Adversary and Other Jeremiads

Introduction

When it comes to the key events that helped to create the society that emerged in the American/Western World in the wake of the Second World War - arguably the most traumatic event in history - many would be inclined to cite the 1950s as the fulcrumic decade, and according to Charles Ealy, author of the article"Seeds of Change Sown in 1955", published in Nov. 2005 in The Dallas Morning News, that's especially true of its midpoint.

For all that, though, it's the mythic 1960s, with its Rock-Youth culture, and quasi-religious worship of sexual abandon and the use of mind-expanding drugs, that tends to be credited as the true decade of change, and with the reader's permission, I'd like to trace the evolution of the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, by briefly depicting the culture whence it sprang, and then - and at greater length - the decade that both preceded and birthed it, with special emphasis on its central year of '55.

Were they really so staid and conformist, those much treasured mom-and-apple-pie fifties? We've already established that they weren't, and that they didn't yield as if by magic to the wild, Dionysian 1960s...

The truth is that far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric, and what happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having "a bombastic atonality and dissonance" was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.

Moving to the totemic year of '55, I begin with a day marked by an event which had a colossal if still largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of American and Western culture, that being the 7th of October, on which five major 20th Century figures, namely, Elijah Muhammad, RD Laing, Ulrike Meinhof, Oliver North and Vladimir Putin, attained the ages of 58, 28, 21, 14 and 3 respectively.

It was on that day that - at San Franciso's Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street - about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder.

All went on to be leading artists of the Beat Generation, a term which first saw the light of day in a 1952 article entitled "This is the Beat Generation", written for the New York Times by John Clellon Holmes, author of the proto-Beat novel "Go" (1952). Holmes had allegedly coined the term following conversations he'd had with Jack Kerouac in 1948 with regard to the disillusioned generation that had emerged in America in the wake of the Second World War.

Kerouac the self-styled "shy Canuck" from Lowell, Massachusetts, also attended this epochal clarion cry to the counterculture, but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. However, his roman à clef "On the Road" (1957) which centres on the mid-century wanderings he undertook in America and Mexico - largely with his muse and close friend Neal Cassady - remains Beat's defining work.

After the reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
'55 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August of the year, Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bopwho went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
On the 30^th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.

However, Dean himself had been powerfully influenced by Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, arguably the two foremost pioneers of the Stanislavski Method within the Motion Picture industry, who'd honed their craft in the late '40s at the celebrated Actor's Studio in New York City. The screen personas of Clift, Brando and Dean, in which vulnerability and defiance were fused to luminously magnetic effect served as prototypes of the neurotic and narcissistic individualism that went on to exert such a seismic influence on the evolution of the sixties counterculture in era-defining movies such as George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun" (1951), Stanley Kramer's "The Wild One" (1953), and Elia Kazan's "East of Eden" (1954)

Their mixture of incandescent beauty and sullen defiance was hardly new though, having been a feature of Romantic rebels again and again at least since the heyday of Byron and Shelley; and it could be said that their true spiritual ancestor was none other than King David's much loved yet fatally rebellious son Absalom, of whom it was written in 2 Samuel 14:25: "But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him."

Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West. When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan.

As in Britain, so in the US, but given America's far greater size and complexity, the situation has of necessity been more extreme. Take a remarkable article written for the Fall/Autumn 1955 edition of the Trotskyist Fourth International entitled "Youth in a Delinquent Society":

Its author, one Joyce Cowley, was at pains to emphasize the general conformity of American youth in the mid 1950s, while also making it clear that cautious conservatism was far from being the total picture, and that there'd been a sharp rise in crime since the onset of the decade. She also stated something to the effect that the nature of the crimes committed during this period were of a shocking gravity that had been relatively uncommon in the US in more recent decades. To support her point, she alluded to various phenomena which are all too familiar to those of us who came to maturity in the 60s and beyond, including the abuse of narcotics, and acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence, from teen gang rumbles to the senseless sacrifice of innocents.

But does all this mean that civilisation, not just in the US and the West, but as a whole, is irrevocably doomed? Many Christians are indeed of the belief that these are the final days prior to the return of the Lord, of which He speaks in Matthew 24:37: "But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be."They may indeed be right, and there are many indications that this is the case. However, in the verse immediately preceding the one just quoted, Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to the precise day of the Second Coming, only God the Father knows: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."

Thence, it may well be that if the nations of the West return to the Judaeo-Christian values on which they were founded, not half-heartedly...but with the kind of uncompromising passion for God that provoked the great revivals of history, like prodigals, broken and contrite in spirit, our great civilisation may yet survive.

