American Buffalo (Page 2)

In the studio, Buffalo Springfield grazed even more widely. They could unchain their pop imaginations and their record collections and run wild across an American landscape that had recently been opened wide by Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

When British rockers invaded the United States in 1964, they peddled reworked American r&b, rockabilly and other pop to American kids tired of saccharine hits by voiceless commercial fabrications named Bobby and Fabian--forerunners of today's teenypop idols. The Brits were especially good at recycling r&b hits by black artists, often invisible on the white-dominated pop charts of the time, into guitar-powered pop with Everly Brothers vocals. Far from the land where these forms were born, British kids heard them as a release from the boredom of homemade UK folk-revival offshoots like skiffle; they became building blocks to be played with as much as styles to be mimicked. It was the same energy that had led 1950s blue-collar Southern kids to refashion r&b and country into rockabilly in their back yards.

Eclectic, populist, postmodern--choose what terms you like--this was key to the 1960s transition of rock and roll into rock. The guitar, portable and cheap, made music-making widely available; garage bands were the ubiquitous result. As electric amplifiers became smaller and cheaper, even basement-bound guitarists could experiment with sound shaping--punching holes in a speaker to get fuzztone, loosening tubes for distortion, rolling the volume pots for violin effects. Early effects boxes for plugging into the signal chain started to appear. It was like getting a do-it-yourself art kit.

It was also an extension of America's postwar cultural renaissance. Whitman's heirs--jazz artists, the Beats, the Abstract Expressionists, the folk revivalists--all shared a romantic, if sometimes romantically cynical, critique of that hangover from the Great Depression and World War II, the gray-flannel 1950s. As counterweight they re-emphasized the value of play, long recognized as one of art's core cultural values; influenced by jazz improvisation and the civil rights movement, they revamped play into an artistic and a moral code. The subcultures of black America were valued even when they were misunderstood.

The romantic notion of authentic popular culture--a folk culture where there is minimal mediation between artists and audience--is an elusive grail. In modern commercial pop culture, that polarity is always in flux, but the folkie notion was a potent one during the 1960s. It was ironic that Bob Dylan, in a characteristic paradox, translated that model into both artistic and commercial success; inevitably, he was accused of selling out. And yet, armed with his nonvoice and limited guitar skills and panoramic musical taste and rapidly growing imagination, he personified the folk revival's longing for a popular hero who would forge a new sound and, incidentally, a new sense of community.

He had plenty to play with: Postwar America was full of new musical syntheses. Both jazz and folk musicians were interested in music from Africa and India, the Caribbean and Asia, for instance, as well as African-American gospel and blues. Thanks to the likes of Dylan and the Beatles, this legacy energized garage bands, crackling across the Anglo-American world, where forming a band became something countless thousands of kids did. Think of garage bands as the inheritors of the 1950s folk-revival aesthetic, and as the precursors of hip-hop: the street-level site where the reassimilation of pop culture becomes a feedback loop. In that sense, Buffalo Springfield was one of rock's ultimate garage bands.

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