Are the Rolling Stones rock?

Huh?

Rolloing Stones= rock but so is buddy Holly.

''There was no such thing when they started.''

Maybe in the media eye there wasn't until the stones/beatles came along BUT rock records have been released before.

That's not even close to being the case. Billboard covered rock starting in 1951, I believe. It was in a section on Negro music.

What was who calling "rock" in 1951, Yancey?

(On a sidenote: in the 40s indie labels were generally known as "mongrels"...)

I'm going to answer this in both threads...

I'm using information from Nick Tosches for my answers. He talks about this extensively in his amazing book "Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll," which I don't have with me (and which Ethan Hawke approached me on a subway platform to talk about once when he saw I was reading it. "Amazing book innit?" he asked. "Yes," I said. Then I walked away). I do have his even more amazing book about Jerry Lee Lewis called "Hellfire" with me, which says:

"One could see the beginnings of this revolution by looking at the August 7, 1954, issue of the music trade weekly Billboard. On one page there was an advertisement for the new Bill Haley record, "Shake Rattle and Roll." Here, for the first time, Bill Haley and the Comets were being marketed as "The Nation's 'Rockingist' Rhythm Group." A few pages later, in the "Reviews of New C&W Records," there was a review of a record by a young Southern man released by Trumpet, a small Mississipi label: "Gonna Roll and Rock," by Lucky Joe Almond... Onward from this hot, glistering August, rock 'n' roll endlessly came."

He also states:

"What black men had been doing since the mid-forties was now recast by a handful of young white boys who had spent their youth hearing those black men, falling under the spell of their magic, learning. Now they recast that magic, mixed it with white magic, and gave forth something that had not been heard before. They called it rock 'n' roll, the same phrase that blacks had been using for more than a decade; but they let the white people who bought it think that they had invented the phrase, as they they let them think that they had invented the music. This, too, they had learned from those black men."

So my Billboard 1951 statement is off I think. Most assuredly, however, Alan Freed should not be credited with creating anything, other than the pattern of stealing money from black performers like Chuck Berry through shady publishing deals.

(and if not, are the stones rock?)

Before "rock" caught on as the word, the Stones’ dance (and the Stones’ "danger" — yes I know this is a lame lame word) was the degree to which they were NOT what they were NOT, and the unexpected demonic power this gave them. But this is rare in rock: and I think nevah exploited with the gleeful nasty vim they gave it. After "rock" caught on as THE word, they deliberately abjured it ("It’s Only Rock’n’Roll") => but tellingly, punk’s prime Oedipal target was NOT prog but the Stones, their vast endless world tours and entourage and high-life preening and sex and drugs and increasing age and all and whatevah. They played themselves as outsiders, and turned this — to save themselves from psychic destruction? (cf Michael Jackson…) — into a vast unending semi-risk-free spectacular masque. They completed R&B by violating it — reinstating its "adult" content, if you like — but stepped away from the second part of the task: doing the same to rock. They helped create it but failed to ruin it. Hence Stones (until such time as they reinvent themselves as a boyband) = not punk = not rock. (ps dave q answered this bettah than me some way upthread, seeing as he actually probably has occasionally listened to them…)

like I mean, the third post from the bottom, come on...

Sinkah's or Reg's?

sinker. I am (kind of inconsiderately) continuing from my comment in mark s's thread about Zappa that has been bumped recently (about how great old ILX could be)

<3 thred