This essay was based on portions of the story, "The Gambolling Baby Boomer", chapter one of "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", and was composed in a spirit of truth and integrity to the best of my ability.

2. From Avant Garde to Global Village

Introduction

It could justifiably be stated that we are currently living in a Western World whose moral world view owes much to values which until recently were associated with progressives operating within the arts, politics, philosophy, religion etc., and that this morality remains more or less constant, affecting everything from top to bottom in our society, despite sporadic shifts of power from the political left to the right. At the same time, traditional morality - founded on the West's Judaeo-Christian heritage - is being increasingly seen as harsh and exclusivist, where once it held almost total sway.

In order to come to some sort of conclusion as to how this situation came about, as good a starting point as any would be the early 19^th Century, at a time when the Romantic Movement was birthing the concept of an artistic avant-garde on the cutting edge of innovation, not just in terms of creativity, but societal change.

Plausibly, the avant-garde worldviewwas the scion of a greater revolutionary spirit that had been impacting the West at least since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the great European move towards greater Rationalism regarding to the key issues of life. The Age of Reason began towards the end of the 18^th Century, lasting until about 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which was one if its earliest fruits.

Many theories exist as to what - or who - was the main driving force behind this spirit, but it's not the aim of this essay to attempt to unmask these, so much as to trace the course of the avant-garde throughout history, and so speculate on how so humble a tendency might ultimately have come to alter the entire fabric of Western civilisation through a process known as Modernism.

It may have been the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who, by asserting that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", was the first major artist to give expression to the concept of an avant-garde on the cutting edge of creative innovation. That said, the first actual use of the term in an artistic rather than military sense was probably made by the French socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon in 1825 in his "Opinions Opinions Littéraires, Philosophiques et Industrielles"(1).

Whatever the truth, it's a recent development, fostered by the early, and especially German and English, Romantics, whose influence on the development of the notion of the Artist as Rebel cannot be underestimated. Yet, it found its first spiritual home in post-revolutionary Paris...which begs the question, why Paris?

It's impossible to say for certain of course, but what is beyond dispute is that of all the nations of Europe, few could lay greater claim to national genius than France...and that this genius is most encapsulated in her ever-enchanting capital city.

More particularly, though, by the 1830s, and following a long series of national traumas including the Revolutionary War itself, Paris had become the leading world incubator of the most charismatic originality of thought and behaviour. It was a uniqueness, moreover, that has tended ever since to verge on the downright bizarre when manifested by her most gifted citizens, such as her celebrated poètes maudits (2), who have long been the ultimate apostles of the avant-garde.

It could be said that the first generation of these were numbered among the young men who - in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 - congregated about such wild and brilliant youthasPétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier, two writers of the so-called frenetic school of late Romantic writers. They did so with the purpose of enforcing the Romantic worldview in the face of widespread censure on the part of the despised respectable middle classes.

To the Gautier of the mid 1830s, this censure constituted a veritable Christian moral resurgence, which he rails against in the notorious preface to his 1836 novel "Mademoiselle de Maupin", the first known manifesto of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. Art in other words, as a religion in its own right.

These seminal avant-gardists have become known as the Bouzingos(3), although little distinguished them from the earlier Jeunes-France(4). They were originally members of a Romantic clique known as le Petit Cénacle (5) - allegedly founded by the sculptor Jehan du Seigneur, with Borel rapidly emerging as leader - whose role in the infamous Battle of Hernani at the Comédie Francaise theatre in February 1830 was paramount.

This took place on the opening night of Hugo's play, "Hernani", and was marked by violent scenes involving defenders of the Classical tradition, and Hugo's supporters, who flaunted long hair and flamboyant costumes in defiance of everything the former held dear . In addition to Gautier, Borel and Seigneur, they included Gérard de Nerval, Philothée O'Neddy and Augustus MacKeat, all of whom went on to be numbered among the Jeunes-France.

According to one theory, while the first Bouzingos were a band of political agitators who took part in the July Revolution in wide-brimmed leather hats, their artistic counterparts were wrongly named by the press following a night of riotous boozing which saw some of them end up in prison for the night. They too embraced radical political views, because for the most part, the artistic cutting edge has inclined to the left, while containing an ultra-conservative element.

Needless to say, perhaps, they owed an enormous debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, who did so much to promote the myth of the artist as tormented genius ever-existent on the fringes of respectable society, a Bohemian in others words. Akin to the Bohemian was the Dandy, and of the poètes maudits of mid 19^th Century Paris, several were both Bohemians and Dandies, depending on their circumstances at the time. They included Charles Baudelaire, whose essay "Le Dandy" (1863) is one of the defining works on the subject.

