Where the Halling Valley River Lies by Carl Halling (read a book .TXT) 📕

front man, Rod Stewart.
And it fell to business partner Peter Grant to prosper within Rock music, first as co-manager of the Yardbirds with Most; then as sole manager of Led Zeppelin, who went on to become the ultimate Rock band; and second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
And by the time of the Zeppelin’s conquest of America, the face of Western society had been altered almost beyond recognition by the Rock and Roll revolution.
Yet, in all good conscience, responsibility for this transformation can't be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock.
For, after all, tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian fabric of the West can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Much of the groundwork had already been done in other words, and that's especially true of the forties and fifties.
It was in these two immediate post-war decades that the Existentialists and the Beats became international icons of revolt, while lesser groups such as the Lettrists of Paris served as scandal-sowing forerunners of the Situationists, believed to have played a major role in fomenting the Paris riots of May ’68.
At the same time, Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Teddy Boys, and a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before. Movies such as Stanley Kramer’s “The Wild One” and Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” fostered a desire among millions of young Americans to be identified as rebels themselves, reacting against the stifling conformity of Eisenhower era America.
For all that, though, none of these phenomena enjoyed a tithe of the influence of Rock in terms of its effect on the Western soul.

Glam and the Gender Revolution

My Pangbourne years coincided with the rise of Rock, which was Pop transmuted into an art form, while somehow including Pop as its less intellectual counterpart. And the music we listened to as self-styled lads had “lad value”; and we called it Underground for its shadowy exclusivity, while at some point it became known as Progressive.
But as I recall…it included both Hard Rock and Soft Rock, and the sophisticated Art Rock of acts and artists as diverse as the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Doors. And for me, there was no real difference between the experimental Hard Rock of Deep Purple, and the out and out Prog of Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
For Rock was split into two categories…Underground…and Commercial…a term we tended to spit out like some kind of curse, as this was pure Pop, whose domain was the despised hit parade featured weekly on British TV show Top of the Pops.
The Underground, on the other hand, was composed of acts and artists who made music largely for the growing album market. And there were those among them, such as Led Zeppelin, who never graced the singles chart despite earning fortunes through concerts and album sales. And from about '69, the Zep constituted one of my prime facilitators into the murky depths of the Underground.
But by the time I quit Pangbourne in 1972, a new Rock revolution was underway in the shape of a heterogeneous mix of Rock and Pop allied to an outrageous androgynous image…and known as Glam.
Glam had begun to infiltrate the British charts as early as ‘71, while making little impact on the US, despite the fact that many of its pioneers were American. While its true roots were to be found in the Blues and early Rock and Roll, more of which later.
But it had been carried into the mainstream by one Marc Bolan, born Mark Feld in 1947 into a Jewish family of working class origins, who had been featured in 1962 in a magazine called “Town”, as one of the Faces, or leading Mods of Stamford Hill in East London.
Although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown in West London.
He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex; the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London’s Hippie Underground centred on Ladbroke Grove.
But In 1970, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan’s love of old-time Rock and Roll. And as T. Rex, they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of “Ride a White Swan”.
And by the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, with Bolan the biggest British teen sensation since the Beatles. While the Bolan phenomenon was dubbed T Rextasy by the British press…and all throughout the land, bedroom walls were adorned with Bolan’s fascinating fallen angel’s face.
However, for the true roots of Glam one must return to the very earliest days of Rock and Roll. And specifically to a certain Rhythm and Blues shouter by the name of Little Richard.
As a boy, Richard had attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sung Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers. And aged just 13, he joined Gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharp onstage in Macon after she heard him singing before the concert. And he had serious ambitions of becoming a full-time minister of the Gospel, while demonstrating extraordinary gifts as a boy preacher.
By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. While around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style.
Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect.
Real success came for Richard in 1955 with “Tutti Frutti”, which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he'd quit the business and returned to his faith. And as a Christian myself, I can only hope that for all his struggles, the good Reverend Penniman is a saved Christian man, and there is a good deal of evidence he is.
For few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as he has been.
Yet, in his wake, androgyny went on to become one of its major features; and this was true of several of its earliest pioneers. And that includes the single most influential phenomenon in Rock and Roll history with the possible exception of the Beatles, Elvis Presley.
For as masculine as Presley was, he was as much a Glam pioneer as Penniman with his early use of make up, and the flamboyant outfits he’d worn even before he found the fame that proved a mixed blessing to a boy raised in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God.
And the mantle was taken up in the mid to late sixties by such pioneers of Glam as the Kinks, Barrett era Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, the Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper. But the decade as a whole witnessed an extraordinary explosion of androgyny on the part of the Western male, which served to pave for the way for the ‘70s.
And Glam swept a host of musicians who'd been striving for major success since the early ‘60s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere. Such as David Bowie, Elton John and Rod Stewart. For all three had first appeared on record as part of the British Blues Boom…Bowie and Stewart in ’64, and John in ’65; and despite being idolised at the height of Glam, they continued to be admired as serious album artists.
For there were two major strands of Glam in its hay day of 1971-‘74, one being allied to the consciously artistic tradition of Progressive Rock, the other, to the purest pure Pop. And among those acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; while the latter embraced T. Rex, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, Slade and Wizzard. While there were many more who either flirted with the genre from within the confines of Prog, such as the Strawbs, or existed on its fringes, such as Silverhead.
As to stateside Glam; pioneered primarily by Alice Cooper, it went on to include such cult icons as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Jobriath and Brett Smiley; as well as singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of all time. While several major acts were briefly touched by it; such as Aerosmith and Kiss, but it would not be until the 1980s that Glam entered the mainstream in the shape of Glam Metal.
Also among those who leaped on the Glam bandwagon was the band that effectively invented the genre, the Rolling Stones. Although they didn’t adopt its more flagrant trappings until around 1972, the year they released the album which is widely considered to be their masterpiece, "Exile on Main Street".
Initial sessions took place in the basement of the Villa Nellcôte, a 19th century mansion on the waterfront of Villefranche-sur-Mer in France's Cote d'Azur, which had been leased to Keith Richards in the summer of '71. However, several tracks had already been recorded at Mick Jagger’s country estate, as well as at West London's legendary Olympic Studios.
Originally a theatre, then a film studio, Olympic was converted into a recording studio by the architect Robertson Grant, while his son Keith Grant – a very close friend of Pat Halling’s - completed the acoustics in tandem with Russel Pettinger. It went on to become the virtual nerve centre of the British Rock movement.
Much has been written of the "Exile" sessions, which saw various icons of the counterculture passing through Nellcôte as if to lay blessings on the decadent antics taking place therein, which stand today as the very quintessence of the benighted Rock and Roll lifestyle. While less than a decade had passed since Rock’s true inception at the hands of the clean-cut Beatles, Western society had already been altered almost beyond recognition within that short space of time.
Yet, responsibility for this transformation can't in all good conscience be laid exclusively at the feet of Rock, given that tendencies inimical to the West’s moral fabric can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries. So, how had society come to be so successfully and swiftly revolutionised by Rock?
Part of the answer lies in its sheer popularity, itself arguably born of its extraordinary eclecticism. Yet, in purely artistic terms, its decline was so rapid that by ‘72, it was already wholly jaded as an art form, even though it remained creatively vibrant for a further decade and a half…but little more, despite sporadic flashes of the old genius.
It’s as if it carried within it the seeds of its own destruction as a result of its reluctance to embrace progression, and persisting returns to the simple rhythms whence it sprang, and worship of those who’ve refused to transcend these. Many would cite the Rolling Stones as foremost amongst these, and yet this has not always been true, far from it.
For all throughout the ‘60s, thanks to