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Patrick Halling’s Musical Voyage 1Unless I'm mistaken it was in the totemic decade of the 1960s - which witnessedan unprecedented explosion of pop and youth culture - that Pat moved into the sessionworld where he was to record for film, television and above all popular music.In the meantime, my mother's musical life was put on hold while she concentrated on being the mother of two small boys, and supporting her husband in hisvarious passions, which included dinghy racing on the Thames and elsewhere.Despite her strong aversion to sailing, she crewed for him for manyyears...specifically at the Tamesis Sailing Club in Teddington, West London where hewas a member for much of the sixties, winning several racing trophies initially in aFirefly (number 1588), while his career as a session player thrived.According to what he's told me, he worked on early sessions for British musicalsensations Lulu, Cilla Black and Tom Jones, as well as with superstar producers TonyHatch and Mickie Most. Hatch wrote most of Petula Clark's hit singles of the sixties,some alone, some with his wife Jackie Trent, and she went on to become a major star in the US as part of the so-called
 British Invasion
of the American charts, as didseveral acts produced by Most, including Herman's Hermits whose angelic front manPeter Noone ensured that his band were briefly almost as popular as the Beatlesstateside.Pat became close to both Most and composer-arranger John Cameron, who together helped Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan achieve a string of international hitrecords once he'd moved away from his early Folk-Protest style towards somethingfar more Pop-oriented, starting with the psychedelic "Sunshine Superman" (1966),which was a massive stateside smash, and the first produced by Most.Among those session musicians who played for Most in the '60s were Big JimSullivan, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who
also
arranged for him. Page went onto join seminal British Rock band The Yardbirds, which had been managed first bySimon Napier Bell, then by Most's business partner Peter Grant. When the Yardbirdscollapsed in 1968, the two remaining members Page and bassist Chris Dreja set aboutforming a new band, also to be managed by Grant. Page's first choice as vocalistTerry Reid turned the job down, but he recommended a young 19 year old singer fromthe Midlands of England known as Robert Plant. Page duly travelled to Birminghamwith Dreja and Grant to look the youngster over, and was impressed by what hesaw. He then invited Plant to spend a few days with him at his home, the ThamesBoathouse, in the beautiful little Berkshire village of Pangbourne for initialdiscussions related to the band...all this taking place in the summer of '68, just months before I joined the Nautical College situated a few miles from the village itself. So,the nucleus of the New Yardbirds came into being.Shortly afterwards, a friend of Plant's, fellow Midlander John Bonham came onboardas drummer, and an old session buddy of Page's, John Paul Jones replaced Chris Drejaas the band's bass player, as Dreja wished to leave the music scene to concentrate on anew career as a photographer. Jones supplemented this role by helping Page with thearrangements, and performing keyboard duties. The New Yardbirds were now readyto fulfill their contractual tour of Scandinavia, which they began in September 1968.
 
With their first album - recorded at West London's Olympic Studios - not yetreleased, they made their debut as Led Zeppelin at the University of Surrey onOctober 15, 1968. This was followed by a U.S. concert debut on December 26, 1968,and so Led Zeppelin went on to become the most famous Hard Rock band of them allequalled only by the Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zepshould emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session musicscenes of the sixties. But then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole.What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle classorigins in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement which took America and the world at large by storm in the late '60s and early '70s? That's not aneasy question to answer, but I'm going to give it some sort of a go.The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, becausethey are believed to have begun life as a secularised version of the black Gospelmusic of the American south, with lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation andanguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, and they found fertilesoil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties, andespecially in the affluent south among men such as Brian Jones from the genteel spatown of Cheltenham in Gloucester, Eric Clapton from Surbiton - via Ripley - inSurrey, and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.But the British Rock explosion was not just fuelled by the Blues. By the early '60s, aneffervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Soul and eventraditional Classic Pop had emerged from several British cities most notably the toughindustrial towns of Liverpool and Birmingham, before going on to take the UK charts by storm. It was the sound of Beat, and no band encapsulated it quite like the Beatles.That said, to further confuse matters, the term Beat - or rather Big Beat - had beenused to describe a music genre as early as 1961 by the writer Royston Ellis, a closefriend of