put it at the front of their song and made it rise to a crescendo.
Pledge week 2022 bonus: “Winchester Cathedral”. I remember this song and always wondered how it got the airplay that it received; a (spoofy) remake of a Rudy Valentino song, that, somehow, beat out “Eleanor Rigby” and “Good Vibrations” for Song of the Year!
Episode 149: Aretha: “Respect” - “This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny…those of you who leave me comments or messages saying, ‘Why can’t you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue signaling?’ may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well; I won’t mind.”
Episode 146 Hendrix “Hey Joe” - roots in Stagger Lee and Cocaine Blues
Look for D Crosby/Byrds version of “Hey Joe”
Episode 144: The Monkees: “Last Train to Clarksville” he explains the connection between this song and Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Beret”. (Ft Campbell)
And, wow: Michael Nesmith (pre-Monkees) penned “Different Drum” a hit for Rondstat and the Stone Ponys
He points out that the Monkees tv show opening song (written and performed by Boyce and Hart for the original pilot) is The Dave Clark Five’s “Catch Us if You Can”. So instrumentation is so similar he could have overlaid the vocals from one onto the instrument track of the other.
And overlaying tracks like this is exactly what he does to show that Boyce & Hart lifted the Beatles “Paperback Writer” to pen “Last Train to Clarksville” (Boyce having misheard the Beatles lyrics thinking they were singing about a train), and Hinkey does overlay the Beatles vocals (slightly sped up) atop a karaoke backing track of the Monkees song and it’s a perfect fit. He then discusses “Last Train to Memphis
Episode 143: Lovin’ Spoonful: “John Sebastian Plays Bach” making it extremely difficult to find on the internet which thinks you want “Johann.”
Episode 141 Ike & Tina: ha! So an unknown Harry Nilsson drafted by Phil Spector to pen tunes takes a bathroom-wall ditty about here I sit and think, ameliorates some of the words to get it past the censors and has created a minor hit; if you hear the lyrics, and think of a bathroom stall wall, you’ll immediately know what (few) words Harry changed.
Mind blown. Tina singing backup vocals on Zappa’s Apostrophe! Cosmic Debris…how did I never recognize this before?!? I hear it now and it’s so obvious.
And the squeaky falsetto voices in “Montana;”
Tina was so excited about having gotten that passage right, that she called Ike out of his own session to come and listen. But Ike was very much unimpressed and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said, ‘I don’t know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long.’”
And Tina turned down the offer to record “Let’s Get Physical” which became a hit for Olivia Newton John. I’d love to hear a version of Tina doing this song.
Episode 139 The Byrds: Fantastic exploration as Hickey takes us back to the Benny Goodman sextet, has us listen to the opening of Eight Miles High, then an excerpt from Coltrane - who was listening to Indian modal music and lifted this from a vocal passage. And touches on Miles Davis along the way.
Episode 136 The Who: Townsend and Entwhistle bonding over…Mad Magazine
Episode 135 Simon and Garfunkel: schoolmates who meshed over reading Mad Magazine [I can’t really articulate to generations who followed how influential Mad Magazine was in shaping the world view of a large cohort of my generation]
{in this episode, not that what follows in these brackets has anything to do with this episode, Hickey excepts some lyrics from S&G’s song “Red Rubber Ball”: “you’re not the only starfish in the sea” which I thought was a curious lyric, knowing the term “starfish” has a sexual connotation in slang.}
Episode 131: The Supremes. There’s a lot here, but what stood out was how many hits The Supremes had - they were really the only rival The Beatles had
Episode 130: Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” - he covers the outrage of Dylan’s shift to electric. And discusses the Newport “axe” incident- “a rumor that still has currency fifty years later.” “Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm,” said “He’s gone to get his axe” using “musician slang for a guitar” but the audience wasn’t familiar with that term and had see Seeger furious … earlier in folk songs about working, Seeger had imitated swinging an axe, so the rumor started that Seeger had been so annoyed with Dylan going electric that he had tried to use an axe to severe the cables.
Episode 129: Stones’ “Satisfaction”: for whatever reason, I thought the Stones had issued this song before some of their others (eg. As Tears Go By). I’d picked up on some of the misogyny in Stones’ ‘60’s songs but was blown away by Hickey’s walking through song after song and pointing out the misogynistic lyrics. And I’d not known much about Brian Jones other than he was a founding member of the group and he’d died young; but what a creep, going way beyond even the misogynistic lyrics of the songs.