The great Parisian Bohemias of the 19th Century were the Left Bank of the Seine as a whole - including the Quartier Latin and Montparnasse - and Montmartre, which exploded on an international scale towards the century's end, while the first literary work to officially celebrate the Bohemian way of life was Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Bohème"(6) (1851). It went on to form the basis of Puccini's opera "La Bohème"(1896), and the contemporary musical comedy, "Rent" (1996). Later Bohemias included London's Chelsea, and New York's Greenwich Village, but Paris remains Bohemia's true and eternal spiritual capital.

The first waves of the avant-garde, and the Bohemias in which they thrived, ultimately produced the Decadent movement of the 1870s and '80s, anda multitude of minor sects, such as the Zutistes of the early '70s, which for a time included Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the later Hirsutes and Hydropathes, and finally, the great Symbolist Movement in the arts.

However, the spirit of the avant-garde could be said to have triumphed as never before in the shape of the massively influential and truly international artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Modernism.

In an artistic sense, she existed at her point of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930, producing such earth-shaking works as Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913), T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922). Mention must also be made of such Modernist schools as the previously mentioned Symbolism, as well as Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. It could be said that she represented the triumph of the avant-garde, anticipating her future at the very heart of the cultural mainstream.

Furthermore, whenever Modernism is discussed with regard to the arts, parallel iconoclastic developments by figures such as Marx in politics, Nietzsche in philosophy, Freud in psychology and Darwin in science must be taken into consideration. They all served to fuel the Modernist agenda, which - according to certain cultural critics - is intrinsically antichristian...and there is substance to their argument, although several major Modernist figures have been professing Christians.

Taking things further, it could be said that rather than emerging from the avant-garde, Modernism actually predated it, that is, as a spirit rather than a movement as such, having roots further back into the depths of Western history, beyond the Age of Reason, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity.

She seemed to undergo a falling away in terms of intensity in the years leading up to the Second World War, while the immediate post-war age brought renewed activity through the Existentialists and Lettrists of Paris, but more especially through the Beat Generation born in her new world epicentre of New York City.

Together, they helped to usher in what could be called an age of mass-modernism, although they weren't operating alone, because by the early '50s, the Modern had formed a strong alliance with the popular arts. In fact, this had occurred some half century earlier with the genesis of Pop Culture, which gave rise to the cinema, and one of the first true Pop music genres in the shape of Ragtime. However, these were minor developments in comparison to the cataclysmic events of the '60s.

The single most powerful weapon in the Modernist armoury has been Pop Culture, and in terms of its evolution, the influence of the Beat Generation was enormous. That is especially true of its role as the begetter of the Hippie uprising, which took place between about 1965, with San Francisco as its centrifugal city, and 1967 when it peaked, before ceding to the year of revolutions, which was 1968.

One of the keynotes of late Modernism and the social revolution it provoked, most notably in the 1960s, has been the progressive acceptance by mass culture of beliefs once seen as the preserve of Bohemians and avant-gardists, the most obvious being the so-called "free love" once promoted so forcefully by angel-faced atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

This process was considerably facilitated by the Rock revolution which, after having begun around 1955-'56, segued into the sentimental Pop music that reached its apogee with the Beatles. It then underwent a further quickening at the hands of harder, earthier bands such as those of the first British Blues boom , and so evolve into Rock pure and simple.

By the end of the '60s, Rock had become a truly versatile music, running the gamut from the most infantile hit parade ditties to musically and lyrically complex compositions owing as much to Classical music and Jazz as Rock and Roll. As such, it was an international language, with the power to disseminate values hostile to traditional Western morality as no other artistic movement before it, while the most powerful Rock stars attained - if only fleetingly - through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of.

Yet, as the ultimate manifestation of mass-modernism, Rock has not functioned alone; in fact, from the outset, it was impelled by the cinema of youthful discontent of the early 1950s, whose magnetic icons, including Monty Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, could be said to have been Rock stars before their time. Furthermore, as the Rock revolution proceeded apace throughout the '70s, it was buttressed and enabled by a cinema finally freed from the shackles of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had been in force since 1930 but which was finally jettisoned in 1967, after at least a decade of declining efficacy.

