EVER since Rob Reiner put on his cheesiest grin.and introduced This ii Spinal Tap as not so much a documentary as a rockumentary", it's been difficult to take films about rock music seriously. Dancing in the Street, a 10 part, £5 million series, starting tonight on BBC 2, aims to change all that. With over 200 interviews with musicians and producers, the co-production with WGBH Boston claims to be "the definitive history of rock `a' roll" from jive to rave.
The birth date of rock `n' roll is a subject of some dispute among those who care about such things but 1956 is the year chosen by series producer Hugh Thomson as the moment when electrified rhythm and blues started seriously crossing over into the (white) mainstream. The term "rock and roll", from the black slang for making love, was coined by the white disc jockey Alan Freed to describe the new, overtly sexual music which struck terror into the heart of god fearing parents across America. There wasn't much doubt what Little Richard was on about in Tutti Frutti when he screamed "Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!" to an audience of ecstatic white teenagers.
Tutti Frutti was re-recorded in a pasteurised version by every mother's darling, Pat Boone, but Richard had already infiltrated the adolescent subconscious of the American nation. "They put Pat Boone on top of the bed, they put me in the drawer but I was still in the house," he says in tonight's programme, Whole Lotta Shakin'. Over the years, though, it's been the Pat Boones of each generation who have reaped the biggest profits.
You don't hear black musicians talking very much about "rock". For 30 years the word has conjured up images of pimply white boys with attitude problems or Spandex clad axe men with big hair. But, from the Mississippi Delta to the streets of South Central LA, the history of innovation in modern popular music has been predominantly black, and this is reflected more than usual in the new series, with programmes dedicated to sixties soul, seventies funk and eighties hip hop.
While Whole Lotta Shakin' examines the early years of the mid fifties and programme two looks at the manufactured groups of the early sixties, like the Beach Boys and the Ronettes, from there on things get more fractured and less chronological. There are programmes devoted to folk rock and the British Invasion, white r `a' b acts like The Rolling Stones and The Animals, the sounds of Stax and Motown, the psychedelic era, the excesses of the early seventies, the advent of punk and reggae and the dance music of the last 10 years.
Rock history can be a pretty Stalinist business, with embarrassing incidents air brushed out of existence, like the aberrations of a teenage record collection, consigned to the second hand bargain bin. Thus, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed loom large in this official chronology but there's not much sign of their contemporaries Yes or Jethro Tull, much less Abba or Gary Glitter, even though all these acts sold a lot more records at the time than the two Godfathers of Punk. The twin poles of Pop and Prog Rock are largely ignored in favour of a faintly spurious unifying theory. Perhaps Dancing in the Street should be subtitled A History of Rock and Roll by a Mildly Hip, Thirtysomething Englishman. The kind of poisonous record collection described with such horror in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (Tina Turner, Dire Straits, Meat Loaf etc) is unlikely to feature much here.
ONE of the difficulties in attempting a definitive history of rock music is that, more often than not, the really interesting stuff is happening on the margins, listened to by only a self consciously small minority. The exception is the sixties. The series devotes one programme to the fifties, five to the sixties, three to the seventies and one to the last is years. Whether this confirms baby boomers' belief that things were better in their day, or is just another example of the conservatism of the Classic Hits mentality is open to question (the fact that the programme is a co-production with American PBS television probably accounts for some of that conservatism). But, given that the most youth obsessed art form ever is wallowing in nostalgia and shambling towards old age (two of the musicians featured, Jerry Garcia and Mick Ronson, have died since they were interviewed for the series), it's probably time to turn it into a historical artefact. These days, it's a non smoking area and please don't step on or photograph the blue suede shoes.