Episode 128: Byrd’s “Tambourine Man”: I knew that Crosby could harmonize with anyone, but also thought he was something of a schmuck, which Hickey touched upon (more recently prior to Crosby’s death, he’d made some nasty comments which caused a final unreconciled falling out with Nash, Stills, and Young)
Pledge Week Bonus: “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto: I’d known this melody forever, since childhood. I wasn’t aware of how the Japanese market at the time was incorporating and adapting to western pop music. And I wasn’t aware that this song is one of the bestselling songs of all time.
Disclosure: I’ve been listening to the podcast but really don’t see any difference with each episode of this being a chapter in an audiobook.
I’m apparently still ahead of the books (I’m beyond episode 130 as I write this) but want to capture some notes along the way
One approach that Hickey uses that I really like is to overlay two pieces of music so you can hear how similar they are, or similarly play back to back short excerpts;
and when he can’t do this, he’ll sing a part, after self-deprecatingly giving us fair warning about his vocal abilities.
I particularly liked in episode 132 on The Four Tops he apologizes for doing a bad Dylan impression, “everyone thinks they can impersonate Dylan, everyone’s imitations of Dylan are cringe worthy, and mine is worse than most” but goes on to exaggeratingly sing “Reach Out” like Dylan, elongating each word at the end of the line…and it’s perfect: you can really hear how Dozier had Dylan in mind when he crafted the lyrics and melody for this song. Hickey ends with “Let us never speak of that again. I think we’d better hear Levy Stubs sing it again to take that unpleasantness away.”
Episode 177? Part? The Stones “ Sympathy for the Devil” has its origins in Mick reading The Master and Margarita but as Hickey points out he is unable to ascertain which version of the book Mick read because “there is no canonical version of the book.”
Episode 177 part? : “Lomax was born in Mississippi in 1867, two years after the end of the Slave Holders Rebellion, later euphemized as the American Civil War.” I have never heard the Civil War (or as my grandmother would have said “the war between the states”) described as Hickey does here; and he’s absolutely correct. In edition, this episode made me completely reevaluate my perception of Lomax; I appreciate hearing the recordings, but, ugh, how he went about it…
Episode 177: “Conspiracy Theory is essentially a form of narrative pareidolia, the same kind of thing that means we see patterns in clouds or fireplaces…” [this is the best definition of conspiracy theories I’ve come across].
In this episode, Hickey warns that he’s going to spend time addressing minstrel shows and the like, and it is a fascinating and highly informative dive; I’d long suspected that many such songs had had different, racist, lyrics in their past and Hickey confirmed this (though he only mentions “Jimmy Cracked Corn” but doesn’t further explain the lyrics, and I wish he had)
Episode 176 “Sympathy for the Devil”: “Marianne Faithful was among the aristocratic circles the group now moved in…her mother was Eva von Sachor-Masoch…whose great uncle was the author of the novel Venus In Furs…which, around this time, inspired Lou Reed to write a song with the same name…von Sachor-Masoch was also the inspiration for the term “masochism” being coined, much to his own annoyance.”
Pledge week 2024: A Whiter Shade of Pale : group name comes from mishearing the name of a pedigree cat: “The cat was actually called Procol, the Latin for nearby, Harun, Arabic for lightbringer. (And song title from a comment about a girlfriend who looked ill)
Episode 171: Hey Jude. Well, this episode covers a lot more than just Hey Jude. I’m issue that Hickey discusses is the fingerpicking that Donovan showed/taught to John, Paul, and George, particularly what’s known as Travis style picking (which George already knew, having been a fan of C&W). “Donovan has said in his autobiography that ‘Lennon picked up the technique quickly…but that McCartney didn’t have the application to learn the style though he picked up bits.’ That seems unlike anything else I’ve read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney. No one has ever accused Lennon of having a(?) application. And reading Donovan’s book, he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison…”
As a guitar player, I can only add to this that the picking John does on Dear Prudence is full on Travis style picking, while McCartney’s Blackbird is pinching the two notes together then strumming in between instead of picking in between.