At some point, it seems that Modernism's unrelenting drive towards permanent societal change reached a logical conclusion. Indeed, once the classic values of the avant-garde had begun to wholly dominate the cultural mainstream, the West entered a Postmodern phase. When this occurred is open to conjecture, but 1980 has been put forward as a likely date. Certainly, after 1980, it became impossible for artists to épater le bourgeois(7)as they'd once done, and even when they strained to shock a public all but impervious to outrage, originality eluded them. Others have insisted Postmodernism began as early as 1950, on the eve of the television and Pop Music revolutions.

What is certain is that things have changed beyond all measure in the West in the last half century or so to the extent that in 2010, the age-old dream of political and artistic radicals, and their allies within the realms of religion, philosophy, psychology, science etc., of a world united by humanitarian values could be closer to becoming a reality than has ever been possible up to this point in time. In the meantime, the old world, the Judaeo-Christian one bound by love of God, love of country, and love of family, has to all intents and purposes been cast out into the wilderness, as if there can be no place for its ancient certainties in the paradise about to be born.

This essay was based on various other writings by myself, and was composed in a spirit of Christian truth to the best of my ability. Notes: 1) "Literary, Philosophical and Industrial Opinions" 2) Accursed Poets 3) Also known as Bousingos and Bousingots 4) Young- France 5) Little Cenacle 6) "Scenes of Bohemian Life" 7) Scandalise the Bourgeoisie.

3. Adversary: The Birth of the Beats

It would be false, indeed absurd, to suggest that the Counterculture of the 1960s was a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors. In fact, it was merely the latest in a long line of alternative societies that can be traced at least as far back as the 18th Century. In other words, by the time of the Hippie revolution, much of the groundwork had already been done, not least during the two immediate post-war decades.

During this brief 20-year period, the Existentialists, Lettrists and Beats became international icons of revolt... Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians or Teddy Boys...a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before, fuelling a desire among many young people to be identified as rebels and wild ones...and Rock and Roll took over the world with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar. But it was the Beats who were the true precursors of the Hippies...in fact it was in about 1965 that Beat started to imperceptibly mutate into the Hippie movement.

Few today are aware of the existence of the Lettrists, that scandalous band of avant garde agitators who thrived in post-war Paris under the leadership of Isidore Isou, but their contemporaries the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be the result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, but whatever the truth, the Lettrists have been all but forgotten while the Beats have never been hotter.

It had been been earlier in the decade...around 1943, in fact...that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around a brilliant angel-faced young Columbia University undergraduate by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg. Through Carr, Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg's own poetic vision.
Also through Carr, the bookish-looking poet met the boyfriend of future Beat biographer Edie Parker, who was another of Carr's Columbia friends. This was Jean-Jacques Kerouac, known as Jack.

Until recently, Kerouac, the self-styled "shy Canuck" from aclose-knit French Canadian family from Lowell, Massachusetts, had been a Football player of enormous promise, but soon after gaining a scholarship to Columbia, things had started to go awry for him. First, he cracked his tibia during a game, and then repeatedly clashed with the coach Lou Little whom he accused of benching him to excess. The upshot was that he left Columbia in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men - both through Lucien Carr - with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation, these being the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr's from St Louis, the patrician William Seward Burroughs.
In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement's undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel "On the Road", a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950 with his close friend Neil Cassady...famously named Dean Moriarty in the novel.

Cassady, who bore a striking resemblance to the iconic movie star Paul Newman, was the son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the early loss of his mother, a childhood spent on Denver's skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. Little wonder, therefore, that he served as muse to Kerouac who - from such a stable loving background himself - was the genius behind Beat's defining work, while Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence.
Oddly perhaps, Lucien Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of "The Alienist", "The Angel of Darkness"," Casing the Promised Land", "Killing Time"and "The Italian Secretary" among other works to be the novelist of the family...but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, "Lou was the glue" of the entire Beat Generation, itself

the most significant avant garde movement of the 20^th Century, as the primary impulse behind the '60s Counterculture.

It was in about '64 , in fact, that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement.

'64 was also the year the Beatles conquered America...but away from the mainstream, a certain Colorado farmer's son and former Stanford University student called Ken Kesey set off on his legendary cross-country trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Furthur, with one Neil Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merrie Pranksters. Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters' outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly.
The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there'd be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks - later the Grateful Dead - or Kesey's own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock.

Two years later, the Hippie, wild child of the Beat Generation, became an international media obsession, before setting about the piecemeal penetration of the mainstream

This slow co-option by the mainstream of the one-time values of the adversary culture could be said to be the ultimate triumph of the Beat Generation, and all the avant gardes that preceded her...but were Kerouac alive today...you can't help but think he might be weeping at the thought of it. Pauv' Ti Jean...

