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#581509 - 10/01/08 02:55 PM
Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
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MercuryXL
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History never changes, but what we want from it does.
Just read a very interesting and thought-provoking article. We sort of remember Sha Na Na from their TV show and retro act. But instead of being imitators of some magical 1950's, they were actually the influential "authors" of it. From their 1st appearance at Woodstock in 1969, they directly inspired "Grease", "Happy Days", and the Fonz, a vision of that decade that was so completely absorbed by the mainstream as "history" that by 1980, the idea of "The 50's" as some golden age of American optimism was complete, possibly even influencing Reagan's election.
Except the authors posit that this popular idea of the 50's is like a false memory, the vision of the decade from Grease/Happy Days would be unrecognizable to people in the 50's. It's a post-modern re-imagining of that time in America, and it started with Sha Na Na.
They were Columbia students- one of the founders was a devotee of Susan Sontag and her theories on "Camp"- of which the band (formerly a glee club!) was practically an intellectual exercise in.
Sha Na Na And The Invention of The Fifties
"Contemporary scholars of American cultural history have begun writing that Sha Na Nas greatest achievement was the invention of a new American era: the Fifties. The whole notion of how artists can change the way a historical era is viewed, and relatively quickly, is interesting on its own; the fact that Sha Na Na and the College played such a role in this change makes it interesting for all Columbians.
On the fourth day of the Woodstock Festival of 1969, Guffeys account begins, just before Jimi Hendrixs celebrated finale, the stage was held by a group of unknown undergraduates from Columbia University ... The rock-n-roll revivalist group Sha Na Na bombarded the audience with tightly choreographed 1950s classics like Teen Angel and At the Hop. The festivals unlikely scene stealers sported dated looks, including greased ducktails, white socks and cigarettes rolled into T-shirt sleeves. Sha Na Nas impossibly upbeat and exuberant version of the 1950s seemed the opposite of the arty psychedelica and hard rock that characterized Woodstock.
Guffey quickly spots that Sha Na Na was subtly infused with Camp. George J. Leonard, the groups leader [in matters of theory], described himself as a 22-year-old Susan Sontag buff. Recalling the groups transformation from Ivy League glee club to television stars, Leonard spoke of a vision of a group that would sing only 50s rock and perform dances like the Busby Berkeley films that he learned to love in college readings on Camp in Richard Kuhns aesthetics courses.
Marcus was coming to the same conclusion: The idea of the Fifties that America still holds the happy, greasy Fifties was an invented History. Up until 1969, quite an opposite cultural memory held sway. When Americans remembered the Fifties, they thought of Joe McCarthy witch hunts, of an age of anxiety, of the shook-up generation diving under their desks during A-Bomb drills, of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit selling out and Holden Caulfield cracking up, or Allen Ginsberg 48 and Jack Kerouac 44 too beat to fight back. Nothing to get nostalgic about there. In a section titled Re-inventing the Day Before Yesterday, Guffey describes older critics, who remembered the decade only too clearly, shocked at the happy-go-lucky imagery of what Horizon Magazine protested as the newly-minted Fifties. Cultural critics had already agreed the decade was a national pre-frontal lobotomy.
Then, Marcus and Guffey saw, around 1969, history had been deliberately rewritten almost invented.
The replacement of the Beat with the greaser as the emblematic 1950s rebel had, Marcus reports, consolidated its hold on American memory within a very few years, by the time of Happy Days and Fonzie. Nor had that replacement gone unnoticed, Guffey discovered. People begin to remember the 1950s not as they recall them but as they have been re-created for them, Horizon marveled by 1972. This is what makes the newly-minted myth of the Fifties so remarkable . Vision fades and imagination takes over, Time critic Gerald Clarke wrote.
Marcus uses the term 1950s for the actual decade, and Fifties for the newly minted myth (a useful device well adopt). The Fifties, then, had rather suddenly replaced the 1950s in the collective memory. Though Happy Days and the musical Grease had played a role, Marcus and Guffey both found articles such as Horizons, which predated those works. Tracing back, Marcus discovered, as Guffey had, that the new Fifties was no older than Columbia College, spring 1969, when the Kingsmen put on two shows: The Glory That Was Grease and the First East Coast Grease Festival, attended by 5,000 students from Massachusetts to Maryland.
That had been the first appearance of the word Grease and the first appearance of the greaser, who, Marcus saw, rapidly replaced the popular image of Beatniks and the Beat era. This ascription of the social domain and style of hoods (in 1950s slang) or greasers (as they came to be known in the 1970s) as the emblematic experience of 1950s youth came to be a common trope in later media discussions of the era (pp. 1213 ff.). The Fonz, then, when he first appeared on Happy Days, a full five years later, had only completed a process of cultural redefinition that had begun with Sha Na Na that the prototypical figure of youth culture in the Fifties was the urban, white, male working-class greaser. [The Beatniks] were superceded by mainstream interest in the greaser (p. 30).
With surprise, Marcus reports that Sha Na Na, the first and most successful of the Fifties redefiners, were not, as he had supposed in his youth, juvenile delinquents from Queens The band was actually formed, he reports with amazement, of Columbia College students, many of whom were classically trained (pp. 1213).