Episode 166: Cream. I really appreciate how Hickey tied Robert Johnson into this episode: amazing depth. But it’s one episode where he didn’t include some factoids: for the song “Badge” how it got its name (written by Clapton & G Harrison; one had hand written out the lyrics and the other asked “Badge? What’s the badge? {the Bridge}; and, although he repeatedly states There are no firsts, this is the first song I know of that for the guitar solo, the guitar was run through a Leslie Tone cabinet. And for the song “S.W.L.A.B.C.” he shares that they came up with that name based on a Monkees song, but doesn’t share what the letters stand for (She Walks Like…)
Episode 159: “Itchycoo Park” I love when i don’t recognize the name of a song, but then hear it and immediately recognize it. Hickey plays a clip in this episode that sounds exactly-exactly-like Led Zeppelin’s “whole lotta love” and dryly says, “you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott.” I also enjoyed how he ended this episode by leading up to The Faces (formerly The Small Faces) replacing their lead singer with…and then ending the episode without the reveal.
Episode 156: Stevie Wonder: “we’d heard in the last episode…how “No Where to Run” by The Vandellas had inspired The Stones’s “Satisfaction”which inspired Wonder to take the four-on-the-floor beat and bring it back to Motown …a conscious attempt …to appeal to white listeners …on the grounds that while black people usually clapped on the back beat, white people didn’t, so having a four on the floor beat wouldn’t throw them off…so Cosby…in trying to come up with a “Satisfaction” sound alike, we’re black motown writers trying to copy a white rock band trying to copy black Motown writers trying to appeal to a white rock audience…Wonder came up with the hook based on slang he heard [“Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”]. Hickey also mentions Wonder singing “High-heeled Sneakers” which I had only heard as a cover (a mediocre one) but some one-hit wonder white band.
Episode 154: The Turtles/Flo&Eddie: I knew big chunks of this, but not the legal wrangling. “The group split up and Kaylen and Vholman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters” then goes on to play an except from “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” - mind blown!
Episode 152: Buffalo Springfield: “Mr Soul” how did I never hear before how similar the guitar riff is to the Stones’ “ Satisfaction”? And for “Broken Arrow” before they had released it, they heard the crashing then diminishing chord at the end of The Beatles “A Day in the Life” so they took their crashing chord, put it at the front of their song and made it rise to a crescendo.
Pledge week 2022 bonus: “Winchester Cathedral”. I remember this song and always wondered how it got the airplay that it received; a (spoofy) remake of a Rudy Valentino song, that, somehow, beat out “Eleanor Rigby” and “Good Vibrations” for Song of the Year!
Episode 149: Aretha: “Respect” - “This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny…those of you who leave me comments or messages saying, ‘Why can’t you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue signaling?’ may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well; I won’t mind.”
Episode 146 Hendrix “Hey Joe” - roots in Stagger Lee and Cocaine Blues
Look for D Crosby/Byrds version of “Hey Joe”
Episode 144: The Monkees: “Last Train to Clarksville” he explains the connection between this song and Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Beret”. (Ft Campbell)
And, wow: Michael Nesmith (pre-Monkees) penned “Different Drum” a hit for Rondstat and the Stone Ponys
He points out that the Monkees tv show opening song (written and performed by Boyce and Hart for the original pilot) is The Dave Clark Five’s “Catch Us if You Can”. So instrumentation is so similar he could have overlaid the vocals from one onto the instrument track of the other.
And overlaying tracks like this is exactly what he does to show that Boyce & Hart lifted the Beatles “Paperback Writer” to pen “Last Train to Clarksville” (Boyce having misheard the Beatles lyrics thinking they were singing about a train), and Hinkey does overlay the Beatles vocals (slightly sped up) atop a karaoke backing track of the Monkees song and it’s a perfect fit. He then discusses “Last Train to Memphis
Episode 143: Lovin’ Spoonful: “John Sebastian Plays Bach” making it extremely difficult to find on the internet which thinks you want “Johann.”
Episode 141 Ike & Tina: ha! So an unknown Harry Nilsson drafted by Phil Spector to pen tunes takes a bathroom-wall ditty about here I sit and think, ameliorates some of the words to get it past the censors and has created a minor hit; if you hear the lyrics, and think of a bathroom stall wall, you’ll immediately know what (few) words Harry changed.
Mind blown. Tina singing backup vocals on Zappa’s Apostrophe! Cosmic Debris…how did I never recognize this before?!? I hear it now and it’s so obvious.
And the squeaky falsetto voices in “Montana;”
Tina was so excited about having gotten that passage right, that she called Ike out of his own session to come and listen. But Ike was very much unimpressed and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said, ‘I don’t know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long.’”
And Tina turned down the offer to record “Let’s Get Physical” which became a hit for Olivia Newton John. I’d love to hear a version of Tina doing this song.
