Doc Rock

By DAVE SCHEIBER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 27, 2001

Get into that classroom and rattle those pads and pens: The professor teaching this history class is giving students that old-time rock 'n' roll, in a cultural context.

GAINESVILLE -- The professor stands beside a huge projection screen, poised to click through his latest PowerPoint presentation. It is 11:45 a.m. at the University of Florida, time for a lecture on a booming industry of the past 50 years.

As in a-wop bop a-loo bop a-lop bam boom.

Twenty-five honors students -- majors in biology, sociology and other serious disciplines -- pack the classroom. They are armed with pens and notepads, ready to scribble down the endless flow of facts and observations from their teacher, who is part PBS documentary narrator and part stand-up comic.

With his gray business suit, wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair cropped short, he looks like he could be running a bank or for office. In fact, professor William McKeen is chairman of the journalism department at UF -- and teaches the most unusual history class on campus.

A second glance at the pattern on his necktie suggests the subject matter: dozens of tiny Mick Jagger lips and tongues, the official logo of the Rolling Stones.

One thing is certain: This ain't Latin.

Teach your children

"Today," McKeen says matter-of-factly to the class, "our subject is the Guitar Gods."

In moments, the larger-than-life images of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman fill the screen. This is lecture No. 23 of 29 for the semester.

The seminar is entitled "The History of Rock 'n' Roll." But the real performer here is Professor Shorthair, 46-year-old McKeen, who has played to a packed house of collegians every spring semester since 1993.

Twice a week, for 50 minutes on Mondays and 90 on Wednesdays, he delves into his lifelong passion for rock 'n' roll and brings the class along for the ride.

But is this any more than a hip professor indulging his own interests? Is a course in rock history -- and not the geological variety -- legit? One national organization of college professors contends that teaching rock 'n' roll history typifies the decline in academic standards at the college level during the past 20 years. Once, students read Plato; now they listen to Sisqo.

Counters McKeen: "The study of rock 'n' roll is very serious, and it's very serious fun." Many academics support McKeen's view, saying the study of popular culture's impact on society has a valid place in college curriculums.

For McKeen's students, who studied the Stones in Week 25, jumpin' back in the past is a gas, gas, gas. Getting into class is like scoring a hot concert ticket.

"We usually fill up within four minutes," says McKeen, who has set up his office computer to belt out a James Brown "Unh!" when e-mail arrives.

Back in class, minutes into the lecture, a different sound rattles the room.

McKeen is playing snippets of three classic Yardbirds' tunes -- Boom, Boom, I Ain't Got You and For Your Love. The CD samples accompany a discussion, along with rare photos, of Guitar God No. 1, Clapton, who was followed in the Yardbirds by Beck, then by Page. The music is loud, played over stereo speakers. Students' heads bob in time, feet keep the beat.

"The Yardbirds were sort of a finishing school for great guitarists. Clapton got his start in the group and was sort of the genus of the Guitar God species. His real name was Eric Clapp. I'd change my name, too."

Paperback writer

McKeen has been immersed in music for most of his life.

He wasn't much of a garage-band guitar player as a kid. But he liked to write. In high school, McKeen got hired as a part-time reporter for a small afternoon daily in Bloomington, Ind. No one covered music, so he volunteered to review albums. His first was Abbey Road in 1969. He was hooked.

McKeen later worked as a writer with the Palm Beach Post and the Saturday Evening Post. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from Indiana University, began teaching at Western Kentucky and earned his Ph.D. at Oklahoma. He moved to UF to teach journalism in 1986 and took over as chair in 1998.

"Bill is an absolutely wonderful teacher," says Terry Hynes, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications. "He is bright and engaging. He's just compelling in the classroom, and the students are very, very fond of him. He's one of those people who knows so much and prepares like an actor, so it seems like it just rolls off his tongue."

While at UF, he has written books about the Beatles, Bob Dylan, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities.

"I would characterize Bill as one of those motors who gets everybody's enthusiasm," says Wolfe from his home in New York City. "He has the depth of a scholar, but the curiosity of journalist. And he has this constant willingness to just plunge into the life all around him, whether it's rock 'n' roll or the newspaper wars. He's always ready to roll."

McKeen's latest book is also his biggest. It is called Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay, a 672-page work edited by McKeen over the past five years and spanning the history of the genre. The anthology was distributed in a gift basket to all performers and presenters at the Grammy Awards telecast.

The book consists of McKeen's favorite rock writing, interviews and miscellaneous viewpoints from an array of music critics, performers and authors. Examples: Bob Dylan's prose poem for Bringing It All Back Home that forever changed the nature of album liner notes, Frank Zappa's defense of free speech before Congress in 1985, and rock author Dave Marsh musing on the importance of Bruce Springsteen's 1975-85 career retrospective boxed set.

