Influence On Rock Music
The movie's influence on rock music is significant. The film reached Liverpool, England in the early summer of 1957. It featured cameo performances of early rock 'n' roll stars such as Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps, fascinated a 16-year-old John Lennon by showing him, for the first time, his "worshiped" American rock 'n' roll stars as living humans and thus further inspiring him to pursue his own rock and roll dream. On July 6, 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney was introduced to Lennon after the latter had performed at a village church garden party with his skiffle group The Quarrymen. McCartney demonstrated his musical prowess to Lennon by performing "Twenty Flight Rock" in a similar manner to the way he had seen it played by Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can't Help It. This led to Lennon inviting McCartney to join the group. McCartney talks about the movie in the documentary series The Beatles Anthology.
Also, Elvis Presley's famous performance of the song "Jailhouse Rock" in the movie of the same name (often cited as the first music video) released one year after The Girl Can't Help It bears a remarkable resemblance to the theme and performance of a song called "Rock Around the Rockpile" from the earlier movie. In that performance, Edmond O'Brien seeks to escape an assassination attempt by jumping on stage and singing the lyrics, "rock, rock, rock around the rockpile," while backed up by The Ray Anthony Band wearing striped inmate uniforms. O'Brien even includes some of the hip-swiveling and leg motions for which Elvis became famous.
Reportedly, the producers had wanted Elvis for The Girl Can't Help It, but Elvis's manager Tom Parker had demanded too much money. Two uncredited composers on The Girl Can't Help It, Hugo Friedhofer and Lionel Newman, had also composed music for the Elvis classic movie, Love Me Tender, in the same year, 1956.
Read more about this topic: The Girl Can't Help It
Famous quotes containing the words rock music, influence on, influence, rock and/or music:
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)