Merry Christmas! I hope you had a wonderful day yesterday and are enjoying the second day of Christmas, you and your two turtledoves.

We wrap up this 50th anniversary celebration of Man and His Music and Pop Music, U.S.A. with this week’s and next week’s posts. (See the 18 previous related posts for more of the back story.) Dad covers the second half of rock in today’s episode. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, to make any kind of historically valid claims about a medium that was, at the time of the show’s airing in 1974, merely 20 years old shows an impressive bit of scholarly chutzpah, and one certainly runs the risk of proffering flat-out wrong assessments in an exercise like this. That said, Dad pretty much nailed it when he claimed The Beatles would leave an indelible mark on rock and roll; the fact that I received a copy of Paul McCartney’s mammoth collection of his lyrics, with commentary and a slew of vintage photos, for Christmas this year, 60 years after the British Invasion and 50 years after this episode was filmed, serves as ample testimony. I give him a B for his prognostications re: Elvis and The Rolling Stones (more-or-less accurate for some aspects of their careers). His only flat-out miss (correctly predicted by his guest, rock critic Jim Knippenberg) was re: Dylan. Still, that averages out to a solid B, not bad for an academic at that time, especially one raised on the big bands and bebop.

Episode 9 begins with my favorite of all Dad’s cold openings, a send-up of the ubiquitous announcements scenes shown in the Woodstock documentary, released a few years before this show was recorded. Dad does a great Chip Monck (yes, that really was his name) and captures the spirit of the festival beautifully. Other moments worthy of note: 1) Dad’s acknowledging The Beatles’ groundbreaking work in the studio (most famously with Sgt. Pepper but in evidence well before and after that seminal album’s release in 1967); 2) his summary of the acid-rock concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore West: “They must have made the Roman orgies look like a Sunday School class”; and 3) his labeling Janis Joplin “the Judy Garland of the Flower Generation.” The show closes with two songs from a bizarre group called David Hirschberg’s Circus & Bar Mitzvah Band, whom Dad cites as an example of the burgeoning rock-theater movement–another spot-on assertion given where glam and prog rock had been up to that point and where they would continue to go for a few more years. 

I hope you enjoy this look at the rock music, capturing, roughly, 1964-1974.