Re "Plus, the music industry mechanism really wasn't in place to allow for mass distribution of non-US acts at that time.": Good point.
Re "rock sounds *terrible* in French.": Yes, Johnny Hallyday certainly *looked* the part - but I can't recall a single song of his! ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote: --- In [email protected] mailto:[email protected], s3raphita wrote: > > Yep, but we were talking about British imitation rock so > Vince Taylor and Cliff Richard are two important pioneers > in the UK. I'm guessing one reason they never made a name > for themselves in the States is because Americans didn't > need second-rate copies of their own stars. Couldn't have said it better. :-) Plus, the music industry mechanism really wasn't in place to allow for mass distribution of non-US acts at that time. There was no market perceived for it, so it didn't really exist. BTW, you find the same thing in France, but for another reason -- the language difference. Plus the fact that rock sounds *terrible* in French. Rap, it can handle, but rock, fuggedaboudit. In France, old pop stars like Francoise Hardy are still minor goddesses, but old rockers like Johnny Hallyday are major Gods, right up there with Thor. :-) > The Beatles probably made it because they came along > after rock 'n' roll's heyday and added enough original > touches of their own to make it more appealing than > the saccharine-sweet pop that had by then become the > norm. Tell it, sista. The US pop music scene was really in its doldrums before the Beatles. Many of the people who had grown up on it had gravitated to folk music because there was *energy* there, and there t'weren't none in pop. Then the Beatles arrived, preceded by a wave of near- hysterical media hype. I'm honestly not sure which con- tributed more to the Beatles' success in the US -- their talent, or the hype. I lean to the latter. See enough TV stories (or, in those days, movie News trailers before your movie) of star-struck Beatles fans and your young impressionable mind has already been pre-programmed to love them when you see them live. Still, it *was* a phenomenon in the US, Beatlemania. By the time it struck, I was a full-fledged folkie, both listening to and performing the "real music," folk music performed by upscale white artists. :-) So they had to drag me away from my Dylan and Baez and the like to listen to a Beatles album. And to be honest, I wasn't knocked out at first by the sound. Even then, I was more fascinated by the *trend*, the fact that so many were so gaga over them. It took the Rolling Stones to knock my socks off. :-) The French did have some modest (home) success with those yé-yé girls like France Gall. You must know the story of how Serge Gainsbourg cruelly set up France Gall with his composition "Les Sucettes" ("Lollipops") with its (to us) blatant sexual innuendo. On the surface, the lyrics tell the innocent tale of a girl named Annie who enjoys lollipops. This is the stage show Gainsbourg also arranged. It shows what an innocent age it was that the 18-year-old Gall could perform on this set and still not realise she'd been well and truly pranked. A friend had to explain it to her later and Gall was mortified. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-iysdFu_TQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-iysdFu_TQ
