The Payola Scandal: Bob Dylan explains how “racial prejudice” killed rock ‘n’ roll
Contrary to what we might think in retrospect, Bob Dylan was never the most popular of artists in the 1960s. This is evidenced by the fact that his record that changed the world, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, reached a disappointing 22 in the US charts. Mostly this is because he refused to play ball with the mechanisms behind popularity. For instance, in the early days, he was considered a word-of-mouth artist whose record sales far outstripped his coverage mainly because most of his tracks exceeded the three-minute mark.
Many of the hit songs from the mid-1950s up until the latter half of the ’60s were under two minutes long, and legendary music producer Tony Visconti explains why: “The DJs could talk more, if you had a record that was well into three minutes it would be the kiss of death, they wouldn’t play it.” Back then, radio held enormous sway over what was heard by the public and what wasn’t. This presented a very singular problem: there was a new monotony over the medium of music. Thusly, Disc Jockeys held huge power, and that presented an opportunity for record labels.
This all began – to chose an arbitrary point – when 45s first arrived in 1949 as ‘Texarkana Baby’ by Eddy Arnold became the world’s first commercially released 45 RPM record. This format changed music forever. Kids were able to snap them up for a handful of pocket change and could swap the newly portable rock ‘n’ roll vibes around until they were beaten up beyond recognition, by which time the next big single would be out anyway. 45s ensured that music was now exchangeable on the playground.
Around this same time, portable radios were also becoming widespread. Music was now everywhere. This hive meant, quite simply, that more music was being made. And with more music being made, more music was also being played on the radio. There was a cultural economic boom. This is proven by the figures for radio employment. In 1950, there were 250 professional DJs in the US. In the seven years of pop culture explosion that followed, that figure soon rose to over 5,000.
So, while the early DJs were curators of taste with integrity at the forefront of their broadcasts, this sudden influx drove down salaries and opened up a window of opportunity for the more sinister side of capitalism to pull sway. Simultaneous with the crowding of the market was a rising status among the DJs. They still had the power, but the record labels had the money. So, a covert agreement was reached among the two. A typical rate of $50 a week was established for a record label to ensure a certain number of plays for a select single per week.
This later became known as the Payola scandal. In short, it denoted the rampant trend of labels bribing stations that beset music. Adding to the problem was that labels had their own political agendas, and perhaps more importantly, political powers to answer to. This is a damning element that we are still reeling from to this day. It was a factor that changed music forever, and killed rock ‘n’ roll in its original form, as Bob Dylan will explain…
“I was still an aspiring rock n roller. The descendant, if you will, of the first generation of guys who played rock ’n’ roll — who were thrown down. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis. They played this type of music that was black and white,” he told AARP. “Extremely incendiary. Your clothes could catch fire. When I first heard Chuck Berry, I didn’t consider that he was black. I thought he was a hillbilly. Little did I know, he was a great poet, too. And there must have been some elitist power that had to get rid of all these guys, to strike down rock ’n’ roll for what it was and what it represented — not least of all being a black-and-white thing.”
In essence, rock ‘n’ roll music sought for societal unification. The level of vivified solidarity that comes from people gathering to enjoy music creates an empathy with others and, as a result, implores unification not just within races but in every sense. By its very nature rock ‘n’ roll thrives on community meritocracy. A hive of shared ideas whereby nobody can plant their flag in a riff or suppress the worthy in the democratised world of musical peace and love. This has been the way that rock ‘n’ roll was at its very inception. It sought to unify people, exult them, and bring about a sort of defiant subversion that rallies against the mechanical repression that the patriarchy employ to sustain their favourable order.
In New Orleans where rock ‘n’ roll was born, African slaves would gather at Congo Square when they were permitted Sunday off. This foregathering was enforced by 1817 when the city mayor of New Orleans specifically selected the square as the only “gathering ground” permitted. This might have been an act of prejudice restriction, but the mayor was hoisted by his own petard as this segregation brought all sorts of cultures together and resulted in a fortified defiance.
Jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll came roaring from the swirled mixing bowl of the square, surrounded by crooked tupelo trees, serpentine dust roads and the giant clay ball moon that seems to be a few miles closer to the delta than the rest of the world, presiding in the hot sultry evening air, all came leering in to catch the sweet sound of celebration despite dower circumstance. Soon white folk joined the fun and amid this progressive carnival, if only for a brief moment on a Sunday, music genuinely was triumphing over cruelly enforced hardship.
That was amplified even further thanks to the incendiary ways of luminaries like Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elvis Presley, the products of the square’s unravelled past. This was bad news for the wealthy conservatives of the world. They had to somehow drive a wedge into the gathering masses to protect their own lot. Payola was their way of doing so.
The mixing of races and cultures made rock ‘n’ roll dangerous. Dylan opines that this is why Payola came to the fore, not just to push a certain record, but to disrupt this incendiary revolution. “Racial prejudice has been around awhile,” he explains. “And that was extremely threatening for the city fathers, I would think. When they finally recognised what it was, they had to dismantle it, which they did, starting with payola scandals. The black element was turned into soul music, and the white element was turned into English pop. They separated it.”
In manipulating a greater genre divide among the radio stations, Dylan claims that they not only halted the subversive ways of rock ‘n’ roll, but also killed its purest form dead. “I think of rock ’n’ roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop. Real rock ’n’ roll hasn’t existed since when? 1961, 1962?” Now to stress on his behalf, he isn’t arguing that music died then, just that the ways of revolution were curtailed and all the post-rock tribalism of the myriad modern genres began.
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