A raucous cultural history of rock’s relationship with the moving image.
When rock ’n’ roll burst into life in the 1950s, the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, corporate showbusiness remained very much in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad.
In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades in cinema, television, music videos, advertising, and YouTube. Along the way, he shows how rock was exploited, how it inspired film pioneers, and, not least, the film transformations it caused over more than half a century.
From Elvis Presley to David Bowie, and from Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese and DIY documentarists like Don Letts, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock—from birth to old age—through its onscreen life.
216 × 138 × 222 mm
320 pages
Hardback
ISBN: 9781789145724
74 illustrations
Editions
Reaktion Books (May 2022)
University of Chicago Press (July 2022)
Reviews
‘Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself excels in its understanding of how the music is characterized by its unique relationship to time, its seizing of the moment as an existential act. Yet it can also be the most potent time capsule, preserving the essence of an era, while also holding out the possibility of being reworked [...] rock music, as a cultural form, survives not just because of the mythical lives of its stars and its own artistic recycling but also because it’s embedded in the life of the screen. The medium of film, appreciated by a global audience, has vastly extended the reach and longevity of the music it often showcases, and the digital world’s ever-increasing use of visual media will only further this “ghostly” proliferation.’
- ‘Is Rock the Real Thing?’, Alex Harvey in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, January 2023.
From the Prologue
Grappling with a large wad of notecards that have been carefully decorated in stylized lettering, Bob Dylan – a skinny young American with frizzled hair – stands in a London alleyway holding in his hands a selection of words from a new song he has written, which bears the curious title ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Once the camera is rolling, he will begin to peel off the cards, trying to keep time with a recording of the song, whose words are transformed with the help of music into a welter of images that marry the sound of rock ’n’ roll to his kaleidoscopic consciousness. Off to his right stand Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth, the latter accompanying Dylan as his road manager on this short 1965 tour of England, which will end in a few days, two weeks before the singer turns 24. Ginsberg and Neuwirth act like they are taking a break from picking up litter as Dylan readies himself. Unusually, he does not attempt to sing along or mime to these words as he is being filmed. He simply stands rooted to his position. It is rock ’n’ roll, but not as it had ever presented itself before.
Such is the iconic beginning of one of the most celebrated rock films ever made, D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (filmed in 1965 and released in 1967). It is probably as familiar to anyone reading this book as any other moment from the screen life of rock ’n’ roll. But within that memorable movie beginning lies another beginning, a new sound and attitude, as the singer, fed up with the demand that he somehow always be the Bob Dylan that his audience has come to expect, stands there not pretending (as you are supposed to do in the movies). As ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ clatters along, the sound of a rock ’n’ roll jalopy on bumpy ground, this is Bob Dylan playing himself: the film existing as evidence of how he was able to wipe out a version of himself that the public had until now carried in their minds.
Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1966) peels off lyric cards to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Allen Ginsberg stands to the left with Dylan’s road manager, Bob Neuwirth (out of shot), London 1965
Across the broad scope of many stylistic variations since its origins in the mid-twentieth century and through several distinct eras in its history, rock achieved its maximum intensity – although not always its greatest popularity – when it was at the point of some new beginning. In film, the image of these points in time, as they relate to rock’s performers and the wider society, is often crystallized into something akin to birth moments, as if rock ’n’ roll emerges as a fully blown self-generated phenomenon that takes shape in the form of particular individuals, or can be seen to permeate the culture and attitudes of particular times and places, always seemingly waiting to be found or discovered again in a new guise. But while undergoing changes as a musical form, rock has from the start always moved backwards and forwards in time, consuming its own past as it reaches to the future in search of new beginnings and the renewed spirit that marks another point of origin.
Rock ’n’ roll film has sometimes been associated most readily with films of the 1950s, perhaps because rock ’n’ roll itself – or certainly the use of that label – is often associated with that decade. But the earliest rock films showed nothing of what Don’t Look Back would introduce in the form of the artist as the author of their own often complex and contradictory public image. Instead, the 1950s films usually did little more than attempt to capture the excitement of the music or its performers at the peak of their popularity, when they would be able to help sell tickets to a picture show, and so some of the originators of rock ’n’ roll often appeared in what were more or less cameo roles, miming to hit songs. In this way, the early films in which rock ’n’ roll features reflect the fact that popular music itself was viewed as ephemeral, something to be milked to death for the few short months or years that its stars remained capable of capturing the imagination of a youthful audience; an audience of teenagers always likely to be diverted by the next thing that would come along. Aside from Elvis Presley – the only rocker to be the top-billed star of almost every movie he appeared in – the stars of the 1950s existed in a market-driven era when the commercial imperatives of TV and Hollywood determined how they would appear on screen. Because they did not control how their image was disseminated to the same extent as rock artists of the following decade and beyond, their ability to break out of the expectations of the age was very limited, almost non-existent.
And unlike those 1950s films that were made by the big Hollywood studios, Don’t Look Back was a low-budget production that initially found its audiences in the kind of theatres that were more used to showing nudie films; where the dark, cheap and grainy black-and-white look of Pennebaker’s movie was judged to be in keeping with what the people who frequented those cinemas might be willing to look at.
From the start, Dylan had concocted fanciful tales of his origins – something not exactly unusual in the entertainment business, where self-invention (even if it extended little further than assuming a new name) was as old as showbiz itself – and throughout his recording career he would shift and change styles, all the while remaining who he was. But in Don’t Look Back, he and Pennebaker – who could be described as Dylan’s co-conspirator, wielding his own jerry-built equipment to allow him to get close to his subject – were not only reinventing the rock film but inventing the idea of the rock star as the central figure in their own mythology, one in which the screen image became all-important. No rock film before had so revealingly gone behind the scenes and into the private world of a rock performer. And in the years ahead, American documentary film in the style of Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers and a few others would become a kind of template for capturing rock on screens, big and small.
And so, the post-1950s rock star, in control of their image and able to express themselves in the full range of their work in ways that were uncommon the decade before, was already in some sense acting. But the difference was that to succeed in rock – unlike acting in the movies – the trick was to play oneself. What, then, do more than five decades of rock on screen tell us about what happens when an artist in one medium moves into another? Equally, when taken as the expression of a wider culture that also grew into something socially transformative in a more lasting way, rock’s dependence on the visual – whether experienced in person or through the medium of screen culture – allowed it not only to be represented in film, TV and other media but to actively extend its own life: to, in a sense, play itself on screen.
We might wonder how something like rock ’n’ roll, which in its early years took form as throwaway teenage culture, managed to endure in the way it has, and what its life on screen can tell us about the many changes, or reinventions, it went through to survive for so long.
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