WI: No Elvis OR the Beatles

POD #1: Elvis is born stillborn, instead of his twin brother, Jesse. His brother turns out not to have the musical talent as his brother, and leads a fairly normal life.
POD #2: Paul McCartney never joins up with the Quarrymen, and the various members of what would have been the Beatles never get beyonf maybe one number one hit in the UK and never become very noted in the US.

So, how does popular culture evolve because of this?

No Paul McCartney: The music scene is waiting to explode in 1964 and many British groups will be in line: Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones and [most importantly] the Kinks. Without the Beatles/Quarrymen, the sound will be different, and quite lacking by OTL standards, but there will be a music revolution.

No Elvis: You interrupt the whole music time line. Rock and roll becomes a style perfected by Chuck Berry, and a part of rhythm-and-blues. The fifties are a period of intense racism. The song "Earth Angel" was recorded by the Penguins (a Black group) in 1954 but many radio stations chose to play the cover version by the Crew Cuts (a white group) that was decidedly inferior, for the sake of segregation. (Yes, racial segregation on the radio in 1955.)

Elvis mixed R&B into the mainstream. Buddy Holly followed to refine the style as a singer/songwriter/musician. Without Elvis, would Holly have been able to do the job? Doubtful.

Without Elvis, you have a big void somebody else has to fill. And what will it sound like?

Maybe a lot folkier. Or jazzier.

There is the possibility that blues might still be picked up by a lot of British groups, although whether that was down to other influences I am not sure. I dare say some American styles are going to make their way over here and inspire somebody.

Will Bob Dylan still be around in this TL mewonders?

the_lyniezian said:

Maybe a lot folkier. Or jazzier.

There is the possibility that blues might still be picked up by a lot of British groups, although whether that was down to other influences I am not sure. I dare say some American styles are going to make their way over here and inspire somebody.

Will Bob Dylan still be around in this TL mewonders?

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No reason why he shouldn't, I'm pretty sure.

no Elvis= The end of the musical world. he was the coolest man ever and his jams are still sick. RIP Elvis

Franciscus Caesar said:

no Elvis= The end of the musical world. he was the coolest man ever and his jams are still sick. RIP Elvis

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Rule 1 of all these threads is if a musician never became famous in an ATL, no-one would know any better, and hence no-one would care less.

A key factor here is that without Elvis, a major pillar of rock and roll is changed. Buddy Holly will likely pursue a career as another Hank Williams, because Elvis did not start to build the bridge between R&B and mainstream popular music.

As for Bob Dylan, he will likely still emerge as a star of folk-contemporary music. But without the infusion of R&B/Rock, he will not sound the same.

Yeah, Bob Dylan is completely safe. He was looking far, far past Elvis to blues and folk artists who cemented their reputations in the 1930s.

Without Paul McCartney, the other three remaining OTL-Beatles probably would each become successful as parts of other groups, but nothing like the Beatles level. Ringo is still one of the best drummers in 1960s UK, and his winning personality and willingness to let the drums take a backseat to the guitar and vocals make him the ultimate catch for any super-group in the making. George Harrison probably turns into something like OTL-Jeff Beck: the guy that no casual listener knows, but whose influence on other musicians is huge. And John, of course, is someone who just can't be hidden -- a brilliant composer and lyricist who practically invented the axiom that in rock, bad publicity is good publicitiy.

I agree that the remaining Beatles would have been successful in their own right, without Paul McCartney.

We also must look at the evolution of Top 40 radio in the fifties. There were no personal music players and many home record players wre of poor enough quality that AM radio was a viable source of music. Top 40 was not the nationwide countdown program initiated by Casey Kasem in 1970. Publications like Billboard and Cash Box did publish surveys, but they would not have been suitable for a radio countdown in the fifties because a given song often appeared several times, by different artists, in a given week.

Surveys had to be local. The first was conducted by broadcaster Todd Storz as he polled record stores in Kansas City in 1954, combined the results with logged listener requests, and published a Top 40 survey. The record stores cooperated because the surveys were a useful marketing tool. The theory was to rank the best selling songs from, regardless of content or genre, and play them in a 40 to 1 countdown each week. The process would generally bias towards anything new or innovative, especially rock and roll. Top 40 would spread rapidly in the late fifties.

Elvis Presley placed 28 songs on the Billboard Top 40 between 1956 and 1958. That is a lot of space to fill. More significantly, Elvis took rock and roll across a racial divide at a time of discrimination and segregation both on stage and on the radio. Would Bill Haley and Buddy Holly be able to do the job? The baby boom would foster the growth of youth-oriented music. How would it change without Elvis at the helm?

I would assume we would see a slower, more subduded progression for rock and roll. You might butterfly away the payola scandal, where disk jockeys were illegally bribed by distributors to play certain records. In turn, you butterfly away the conservative backlash against rock and roll, where the music was branded as evil, immoral, work of the devil, etc. In OTL, music slowed down in the US from 1960-62 as the cutting edge of rock and roll migrated to England. In ATL, you slow down music in the late fifties but keep a steady pace into the sixties.

By the mid sixties, music will be subject to the same pressures of OTL: a burgeoning young baby-boom audience, rapidly improving high fidelity technology and a demand for recordings that fill the entire audio spectrum. If the Kinks can come out with anything like "You Really Got Me," the time line will heal very fast.

Bob Dylan did not put songs on the chart until 1965. Artists like Dylan and the Beach Boys would emerge relatively unchanged, or different only in as much music in general is different. We should also remember that in the mid and late sixties, fifties rock was no longer popular.

the_lyniezian said:

Rule 1 of all these threads is if a musician never became famous in an ATL, no-one would know any better, and hence no-one would care less.

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... This is true!