This essay was based on portions of a first draft of a piece entitled "The Riddle of the British English", and was composed in a spirit of Christian truth the best of my ability.

4. The Forbidding Entrance of Rock

It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zeppelin should emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session music scenes of the sixties, but then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole. What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origins in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement which took America and the world at large by storm in the late '60s and early '70s? That's not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to give it some sort of a go.
The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle. Widely believed to have begun life as a secularised version of the black Gospel music of the American south, with lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, they found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. They did so especially in the affluent south among men such as Brian Jones from the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Eric Clapton from Surbiton - via Ripley - in Surrey, and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.
However, it's not any of these superstars, but a Paris-born guitarist and pianist of Greek and Austrian ancestry who has been called the Founding Father of British Blues. Justifiably so, too, because possibly more than anyone, Alexis Korner was the incubator of the '60s Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement. He began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led ultimately to his forming the band Blues Incorporated in 1961, with singer Long John Baldry, harmonica player Cyril Davies, guitarist Jack Bruce, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and drummer Charlie Watts.

In addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock stars who were drawn to Korner's regular Rythym and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early '60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.

Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones' first choice as vocalist for his band the Rollin' Stones, but he turned him down in the belief that the Blues had no future. He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for Manfred Mann, one of the first wave of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success, along with the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Spencer Davis Group, the Yardbirds etc. He became a born again Christian in the mid 1980s, after having been invited to an event featuring Brazilian evangelist Luis Palau by fellow former teen idol, Cliff Richard.
However, the British Rock explosion was not just fuelled by the Blues, because by the early '60s, an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Soul and even traditional Classic Pop had emerged from several British cities most notably the tough industrial towns of Liverpool and Birmingham, before going on to take the UK charts by storm. It was the sound of Beat, and no band incarnated it to quite the same degree as the Beatles.
That said, to further confuse matters, the term Beat - or rather Big Beat - had been used to describe a music genre as early as 1961 by the writer Royston Ellis, a close friend of John Lennon's due to their shared appreciation of the Beat poets. In Ellis's book "The Big Beat Scene", the term Beat is used to describe the music of the first British Pop stars to emerge in the wake of the Rock revolution, such as Billy Fury, Joe Brown, Marty Wilde et al, as well as a host of lesser known ones. But then Rock is also used as an abbreviation for Rock and Roll in the selfsame book.
The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is debatable, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. Yet, they themselves resisted being typecast as mere Pop, and could be said to have ultimately promoted a type of Rock with Pop elements which was yet no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Rolling Stones. The overwhelming melodiousness of their classic period of 1964-'69 was founded on a vast variety of genres including Classical music, Folk, Classic Pop, Country and Western, Rock and Roll, Soul and Motown, and even the Blues, leading one to conclude that largely through the Beatles, Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, a veritable Babel of musical styles.
During their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer, and that includes the Rolling Stones, whose early style was far more rooted in the Delta and Chicago Blues than that of the Beatles, which was lighter, or Poppier. The Stones' uncompromisingly primal rhythmic proto-Rock went on to form the basis of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, and yet even these have to a greater or lesser extent benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the Beatles. That's not to say, however, that the Beatles introduced melody into Rock and Roll, because it already existed by the time they had their first hit single in 1962.
One of its chief sources was the Brill Building Sound, which thrived in that brief period between Elvis's induction into the US Army and the onset of Beatlemania. During this interregnum, the music's initial threat was neutralised by its co-option by teenage idols on both sides of the Atlantic, who while heavily influenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on the moral establishment. It was named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed and which since the '30s had been a centre for Pop music, a term allegedly coined as early as 1926.

Brill Building could be described as traditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution, and so partaking of Rock rhythms as much as the sophisticated songwriting techniques of the Classic, which is to say pre-Rock, Pop of the Great American Songbook. It exerted a colossal if largely unsung influence on the evolution of Pop in the sixties. As if to confirm this fact, the Beatles, the greatest of the sixties groups, covered songs by Brill Building composers Goffin and King, and Bacharach and David, in the early, more wholesome phase of their career.
While the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by the totemic year of 1966, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group, thanks less to their music than to their lyrics, which had started to acquire a marked intellectual dimension. This was in no small part attributable to the influence of Bob Dylan, a consciously intellectual figure who in the fallow years that immediately preceded the British Invasion had mined the ancient American art of Folk Music for inspiration, thereby gaining an international reputation as a poet-minstrel in the Protest tradition. Pop as a whole had acquired a gravitas by the mid 1960s which was jarringly at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles and other bands within the outdated Beat genre.
This was as a result not just of Dylan's influence as the first great poet of Rock, but both an increasing melodic complexity on one hand, and an increasing spiritual darkness on the other. While the Beatles led the field in terms of the former, the latter arose as I see it from the growing pre-eminence of harder, more forbidding acts such as the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds and the Troggs. The term Rock was somehow perfect in describing the way out music they made, although when this moved in to supplant Pop as the favoured term for hard-rocking guitar music it's impossible to say.

