Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977

Wynonie Harris's 1948 hit, ""Good Rockin' Tonight,"" popularized the term ""rock"" but was confined to Billboard's ""race"" charts and never crossed over to the larger white audience (though a contemporary African-American performer, Louis Jordan, sold millions of singles). The reason, according to Miller (a 1994 NBCC finalist for The Passion of Michel Foucault), is that ""rockin'"" wasn't merely teenage slang for ""having a good time""; it meant ""having sex."" For Miller, rock and roll's development is best understood as a succession of such contradictions, not as a smooth and continuous progression. Crisply written and carefully contextualized, Miller's story takes into account both the technological and social forces that helped cement rock's position in Western popular culture. In Miller's view, Leo Fender's invention of the solid-body electric guitar and the adolescent restlessness of the baby boom generation played equally important roles. While many of the pivotal moments Miller cites are perhaps too obvious--Elvis Presley's first visit to Sam Philips's Sun recording studios, Brian Epstein's discovery of the Beatles at the Cavern, Bob Dylan's electric set at Newport--there are plenty of less celebrated happenings and characters to keep even the most jaded rock critic turning pages. (The white R&B songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller--who wrote ""Kansas City""--loom almost as large here as Lennon and McCartney.) Particularly refreshing is Miller's attention to the place of such movies as Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle and Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come in the development of rock. The portentous subtitle of the book points to rock's ""fall""; in Miller's view, this is part and parcel of its cultural acceptability, which has robbed the music of its original revolutionary energy. For him, the genre's bestselling album, Michael Jackson's Thriller, was possible only after the original thrill of rock and roll was gone. Photos. (Aug.)