McKeen authors a preface and intros to the 94 selections, while Peter Guralnick -- whose work includes a two-volume biography on Elvis Presley -- contributed the introduction. Sales and reviews have been strong.

"If you like rock and roll," author Carl Hiaasen wrote, "you'll love this raunchy, rollicking anthology -- great writers, great music and astounding musicians dead and alive."

Don't know much about history

"The next Guitar God we'll consider is Duane Allman," McKeen says. "He's the Allman Brother who died. The other one married Cher. You decide which is worse."

Students chuckle, but without missing a beat, McKeen gets back to business, revealing tidbits that many know little about. Before he helped form the Allman Brothers, young Duane was a session guitarist, so respected by Atlantic Records that he was often paired up in the studio with superstar singers such as Wilson Pickett.

"In the summer of 1968, he kept telling Pickett, "You really ought to record that new Beatles tune, Hey Jude.' Finally Pickett agreed to cut it," McKeen says. "He recorded the song while it was still in the Top 5 by the Beatles, and ended up with a Top 20 hit -- one of the rare times a song was a hit by two artists at the same time."

The result: Allman scored big points with Atlantic president Jerry Wexler, leading to a record deal and the official creation of the Allman Brothers Band.

Students scribble away.

You can't do that

The National Association of Scholars, based in Princeton, N.J., consists of some 4,300 university professors who study trends in college education and favor a traditional orientation to curriculums.

Last year, the association issued a report, "Losing the Big Picture: The Fragmentation of the English Major Since 1964." As for McKeen's class, it's only rock 'n' roll, and they don't like it.

"It's certainly true that these kinds of courses have come onto the scene in the last 20-25 years, and they happen to coincide with the collapse of general education requirements and core curricula at the universities," says Bradford Wilson, the association's executive director. "When I went to school in the late '60s, we still had a fairly well defined core curriculum. Today, the curriculum is a smorgasbord from which students choose, and there's very little structure."

He decries a new "consumerish" approach to curricula.

"A kind of vacuum has replaced the old structured curriculum -- and into that vacuum come courses that try to compete for students, by appealing to what they already know -- and of course, rock 'n' roll is something we all know," he adds. "I don't blame the students. I blame the administrations and the faculties."

Hynes, UF's dean of journalism and communications, says she is glad her department offers the rock course. "Twenty years ago, we used to hear that kind of complaint, but there has been so much change in the traditional university curricula with so many new kinds of programs."

Indiana University professor Glenn Gass helped pioneer the collegiate study of rock 'n' roll history, giving his first course there in 1983. He also teaches a class on the lives and work of the Beatles.

"I always got a lot support for this from the university as a whole -- the most resistance I got was from within the school of music, which was filled with people who thought jazz is an illegitimate form," Gass says. "Rock 'n' roll was viewed with utter contempt. I used to get parents calling me, asking if this was a serious class, or if their kids were pulling a scam.

"Now, I get parents who want copies of the tapes, or are so excited because their sons are listening to the Rolling Stones and now they have something to talk about. So it has really been a complete change."

McKeen maintains that rock 'n' roll study provides a valuable window on the world, especially in matters of race relations.

"Rock 'n' roll is where white America and black America met," he says. "The fertile period of rock 'n' roll parallels the fertile period of the civil rights movement. Looking back on the trajectory of it, the thing that comes out of rock 'n' roll is that white people were playing black people's music, and the other way around. Little Richard tells this story that all the white kids bought Pat Boone's version of Tutti Frutti. He said, "They put Pat Boone's record on top of the dresser, and they put mine in the drawer under the socks -- but I was in the same house.'

"In the way it helped bridge the races, I think rock 'n' roll is an unsung hero."

"Rock 'n' roll helped raise awareness among the young white audience about the contributions of many great black artists, and I think that did help bridge the cultural gap in some ways back then," said Theodore Hemmingway, professor of African-American studies at Florida A&M University, who wrote a chapter in Charles U. Smith's The Civil Rights Movement in Florida and the United States.

McKeen's main class requirement is a semester-long research paper, in which students "adopt" an artist and analyze his or her life, music and influence.

Students must also write a paper discussing a rock book chosen from a recommended list and regularly turn in a "listening journal" in which they write about and analyze the music they hear.

McKeen gives two long multiple-choice exams, packed with the mountains of rock trivia covered in the class. He does not count them heavily toward students' grades -- they're meant as a fun way for students to gauge their knowledge of rock history.

"I do that because I realize that my exams deal with a lot of stuff that might be considered trivial," he says. "So I put the weight on their written work.