One thing is certain...as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. I'd go so far as to say that it was a way of life almost from the outset, a philosophy, even a religion...one of whose prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian moral values of the West. Could this be the reason - or at least one of the reasons - why the US and Britain came to be its spiritual homelands, given that these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity?

Who can say for sure; but whatever the truth, Rock is clearly more than just another form of Pop, despite having been inextricably linked to pop culture since its birth, in much the same way as Jazz once was; and while it has very little ability left to shock, its impact has been so immense, that in the last half century or more, Western society has been altered beyond all recognition by the rebel spirit of Rock; and the sexual and social upheavals it led for so long.

This essay was based on portions of a later draft of "The Riddle of the British English", and was composed in a spirit of Christian truth to the best of my ability.

5. Weimar Shadow of Future Things

Introduction

Many cultures have made monumental contributions to the development of our great Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation, not least that of Germany, one of the most purely artistic, poetic, musical and spiritual nations in modern history. Yet it could be said that the greatest and most blessed nations are those most liable to decadence, a word which seems to seems to suggest both moral decline and a dark, sinister glamour; and few societies have been more associated with this latter quality than that of Germany between the wars, and that's especially true of its then capital city of Berlin.
The Weimar era, which came into being in 1919 and lasted until Hitler's ascent to the Chancellorship in 1933, has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West

Indeed, it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosses' superb movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical "Cabaret", itself a descendant of one of Christopher Isherwood's two Berlin stories, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier.
Needless to say, the Weimar era was no isolated historical instance of a society in decline, having been significantly shaped by the culture which birthed it.

Germany was of course the birthplace of Luther and the Great Protestant Reformation that has exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity. At the same time, by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919, it had long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas .

For example, more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Germany had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival and of all its great nations, it was arguably Germany that had been most affected by this, even more so perhaps than France and Britain, and to the obvious detriment of Biblical Christianity, even while modernity thrived.
Thence, the legendary hedonism of the so-called Golden Twenties could be said to have arisen as much - if not more - from her spiritual legacy as the more immediate source of a long and terrible war and its aftermath, but it's this latter that we turn to now.

