I love early rock as much as I love current rock (and more than everything in between) and it is depressing that this vibrant, deeply alive sound is left to archivists and PJ Harvey. Who takes the time to quote Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” only to have the reference ignored by all and sundry.
Ignore Eddie Cochran at your own risk.
Look at it this way: rock and roll is the province of teenagers and therefore the province of tainted innocents and folks like Eddie Cochran were the perfect purveyors of a sort of unknown future we don’t have today.
If you listen to Care Bears On Fire, you know they’ve heard early punk and the riot grrls, etc. But you don’t know if they’ve heard “Summertime Blues”, or “Be Bop A Lula” or “Almost Grown”.
It’s as if there is too much history and all tthat wonderful stuff at the start, when it was all teens in cars, at parties, dancing, playing: living a dream of youth, got lost in the shuffle somewhere.
Paul Simon quoted Gene Vincent in “The Afterlife” (his first words to God), but even the people who recognized the quote thought it was Presley (who covered “Be Bop – A-Lula”). Ian Dury wrote “Sweet Gene Vincent” in the 1970s. But that was a long time ago. How can somebody who wrote a lyric as perfectly attuned to your ear as “Be Bop A Lula, she’s my baby”? Is there really ANYTHING ELSE that needs to be added?
I am as far from a luddite as you can imagine. I am a futurist. I wish I was born 100, 500, years from now so I could have all the music I will miss by dying.
And I don’t suffer from nostalgia except for very, very specific personal stuff.
But I wish Mary Magpie, even Helen Bach, had what I had. I wish they grew up in the heart of rock and roll, able to listen to it organically from, say “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”” to “She Loves You”.
It is as if the Beatles stopped rock and roll so dead in its tracks we can’t rewind to the joyful innocence of the starting beginning.
And I wish Care Bears would listen to Eddie Cochran.
I wish Mary would take a step back to the beginning and exert her will upon a musical innocence that, at least as an American, is her birth right.
On April 16th, 1960, Gene, tax exiled to the UK, was in a car accident that killed Eddie Cochran. A little more than a year after Buddy Holly’s early death.
Gene was seriously injured and had a limp for the rest of his life. He died in 1971 at the age of 36.
Below you can see Eddie Cochran with all the beauty and power and cockiness of youth: “Who cares?” he says after worrying about being grounded… “C’mon everybody”
The music lives on if we let it.
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