Classically trained indeed. Case in point: Grease only became the word (as the musical later claimed in its famous title song) because George Leonard 67, the groups theoretician, studying Greek and Latin, happened to be taking Columbias famous classicist Gilbert Highet. While George was sitting in Highets class, struggling to think of a name for the first concert, Highet picked up his book, The Classical Tradition and rolling all the rs in his rich Scottish accent intoned Poes poem: The glorrry that was Grrrreece the Grrrrandeur that was RRRome! George had his title: The Glory that was Grease!...
"Their popular television show joined with Happy Days and Grease popularizing the new myth. By the 1980 Presidential election, America had embraced the dream of the Fifties as a pre-political Golden Age. So much so, Marcus painstakingly shows, that the American political landscape was altered to take advantage of this invented cultural memory.
In Ronald Reagans time, Marcus documents, politicians began invoking a Columbia College fantasy as if it had been history, and trying to ally themselves with it. Conservatives [in the Reagan Era] parlay(ed) the cultural nostalgia for the Fifties that had circulated in the 1970s into the basis for a political offensive ...
The invention of the American greaser, swaggering in his gangs motorcycle jacket, as the Noble Savage of the American Century was a direct parallel to the Romantics tough Highlander swaggering in his clans tartan as invented a tradition, alas, as the kilt. "
Sorry so long- there's more interesting stuff in the article about invented history at the above link.
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#581510 - 10/01/08 02:58 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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teverett
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A real good point. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were doing it first, but not in "Woodstock." And the oldies set was just part of their act.
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#581513 - 10/01/08 03:02 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: teverett]
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RealMuso
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Good stuff.
Other bands did things that flew in the face of the Woodstock era by harking back to the 50s-- I'd point to NRBQ's first album and Cat Mother's "Good Old Rock'n'roll" (prpduced by Hendrix!). But no doubt that Sha Na Na invented the Happy Days/American Graffiti aesthetic.
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#581515 - 10/01/08 03:07 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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platinumhussy
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That was fascinating. Thanks!
So is "Columbia College" a college of Columbia University?
P.
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... as art dies WE die... - Mr. Coffee
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#581519 - 10/01/08 03:12 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: teverett]
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Quest4BetterPop
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As a fan of real doo wop music, I always viewed Sha Na Na as an embarrassment to the genre more than anything else.
Even that currently running infomercial hawking doo wop CDS with "Bowzer" in it is painful to watch because of his unwelcome presence. The vintage clips of real period acts doing their best songs are great, of course.
I think the American Graffiti movie (begun in '71 and released in '73) had more to do with launching the present day view of the 50s (even though it was set in '62) than anything Sha Na Na did.
Looking back to the first time I saw the Woodstock movie, I remember wondering what on earth Sha Na Na -- wildly and painfully out of place on that stage -- were doing there.
_________________________
"I wouldn't even think of playing music if I was born in these times."
-- Bob Dylan, 2001
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#581520 - 10/01/08 03:12 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: platinumhussy]
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teverett
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That was fascinating. Thanks!
So is "Columbia College" a college of Columbia University?
P.
Yes.
Looking back to the first time I saw the Woodstock movie, I remember wondering what on earth Sha Na Na -- wildly and painfully out of place on that stage -- were doing there.
Killing! They have the same effect in Festival Express. I never had much use for them, musically, either (I sort of know one, and he's a fine fella), but if I hadn't been through the real thing, they'd have been mind-blowing.
Edited by teverett (10/01/08 03:17 PM)
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#581522 - 10/01/08 03:14 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: RealMuso]
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MercuryXL
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Thanks guys. I realize it's a bit wordy, wonky "Cultural Studies", but I do find it interesting, how the past gets re-interpreted, esp. in pop culture. When they were on TV, even as a kid I thought Sha Na Na were corny, little did I know they were at first wildly influential post-modern geniuses, lol. 
Ps. To PlatinumHussy, yes this was published in a Columbia College journal, and Sha Na Na were students there, hence the occasional dates after names (Smith '69 etc.)
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#581526 - 10/01/08 03:17 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: teverett]
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Skippy
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Great article. Particularly loved the invention of "50s dance" to be a melding of Busby Berkeley and "Chuck Jackson's act at the Apollo."
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#581531 - 10/01/08 03:38 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Skippy]
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Willard
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Gee-Whiz! You mean the 1950s wasn't all poodle skirts, sockhops, and chocolate malts?
Seriously, that article is one the money. Regardless of what we've learned about the 1950s on TV Land, it was a tense decade of paranoia that gave birth to a myriad of problems that manifested themselves in the 1960s.
After Stalin passed away, instead of taking steps to end the Cold War, Ike & Khrushchev stoked the campfire with space and nuclear warhead "races", andthe Korean war is now remembered as the setting for the MASH sitcom, instead of a real conflict with a real death tolls.
I also think the postwar baby boom has alot to do with remembering the 1950s as "the good old days" simply because there were so many more people growing up in the 50s than in the previous war strewn years and the great depression.
It's all relative, really. Everyone remembers the decade they grew up in as a "simpler time" compared to the years of adulthood - regardless of whether it was the 80s, 70s, 50s, or the 1890s - thats how we compartmentalize things we look back on, aka "nostalgia".
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#581538 - 10/01/08 03:43 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Skippy]
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Matt
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the writer displays his own prejudices by mentioning eight times that these kids went to Columbia (alma mater of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Mark Rudd, Obama etc.). It merely indicates ambition, nothing more.
ShaNaNa did not invent the 1950s any more than Albert Gore invented the internet.
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