Despite the fact that the bona fide Weimar era was set to dawn in all its gaudy decadent glory in early 1923, Germany was yet a terribly ravaged and traumatised land as a result of a long series of crises leading back to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm III and military defeat in the First World War.
Following on from the armistice, she was subject to still more bloody conflict in the shape of the German Revolution, which culminated in the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, during which the Spartacist League and other leftist factions rose up in revolt in Berlin, only to be put down by paramilitary Freikorps consisting of volunteer soldiers, many of them on the extreme right.
The liberal democratic Weimar Republic was established soon afterwards, but Germany's post-war miseries had only just begun. During the debates in Weimar, A Soviet Republic was declared in Munich which was crushed by the Freikorps, resulting in the proliferation of far right movements throughout Bavaria. One of these was the German Worker's Party, and several of its key founding members went on to exert a powerful influence on a young war hero by the name of Corporal Adolf Hitler with their shadowy brand of nationalism.
To further compound the nation's woes, The Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919. Of its many provisions, one of the most vital required her to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and so to agree to drastic military restrictions, as well as a good many territorial concessions including the surrendering of all her overseas colonies. She also had to pay heavy war reparations, the total cost of which came to 132 billion marks, or £6.6 billion.
The following month, while still in the army, Hitler was sent as a police spy by German Army Intelligence to infiltrate the ranks of the previously mentioned German Worker's party in the mistaken belief that it was Socialist in ideology.
The German currency was relatively stable during the first half of this year, but May brought the harsh London Ultimatum, which demanded reparations paid in gold or foreign currency, as well as 26% of the value of Germany's foreign exports. Hyper-inflation followed soon afterwards, which resulted in the Mark becoming all but worthless. By January 1923, defaults on payments had grown so serious that French and Belgian forces felt compelled to invade the heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley close to the Franco-German border, where they set about securing reparations in the shape of coal and other commodities.
Many Germans, including skilled workers, started working for the bare minimum necessary for the sustenance of life, as the nation started to become increasingly afflicted by unemployment, poverty, hunger, and even malnutrition, leading to widespread bitter unrest and resentment, one of whose expressions was the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923. This was an attempt by Hitler's National German Workers Party, including paramilitary storm troopers under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, as well as future leading Nazis, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg, at a revolution modelled on the Fascist March on Rome of the previous October. Of all the putschists, it was World War I hero General Ludendorff who demonstrated the greatest courage under fire, but he was to subsequently disown Hitler. As to the latter, he spent just a little over a month in Landsberg Prison after the putsch was decisively put down by the Army, where he dictated his memoirs, "Mein Kampf" to his friend and fellow inmate Rudolf Hess.
Somehow, however, total economic collapse was halted under the chancellorship of Gustav Streseman - who was both charismatic and democratic, at a time when such politicians were in desperate need in Germany - by the replacement of the worthless Papiermark with the new Rentenmark, which was introduced on the 19th of November 1923. Streseman had earlier sought peace with Germany's enemies by calling off all passive resistance of striking German workers in the Ruhr Valley, an act which while having a beneficial effect on the economy, served also to fan the flames of nationalist rage. Millions of middle class Germans had been left ruined and embittered by the period of hyperinflation, with the result that they became susceptible to extreme right wing propaganda, while many workers turned to Communism.
For the time being, though, Germany - and specifically Berlin - became the supreme world epicentre of Modernism, of creative and intellectual foment not just in the fields of literature, architecture, music, dance, drama, cinema, and the visual arts, but of science as well. While she'd been a cradle of the Modern Impulse for centuries - a distinction she shared with several other Western nations including her closest European intimates, France and Britain - it could be argued that never before had she been quite so fiercely inclined in a cultural sense towards the radical and left-leaning, the experimental, the iconoclastic, the frankly scandalous, nor on so large a scale, as in the Weimar era.
Artistic innovation wildly thrived in Berlin in the years 1924-'29 in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek" (1925), as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis" (1927), the spectacles of cabaret queen Anita Berber and her enigmatic companion Sebastian Droste, and so on. The same applies to that lost city's notorious sexual liberalism, which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of her cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated.

So much of what has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-decade, from the philosophies that have dominated our academia for decades, such as Critical Theory and Deconstruction, all the way to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music pre-existed in some form in the Golden Twenties. But beneath the glittering carapace she carried within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judaeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society.

Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Great Depression, the ineffable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the dawning of the Rock and Roll era with its quasi-religious exaltation of youth...rebellion...sexual libertinism... and the universal use of mind expanding drugs.

Since the inception of this Social Revolution, many of its core values have supplanted the old traditional Judaeo-Christian - once damned as Bourgeois by artistic and political rebels - within the Western cultural mainstream. For some this might beg the question: Could a time be coming when the disasters that befell the once glorious Weimar Republic will appear to those of us still alive in the contemporary West to be little more than a dress rehearsal in comparison? For my part, I hope this will not be case, but needless to say the future's not in my hands.

This essay was based on portions of the story "The Triumph of Decadence", chapter two of "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", and was composed in a spirit of Christian truth to the best of my ability.

6. Rebels of Glam, Rebels of Punk

1973 was the year in which Glam became a national craze throughout Britain and other Western countries.

Effectively there were two major strands of Glam in the hay day years of 1971-'74, one being allied to the serious, nay consciously artistic, Rock tradition, the other, to the more commercial end of the music...pure Pop in other words. Among those British acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie and Roxy Music, and at a later date, Cockney Rebel, Queen and Sparks, while those who were more Pop-oriented included T.Rex, the Sweet, Slade, Wizzard and Gary Glitter. Foremost among US Glam Rockers were Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jobriath and the New York Dolls, while many other American musicians were touched by it, including Aerosmith and Kiss, and singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, who is a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of them all.

In Britain, Glam had been carried into the Pop mainstream as early as 1970 by T.Rex's Marc Bolan, born to a working class Jewish couple, Simeon and Phyllis Feld, in 1947 in Hackney Hospital, East London.

Bolan had been featured in 1962 in a magazine called "Town", as one of the Faces, or leading Mods of Stamford Hill to the north east of the city, although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown near the pleasant and affluent suburb of Wimbledon.

He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London's Hippie underground centred on Ladbroke Grove. In 1970, though, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan's love of old-time Rock and Roll.