John Lennon's due to their shared appreciation of the Beat poets. In Ellis's book "The Big Beat Scene", the term Beat is used to describe the music of the firstBritish Pop stars to emerge in the wake of the Rock revolution, such as Billy Fury, JoeBrown, Marty Wilde et al, as well as a host of lesser known ones...but then Rock isalso used as an abbreviation for Rock and Roll in the same book.The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this isdebatable, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group inhistory. Yet they themselves resisted being typecast as mere Pop, and could be said tohave ultimately promoted a type of Rock with Pop elements which was yet no lessremoved from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the RollingStones.The overwhelming melodiousness of their classic period of 1964-'69 was founded ona vast variety of musical genres including Classical and Folk, Classic Pop, Countryand Western, Rock and Roll, Soul and Motown, and even the Blues, leading one toconclude that largely through the Beatles, Rock became the ultimate musicalsmorgasbord, a veritable Babel of musical styles. During their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than anyother group or solo singer, and that includes the Rolling Stones, whose early style wasfar more rooted in the Delta and Chicago Blues than that of the Beatles, which waslighter, or 
 Poppier 
. The Stones' uncompromisingly primal rhythmic proto-Rock wenton to form the basis of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, and yet even
these
have to agreater or lesser extent benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the
 
Beatles, although the same could not be said of Punk, which is Rock stripped to itsmost essential ingredients.That's not to say, however, that the Beatles
introduced 
melody into Rock and Roll, because it already existed by the time they had their first hit single in 1962. One of itschief sources was what has become known as the Brill Building Sound, named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed andwhich had been a Pop music centre since the '30s, the term Pop music having beencoined - allegedly - as early as 1926. Brill Building Pop could be described astraditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution, and so partaking of Rock rhythms as much as the sophisticated song writing techniques of Classic - pre-Rock - Pop.There was a somewhat notorious interregnum period of Popular Music between thedecline of the first wave of Rock and the onset of Beatlemania and it lasted fromabout 1958, the year of Elvis Presley's induction into the US Army, and around 1963when the Beatles started to go global. Much has been made of the fact that the music'sinitial threat was neutralised during this brief era, and that this process coincided withthe first wave of teenage idols - both in the US and UK - who while heavilyinfluenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on themoral establishment.It's my contention that in spite of the bad press it's received over the years, the firstwave of Pop to arise in the wake of the Rock and Roll revolution was infinitely morefertile and diverse than it's been given credit for, and that's especially true of the BrillBuilding Sound, whose melodic and lyrical sophistication harked back to the goldenage of the Great American Songbook. It's sheer wholesomeness has attracted muchhostility, but it should be remembered that for the first two years or so of its existence,the music of the Beatles was pretty wholesome too, and I can't help thinking it's ashame it didn't remain that way; even though many - perhaps most - of their finest songs were written after 1965.Its chief songwriters included Goffin and King, who wrote hits for the Shirelles, theCrystals, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney and others in the immediate pre-Beatles era. They certainly influenced the Beatles, who covered one of their songs,"Chains", which was soulfully sung by John Lennon. Carole King of course went onto become a superstar in her own right during the singer-songwriter era of the late1960s, one of the most obvious examples of a survivor from the Brill Building era.Another was Burt Bacharach, who with lyricist Hal David went on to even greater glory in the '60s at the height of Beatlemania. Despite reversals, he continues to berecognised as one of the greatest popular songwriters of all time. Other Brill buildingteams included Leiber & Stoller, Sedaka & Greenfield, Mann & Weil and Barry &Greenwich. As well as writing songs for major acts from Elvis Presley to the firstgreat girl groups, their work facilitated the pioneering production techniques of PhilSpector, and influenced much of the Pop that was to dominate the '60s, including theBeatles themselves.Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by about 1966,they were as much a Rock as a Pop group and this had less to do with their music thantheir lyrics. These had started to acquire an intellectual dimension by that totemicyear, which was significantly attributable to the influence of Bob Dylan. Pop as awhole in fact had acquired a
 gravitas
at odds with the innocent and sentimental musicof the early Beatles and other bands within the outdated Beat genre as a result not just of Dylan's influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing melodiccomplexity on one hand, and an increasing spiritual darkness on the other. This latter 
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