"I'm pleasantly surprised by their insights and interest and passion in the topic," he adds. "I just had one turned in today called "Elvis Is Alive and Paul Is Dead,' and it's about rock 'n' roll myths on the Internet. I get papers on everything from Johnny Cash to Frank Sinatra. The students are very into it."

Highway 61 revisited

The 25 honors students know the anthology well -- it's their class textbook. They speak highly of the course and their prof

"This class feeds my appreciation for music," says Brad Colyer, 21, a film major. "To me, music is the most powerful instrument in the world. Because I'm a film student, I'm hoping this class will help me implement music more effectively into what I do. I'm sure some people in here may take this as just a blow-off class, but most of us really want to look beneath the surface of the music. You look at a song and tell what was going on in society at that time."

The Guitar Gods class is over, and McKeen heads down a corridor back to his office, where there are papers to grade, an endless flow of journalism students needing attention, another class to prepare for.

The walls are covered with vintage rock 'n' roll and movie posters. A half-dozen framed certificates name McKeen as "outstanding faculty member" in the school of journalism, at Florida and Oklahoma.

McKeen's fan club includes his children -- Sarah, 21, a UF junior; Graham, 18, an Indiana freshman; and Mary, 14, a middle-schooler living in Indiana with his former wife. He is engaged to be married in July to Nicole Cisneros, whom he met at UF, and hopes to adopt her 4-year-old daughter, Savannah.

Before the wedding, McKeen and his son will travel the length of Highway 61, from Minnesota -- weaving past Dylan's hometown and Chuck Berry's house -- all the way to the French Quarter in New Orleans. The trip will form the basis of McKeen's next book, in which he will chronicle the experiences and music along the historic route.

He plans to have it done before the next rock class in spring 2002. Not everyone at UF is thrilled at the prospect of the next class. McKeen's habit of blasting tunes in lectures has caused PR problems with the public relations class down the hall.

"There's a PR professor who comes over and scowls through the doorway every now and then," he says. "She actually came to see me in my office and I said, I can't not turn it up. I saw her in the hallway recently and said, "I'm doing Bob Dylan next week,' and she asked if I'd come talk to her class."

About Dylan's timeless poetry and influence on the direction of rock 'n' roll?

"No," he says dryly, "the noise."

Time for the final exam

Think you can ace the History of Rock 'n' Roll final exam given by University of Florida professor William McKeen? Here's a chance to match up with 25 honors students who took a similar test. (You get 10 questions; they had to answer 100.)

1. What was the name of the nightclub at which Louis Armstrong first heard the sound of a cornet?

(a) Full Circle; (b) Funky Butt; (c) Reet Petite; (d) Preservation Hall.

2. What was the name of the 1966-67 Beach Boys project that became perhaps the most famous unreleased album in rock 'n' roll history?

(a) Smile; (b) Shut Down, Vol. 2; (c) Pet Sounds; (d) Wild Honey.

3. He was the owner of Sun Records and sought to find an artist who could blend rhythm & blues with country & western.

(a) Leonard Chess; (b) Archie Beyer; (c) Sam Phillips; (d) Norman Petty.

4. He was a blues artist whose style influenced the Rolling Stones, among many others. Journalist Bob Greene had to browbeat the Stones in print to get them to acknowledge their debt to the man.

(a) Howlin' Wolf; (b) Muddy Waters; (c) John Lee Hooker; (d) Blind Willie McTell.

5. What were Chuck Berry and Keith Richards arguing about in the movie Hail, Hail Rock 'n' Roll?

(a) an amplifier; (b) spiked fruit punch; (c) stage costumes; (d) Keith's recent death.

6. How did Robert Johnson die?

(a) Stabbed in a knife fight over bootleg whiskey; (b) old age, that crossroads stuff is bogus; (c) poisoned by a jealous husband; (d) he heard a Neil Diamond record.

7. Which Phil Spector-produced song flopped in America but was No. 1 twice in Great Britain?

(a) Be My Baby; (b) You've Lost That Loving Feeling; (c) River Deep, Mountain High; (d) The Long and Winding Road.

8. Which of these was the last Beatles album recorded?

(a) The Beatles (The White Album); (b) Abbey Road; (c) Let It Be; (d) Magical Mystery Tour.

9. Which of these was the last Beatles album released?

(a) The Beatles (The White Album); (b) Abbey Road; (c) Let It Be; (d) Magical Mystery Tour.

10. He composed Louie Louie.

(a) Brian Wilson; (b) Phil Spector; (c) Jerry Wexler; (d) Richard Berry.

Answers:

1. (b); 2. (a); 3. (c); 4. (a); 5. (a); 6. (c); 7.(c); 8.(b); 9. (c); 10. (d).

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