Soon afterwards, Bolan shortened the name of the band to T.Rex, and they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of "Ride a White Swan". By the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, and Bolan, the biggest British teen sensation since the heyday of Beatlemania. The Bolan phenomenon was dubbed TRextasy by the British press, while Bolan's startlingly pretty face adorned the walls of teenage bedrooms all throughout the land.

In truth, though, extreme androgyny had been a major feature of Rock music all throughout its history, notably through acts and artists as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper and the Stooges, who were among the foremost pioneers of Glam Rock.

However, it could be said that its true founding father had been Rhythm and Blues shouter Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard. After all when it comes to Rock and Roll, everything can be traced back to the early days and beyond that to the Blues themselves.

As a boy, Richard attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sang Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers, his favourite singers being Gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He joined Sister Rosetta onstage in Macon at the age of 13, in 1945 after she heard him singing before the concert. What's more, he had serious ambitions of becoming a preacher.

By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. Around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style.

Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect. Real success came for Richard in 1955 with "Tutti Frutti",which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he'd quit the business and returned to his faith.

Few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as he has been. He has been quoted as saying that "Rock and Roll is driving people from Christ", and that he himself "was directed and commanded by another power" at the height of his influence as a Rock and Roll star, and which he has identified as "a power of darkness". But the darkness of Glam was as nothing in comparison to that which succeeded it.

By the end of '73, the first wave of Glam had all but dispersed, although it was to experience repeated periodic revivals, notably in the '80s through the New Romantic movement in the UK, and the Glam Metal scene in the US. It still exists to some degree...yet with its power to shock effectively reduced to nothing, such is the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage.

Within three years, it had been supplanted by a movement which, if it were at all possible, was even more outrageous, and this was Punk.

Punk's origins lay in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s, who attempted to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, such as the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Troggs and the Pretty Things, who were themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant that exerted the greatest influence on the British Punk uprising...easily the most momentous of them all...and largely through the influence of a brilliant young London entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren.

McLaren, whose Jewish mother had owned a shmattefactory in London's East End was a former art student turned boutique owner, who by early 1972 was selling '50s style clothing - among other items - designed by his then partner Vivienne Westwood through an outlet at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea, which he'd named Let it Rock. It exists to this day as part of Dame Vivienne's global fashion empire as World's End, which it was renamed in late 1980.

In the late 1960s, he'd been drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fomenting the '68 riots, themselves offshoots of the post-war Lettrists, who were very much precursors of the British Punk variant. He brought them to bear as he set about developing the Punk look in mid '70s London.

In 1975 he became the manager of the disintegrating US Glam band the New York Dolls, designing red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, which proved a disastrous move, and they split up soon afterwards.

Yet, while in NYC, he came across a fledgling Punk outfit by the name of the Neon Boys, featuring two young former Sandford Preparatory students by the name of Tom Verlaine - named after the French Symbolist poet Paul - and Richard Hell... born Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers in Morristown, NJ. and Lexington, Ky. respectively.

He was especially impressed by Hell's unique image of spiky hair - allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by Etienne Carjat - and torn tee-shirt held together with safety pins. He attempted to persuade Hell to return with him to London, but the poet and musician demurred, so McLaren returned alone in mid '75.

Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique Sex and set himself up as the manager of a group known as the Strand, after "Do the Strand" by Roxy Music. The Strand had originally been formed by three working class denizens of the Hammersmith - Shepherds Bush - Acton area of West London, allegedly at the urging of guitarist Warwick "Wally" Nightingale.

Mclaren agreed to be their manager only on the condition that founder member Wally - deemed "too nice" by the entrepreneur - be ejected from the band, and so he was. Then, when a charismatic young London Irishman by the name of Johnny Rotten - born John Lydon in Finsbury Park, N4 - came onboard as lead singer, and the band was renamed the Sex Pistols, they were set to spearhead the most infamous of Punk's many strains...the British one.

From its London axis, Punk spread like a raging plague throughout '77, even infecting the most genteel English suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.

It was genuinely dangerous to dress like a Punk in that landmark year; and if you chose to do so, you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.

The truth is that Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. This explains the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the general public. It could be said, therefore, that Punks were the avant-garde of the new Britain in a way that would be inconceivable today.

Today in Britain as well as every other nation on earth, aspects of the Punk revolution can be seen and heard at any time by anyone of any age on the internet, where they exist as minor elements of the teeming Babel that is the entertainment industry, provoking no more resistance from an exhausted culture than old film footage of Sesame Street.

This essay was based on portions of "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child" and various other writings, was composed in a spirit of Christian truth to the best of my ability