It’s been a few weeks (end-of-the-semester busyness), but I’ll try to finish off this 2023 look at my father’s two public-access TV shows in their 50th anniversary year (well, for the first one, Man and His Music; the second one, at which we are currently looking, Pop Music, U.S.A., debuted in 1974, but we’re celebrating a year early for the sake of continuity).  To recap briefly, Man and His Music was distilled from Dad’s music appreciation class at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music; Pop Music, U.S.A. featured material he covered in his equally popular history of jazz and pop class.  Both of them featured class sizes of well over 200, with the former, his bread and butter, logging as many as 600 students per term in his/its heyday.

It’s a bit presumptuous, academically speaking, to try to cover a subject historically that’s only 20 years old (1954 being an arbitrary birth-of-rock-and-roll year selected because in July of that year, Elvis recorded “That’s All Right, Mama,” sending his career into orbit and paving the way for so much that followed), but that’s what Dad tried to do with rock and roll in this episode.  In 1974 we had not yet had punk, the commercially popular slice of funk, disco, New Wave, or MTV (let alone grunge, electronica, rap, EDM, and a host of others), and we only had the initial stirrings of glam, the singer-songwriters, and Philly Soul.  But what was out there and discernible, Dad discussed in his usual manner, with looks at the socio-cultural and psycho-emotional overarching frameworks that help inform rock and roll.  And, in this episode, we get Dad the showman, not once but twice, first, in the cold opening, as a Wolfman Jack-type DJ holed up in some kind of ramshackle broadcast studio just out of reach of the FCC; second, as a Jerry Lee Lewis clone playing a spirited version of Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock.”  I hope you enjoy episode 8 of Pop Music, U.S.A.