Episode 139 The Byrds: Fantastic exploration as Hickey takes us back to the Benny Goodman sextet, has us listen to the opening of Eight Miles High, then an excerpt from Coltrane - who was listening to Indian modal music and lifted this from a vocal passage. And touches on Miles Davis along the way.
Episode 136 The Who: Townsend and Entwhistle bonding over…Mad Magazine
Episode 135 Simon and Garfunkel: schoolmates who meshed over reading Mad Magazine [I can’t really articulate to generations who followed how influential Mad Magazine was in shaping the world view of a large cohort of my generation]
{in this episode, not that what follows in these brackets has anything to do with this episode, Hickey excepts some lyrics from S&G’s song “Red Rubber Ball”: “you’re not the only starfish in the sea” which I thought was a curious lyric, knowing the term “starfish” has a sexual connotation in slang.}
Episode 131: The Supremes. There’s a lot here, but what stood out was how many hits The Supremes had - they were really the only rival The Beatles had
Episode 130: Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” - he covers the outrage of Dylan’s shift to electric. And discusses the Newport “axe” incident- “a rumor that still has currency fifty years later.” “Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm,” said “He’s gone to get his axe” using “musician slang for a guitar” but the audience wasn’t familiar with that term and had see Seeger furious … earlier in folk songs about working, Seeger had imitated swinging an axe, so the rumor started that Seeger had been so annoyed with Dylan going electric that he had tried to use an axe to severe the cables.
Episode 129: Stones’ “Satisfaction”: for whatever reason, I thought the Stones had issued this song before some of their others (eg. As Tears Go By). I’d picked up on some of the misogyny in Stones’ ‘60’s songs but was blown away by Hickey’s walking through song after song and pointing out the misogynistic lyrics. And I’d not known much about Brian Jones other than he was a founding member of the group and he’d died young; but what a creep, going way beyond even the misogynistic lyrics of the songs.
Episode 128: Byrd’s “Tambourine Man”: I knew that Crosby could harmonize with anyone, but also thought he was something of a schmuck, which Hickey touched upon (more recently prior to Crosby’s death, he’d made some nasty comments which caused a final unreconciled falling out with Nash, Stills, and Young)
Pledge Week Bonus: “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto: I’d known this melody forever, since childhood. I wasn’t aware of how the Japanese market at the time was incorporating and adapting to western pop music. And I wasn’t aware that this song is one of the bestselling songs of all time.
July 14, 2024
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is my absolute favorite podcast these days. Andrew Hickey's research into music is exhaustive and defies the many myths that have arisen about the artists who made it. The podcast has the advantage of hearing clips of the songs under discussion, but I find that reading the book I catch things I previously missed. The second volume covers the years 1957 to 1962, essentially the second wave of Rock and Roll. The common wisdom was that this was a fallow period in rock history when the music business pushed sanitized pop vocalists (typically named Bobby) to the forefront. But this period also saw the emergence of The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Brenda Lee, and Roy Orbison, as well as the first girl groups in New York, and the Motown sound in Detroit. Leiber and Stoller had some of their biggest rock hits, and Goffin and King started their illustrious partnership. Not too mention dance trends like "The Twist" and "The Loco-Motion." The period ends with the first efforts by Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles (who we learn throughout the book were the culmination of many attempts to create a UK rock sound). I recommend the book and the podcast highly.
June 30, 2024
Rock Music from Sun Studios in Memphis to Liverpool in England
Reading this history researched so thoroughly by Andrew Hickey is amazing, educational and entertaining all at the same time. The story flows so beautifully that I looked forward to turning to the next page. This review is for Volume 2, which followed up an equally well documented Volume 1 about the music that led to that covered here. I am first in line for Volume 3. Thank you, Andrew.
Reading this history researched so thoroughly by Andrew Hickey is amazing, educational and entertaining all at the same time. The story flows so beautifully that I looked forward to turning to the next page. This review is for Volume 2, which followed up an equally well documented Volume 1 about the music that led to that covered here. I am first in line for Volume 3. Thank you, Andrew.
August 2, 2022
Episodes 50 - 100 of Hickey's historical analysis of Rock (Pop) music. Interesting and informative.
October 27, 2022
Can’t wait for volume 3!
As a long time student of the history of rock music and its predecessors, on both sides of the Atlantic, these books hit the sweet spot.
As a long time student of the history of rock music and its predecessors, on both sides of the Atlantic, these books hit the sweet spot.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews