Americans Invented Rock and Roll, But The British Perfected It. Fight me!

Robert Johnson was and is an important Blues musician but his influence on early rock and roll is minimal. King of the Delta Blues wasn't released until 1961. That's the album that influenced Clapton et al.
Elvis was the king of rock and roll. He's it's most important figure. He broke the color barrier on the radio and allowed Little Richard and Chuck Berry to be heard widely.

 

I respectfully disagree! RJ’s influence is widespread, and I would add John Lee Hooker and Big Joe Turner to the list. Big Joe was playing Rock & Roll before the phrase was even coined.

 

Look at the Murican Rock and pre Rock Blues musicians "place" in society when the Beatles first hit.

Nice Murican families would never send their jailbait teen daughters to a Muddy Waters or Howlin Wolf show.
Not an Elvis show either.
In the early '60s there were still African American bands (more Jazz than Blues) touring to big white audiences, yet those musicians were not allowed to sleep in the hotels in the towns they played, or even allowed to use the white bathrooms there.
African American men were still being lynched for talking to white girls.

Then The Beatles came playing vaguely Blues based music but with tamed down teen jailbait girl safe lyrics like I wanna hold your hand.
Murican Moms and Pops raised in the '40s & '50s were more comfortable sending their innocent teen daughters to see those nice sweet well mannered British boys.

What exactly was it that made smaller Rock and Blues shows into huge arena events?
Screaming teen girls. They dominated the audiences that propelled the movement.
What was it exactly that was happening?
Rock & Blues was made into a pop music form, cleaned up and sanitized for a more conservative consumer.
Nothing against those bands, but they took music created by bad@ss people in bad places and made it into a nice clean package suited for the whole family.

Of course in a few short years, "I wanna hold your hand" became "I'm lonely, wanna die"; but the sanitizing of low down dirty Blues and Rock & Roll had already taken place, and we had Pop Rock.

Why is the pop rock what folks remember?
Because it was more perfect music?
No, pretty much because it was pop music.

 

This man gets it. Jimmy Marshall swapped power tubes in a Bassman and put more speakers under it. But to pretend that Leo wasn't absolutely blasting music halls well before the Brits is just being foolish. Not holding one side or the other in the American v British pissing contest or trying to crap on Marshall as a whole, but Leo did more groundbreaking with amps than anything else. Damn near everything that followed is pretty easy to trace back to his designs.

 

How has this thread made it to five pages without anyone mentioning the Ramones yet? Talk about RnR perfection:

 

comon, man. Without us you'd be playing skiffle.

 

I don't think motown would've been what it was without european classical musical influence, which is alot of what influences the beatles. Also chuck berry was influenced alot by Bob Wills

 

British rock is more melodic. American rock is more aggressive. Fight me.

 

This is a interesting discussion but about half of it doesn’t really apply to the topic of the perfect rock and roll. Just saying.

 

What about German rock, or Swedish rock? Do they have any standing here?

 

"Murican" was made from Swedish, German, African, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Irish, Scottish, French and Even English blood etc etc.
Plus of course our natives.
So we include 'em all...

 

FIGHT you? I'll join you on this one.

 

.. and the aussies picked the eyes out of both of them and made up our own style of R&R....

 

The Dead also developed the in-ear monitors that everyone uses today.

The biggest contemporary influence on The Beatles & Stones was this guy here...

 

Unfortunately your argument falls flat on it's ass, but I guess you can ignore the 1950s if you want?

I don't think there was much left to invent after Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and countless others in the US. Hell have you ever listened to anyone this side of the Atlantic? Y'all produced a fine bunch of pop stars though...

 

Sorry but who is that? *waits to be ridiculed*

 

We had the passing away of Larry Wallis recently who was the original guitarist in Motorhead. They were put together ( by an ex Hawkind member) as the British MC5 ( and Larry later collaborated with former MC5 musicians). I think, arguably, Motorhead took that kind of formula and ran with it, did it bigger and better. I appreciate that they got tagged as heavy metal but they rarely were and were the great rock'n'roll bad guys.

 

Don't forget Radiohead and Muse.

USA manufacture the best singers without doubt.
UK manufacture the best bands.

On the fence is 'U2' - they are probs pro US (being Irish) but a quarter of the band are Welsh by birth (the Edge) so you could argue the important bit is UK born.