But the most intriguing power of this bright and fascinating book is therealization that popular music history, for the most part, is founded onrecordings and not on street-corner performers who are often written out of thestory altogether. Is it possible that playing live, and on the street, resultsin a counter-popular-music canon? Sometimes these singers and their songs makeit to the world of recording, and their street days become a back story.Fletcher makes the case for an alternative history of popular music based onlive performance.
On April 16, 1962, just after the release of his debut album, Bob Dylanintroduced a new song in the basement of Gerde's Folk City,“Blowin' in the Wind.” It “was met by stunned silence.” Then and there, live,the whole world of pop music changed. Dylan's next few albums transformed theprocess of making records, with studio sessions conducted as though in a smallbasement with nobody in chargeor on the corner with everyone's friends incharge, behaving as they would in the streets and small clubs of New York. This is howthe six-minute “Like a Rolling Stone” got recorded, breaking all the rules ofnarrative and length for singles. There were co-conspirators present and a realaudience.
Fletcher documents all this, and much more, on the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1960s where the starting point for manyrecording artists began in spontaneous, live music. “The only pop culture thatseemed not to have an impact on the Village scene was rock 'n' roll. A musicthat had changed the entire national status quo in the mid-1950s,” Fletcherwrites, “seemed somehow to have met a blockade at the metaphorical gates of Greenwich Village.” They played folk music instead “andgiven the see-through vapidity…as heard through prepackaged Philadelphia teen idols, the young Villageintelligentsia had every reason to believe that folk music was in fact the truerebel yell.”
Live music was a community of players that ultimately gainedinternational prominence because these rebels stuck to their acoustic guitars,banjos and early American songs. Eventually, they recreated pop musicaltogether. However, the most essential element here is that the line had beenheld primarily through live music, not records.
Fletcher perceives music as cultural history. His research is impeccableand adds up to an understanding of how urgent it is for critics and historiansto listen beyond records to hear how powerful music is when it wafts in throughyour window and not out of your radio, plugged into a system that pre-selects.Fletcher expands the accepted version of how music becomes popular.
From the first crooners to the initial rappers, with punk in between andjazz all around, All Hopped Upclearly demonstrates the importance of music first heard on the streets of New York. From thiscomes a realization: Listen to what is coming from your neighbor's basement andavoid halftime at the Super Bowl. The elders need to get out of the way. Theytake up too much sonic space. They have too much product. They are not liveanymore. That they once were is the story, but all stories require properendings and not necessarily sequels. What's next can be heard on your block,Fletcher might say, and, indeed, does say regarding New York. Get out of the new way if youcannot lend a hand.
