Searching for Rock and Roll (3rd Edition)

By Martin Jack Rosenblum and David Luhrssen

(Cengage Learning)

By Blaine Schultz

In a mere 86 pages Milwaukee writers and educators Martin Jack Rosenblum (UWM, Harley Davidson) and David Luhrssen (Shepherd Express, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design) offer a succinct roadmap for anyone looking to connect the dots in the evolution of rock and roll.

The duo draws heavy focus on the decade 1965 to 1975 as the pivotal era when rock and roll reached a jagged maturity. Rosenblum’s notion that the rock and roll album was worth studying as an Art form (yup, capital “A”) serves as the foundation Searching For Rock and Roll is built upon. And as is all but common knowledge –whether he likes it or not – Bob Dylan serves as Orpheus.

“When I was post-Rockabilly and into the Beat Poet era and suddenly in the Folk/Blues Revival and I heard Dylan's ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’," Rosenblum says, “I knew the end of the Revival was at hand and that the Beats, too, were outdated. I was driving my 1939 Ford Hot Rod and Dylan's song came on the radio. I was on Ballard Road in Appleton. I had to pull over and stop. Here we had the thrust of Rockabilly and the intellectual capacity of Beat poetry shoved into a 12-bar pattern.”

The book’s first edition came about when Rosenblum found himself unsatisfied with existing texts for teaching a rock and roll survey course at the college level. So with a six-week deadline they bounced ideas off each other and came up with the first edition.  Something ironic about a college professor and an editor racing the devil to beat a deadline, but with the tweaked third edition they have come up with a book that sparks as many questions as it answers. If it recalls hazy, passionate, late night discussions over great music and obscure records then they have done their job.

Before you get the impression these guys are navel gazing in ivory towers, consider that Luhrssen was one of Milwaukee ’s earliest 'zine creators. “I suppose the crossroads moment for me was interviewing the Haskels,” Luhrssen says, “a band I had never met and only vaguely heard of, in the upstairs kitchen of Haskel Hotel sometime in May of 1978. The encounter proved to be my entry point into active participation in the music, and laid the foundation stone for my career in music writing. Embracing punk rock at that time was like making a choice about one’s religion. You accepted a particular doctrine and excluded many other things from consideration. Out with Yes! But what about Bowie and Eno?”

Likewise a chance encounter with Bob Dylan in a taxi outside Milwaukee ’s Oriental Theater offered Rosenblum an early insight back in 1964. “He was quite polite and very cool – very inviting and awfully nice. I realized the person is not the song, that the song's narrator is a literary convention and forever after was not one of those who looked to the artist but rather stuck with the artist's resultant works.”

At a Milwaukee book release event at Boswell Books, the duo cited the trajectory from Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home (’65) through Patti Smith’s Horses, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night (all ’75) as bookends for that landmark decade. They also spoke of the influence of houserockin’ gospel and frenetic rockabilly – and just how blurry the lines often are the record companies and music critics conjure for vague reasons.

The book also offers chapters on the foundations of rockcrit (in 1967 fewer than a dozen copies of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were sent out to the press) and the elephant in the kitchen ironically known as   “Alternative Rock.”