A broken amplifier made the first fuzzy guitar
In March 1951 a band drove from Mississippi to Memphis to record a song called 'Rocket 88'. Somewhere on the road the guitar AMPLIFIER was damaged — accounts disagree about whether it fell off the car or got soaked in the rain — and it arrived with a torn speaker cone. Instead of calling the session off, the producer Sam Phillips stuffed the cone with paper and recorded it anyway. The buzzing, ripped-up sound is one of the earliest examples of DISTORTION on a record, and plenty of people call 'Rocket 88' the first rock and roll song.
The accident turned into a technique. Players learned to push an AMPLIFIER harder than it could handle on purpose, letting the sound break up into fuzz and FEEDBACK, and the ELECTRIC GUITAR went from a polite rhythm instrument to the loudest thing on STAGE.
A film, a DJ and a moral panic
The phrase 'rock and roll' had turned up in blues songs for years before the Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed started using it in the early 1950s as the name for the music he played. Then the film Blackboard Jungle opened in 1955 with Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' blaring over the credits, and there were reports of teenagers dancing in the aisles and tearing up cinema seats.
Newspapers were horrified, which made the music far more attractive to anyone under twenty. Being a REBEL was part of the deal from the start.
The duckwalk was a cover-up
Chuck Berry gave rock its guitar language, the fast two-note RIFF that hundreds of bands borrowed, and its most copied move. He said he used the duckwalk on stage to hide the creases in a rayon suit; the audience loved it, so it stayed. His songs set the subject matter too: cars, school, dancing and being young.
Another future star had already walked into Sam Phillips's Memphis studio. In 1953 a teenage Elvis Presley paid a few dollars to record a couple of songs there, and the tape led to a contract the following year.
Why amplifiers go up to eleven
In the 1984 comedy This Is Spinal Tap, a guitarist proudly explains that his AMPLIFIER is louder than everyone else's because the dials go up to eleven instead of stopping at ten. Asked why he doesn't simply make ten louder, he stares blankly and repeats that these go to eleven.
The joke escaped the film. 'Up to eleven' is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as a way of saying beyond the normal maximum, and a few amplifier makers have printed dials that really do go that far. It is a neat summary of rock and roll: the volume was always half the point, whether you were a ROADIE hauling speaker stacks across a TOUR or a fan in the CROWD losing your hearing to an ENCORE.
One rock song has left the solar system
In 1977 the American space agency attached a gold-plated record to each of the two Voyager spacecraft, carrying sounds and music from Earth in case anyone ever finds them. Among the classical pieces and folk songs from around the world sits a single rock and roll track: Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode'. Both probes have long since passed the planets and are still travelling, so if anyone out there ever works out how to play it, a GUITAR SOLO recorded in 1958 will be the first thing they hear.