Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
'Will You Love Me Tomorrow'
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
by Ken Emerson
Viking, 334 pp., $25.95
The relatively brief phase of pop music history entertainingly memorialized in Ken Emerson's Always Magic in the Air has been seen as a lull between two more notorious upheavals in taste. The music that took over America in the mid-1950s, whether billed as rock and roll, rhythm and blues, or under some other rubric, came overwhelmingly from the South—Georgia (Ray Charles, Little Richard, James Brown), Mississippi (Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley), Louisiana (Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis), Texas (Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison), Missouri (Chuck Berry)—and represented a fusion of all those strains of blues and country and gospel that had been kept at bay by mainstream pop. This was the first wave of the heroic breakthrough that histories of rock love to celebrate; the second came in the mid-1960s with the near-simultaneous surge of the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion, the Detroit sound of Motown and the Memphis sound of Stax-Volt, and the one-man revolution represented by Bob Dylan.
Review, 3887 words
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