THE WORLD OF ROCK

The people who buy rock records have a lot of money to spend (just look at how many of the top twenty albums on the charts are rock, and not just rock, but rock with pretensions of being “good” rock) and for many of them, their interest in the music goes far deeper than just something to listen to while driving to Ann Arbor.

There has almost from the beginning been a large market for publications dealing with rock — at first, fan magazines like 16, Go Magazine, and Rave, but now with Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone and Creem, the serious criticism of rock music has become a commercial reality. Now the time has come for books which at least have pretensions of presenting a serious analysis of rock music. But, pretensions are about all that The World of Rock has.

Gabree seems to have earned his credentials as a rock expert on the basis of a very negative article on the Beatles in Cheetah magazine last winter. This article had originally been published in Downbeat, and had received so much negative response that Gabree almost totally changed the point of focus from Sgt. Pepper in the Downbeat version to Magical Mystery Tour, in Cheetah. Even with these changes, the negative response was tremendous, and Robert Christian, who was then Cheetah’s film critic and has since become Esquire’s pop music critic, wrote an answer which appeared two issues later. The Beatles article is Chapter 1 of The World of Rock, and it’s easily the high point of the book.

From then on we find “dozens of photos,” an accurate, but far too incomplete to be interesting, history of rock, with phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs quoted (with permission but without specific credit) directly from reviews that appeared in Eye, Downbeat, and Pop Scene Syndicate. After advancing the idea that the music was far more important that the number of people who buy the record in cutting down the most popular group of all time, he even had some nasties to say about record companies who spend lots of money promoting underground acts with limited sales appeal over groups like the Union Gap, who consistently make the charts.

There definitely exists a market for meaningful criticism of rock. Crawdaddy has gone over the deep end of intellectualism and has become extremely boring, and Rolling Stone has been focusing far more on the scene than on the music which is good, but leaves a definite gap. If someone were to write a book that filled this gap, it would be an instant best-seller. But when a writer, whatever his intentions, can’t decide whether he, or the people who read him are really the critics; and has to use other people’s lines, second rate photos, and a few hours of research to stretch an interesting article into a hype like The World of Rock, he deserves little attention for his opinions.