“Rock critic.” The term appeared in pop music discourse about 1966, often applied to the founding writers of Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone. These magazines’ young writers, like Paul Williams and Jon Landau, decided to specialize in writing about rock. Unsurprisingly, given it was the year of Revolver and Blonde on Blonde. A higher level of music demanded a higher level of detail, analysis, and evaluation.  

But how about Meet the Beatles and Highway 61 Revisited? None would argue that these were lesser albums. And, as I’ll show, the rock music of the 1964-65 period inspired several journalists around the country to produce enlightening criticism. These and other critical rock writings from that period tend to be left out of accounts of music journalism history.

In this post, I take a look at a group of writings from 1964-65 that qualify as rock criticism or at least a precursor. But, before that, let’s look at how Ralph Gleason started writing rock criticism in the 1950s.       

Introduction

Histories of American rock criticism date its birth to 1966, when Crawdaddy! launched. Founder Paul Williams stated in the first issue that his fanzine’s purpose was to rise above the fan discourse of teen magazines and give rock music the serious commentary it deserved. The founders of Rolling Stone and other pioneering rock magazines issued similar credos.

These serious intentions have been taken seriously by rock journalism historians. This has created an impression that, before 1966, all writing about rock music had been facile. As a result, writings about rock music before 1966 have been largely omitted from historical accounts. 

As a result, an incredibly fertile and consequential period in rock music and its press remains under-studied: the time from the Beatles’ arrival in America in 1964 to the birth of psychedelic rock in 1965. A closer look at the journalism about rock music during that period shows that a handful of writers provided unique, real-time appraisals of rock from arguably the most significant period in modern pop music history. These writings are essential because they introduced themes, values, and concepts that would underpin rock’s critical discourse to this day.

Wild, Insidious Harmonies      

American rock criticism was born in response to the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s. Its precursors were the serious commentaries about jazz and popular music that began in the 1920s.

However, in 1964, the stakes grew higher for journalists covering rock after the Beatles launched their first American tour in February. Even writers who dismissed the band or wrote uncritically about them felt a seismic shift in music journalism. And in American culture, as Beatlemania spread across the country. 

The first U.S. news about the band came from England in 1963, about British Beatlemania. American reporters paid little attention and often mocked the phenomenon, deeming it musically unimportant. By fall 1963, U.S. coverage increased slightly, but remained dismissive.

For example, in October 1963, a writer for the Los Angeles Times wrote an article titled “Big Racket in Liverpool.” They wrote that the music of the Beatles and the Liverpool bands was:

Vigorous, aggressive, uncompromising, and boringly stereotyped. It is exaggeringly rhythmic, high-pitched, thunderously amplified, full of wild, insidious harmonies.[1]

Although meant as negative criticism, the writer’s descriptors included characteristics that would be praised by future rock critics, such as “uncompromising.” 

Other Beatles stories in U.S. newspapers were overtly hostile, as expressed in headlines such as “Beatles Infest England,” and “The Beatles Rate High-Class Hatred.” One writer called Beatlemania a “disease.” Other writers dehumanized the band.

For example, Hollywood gossip columnist Erskine Johnson wrote that the Beatles “look like an explosion in an eel factory.” Like the L.A. Times writer, he found their sound boring, “music with little or no melody. It is a rhythmic, monotonous beat … The Beatles don’t even look human because of their long, monstrous, shaggy haircuts.”[2] 

Other press reactions were dismissive rather than hostile. An example was Jack Gould’s New York Times review of the January 3, 1964, Jack Paar show in which Paar played an excerpt from a British Beatles show.[3]  

Stirrings of a Critical Discourse

The overall tone of the U.S. press remained unchanged even after Capitol Records released Meet the Beatles on January 20, 1964. The LP quickly rose in the charts along with the singles “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and the re-released “She Loves You.”

But the press came to attention a few weeks later, when the Beatles arrived in America in February for their first U.S. tour. The band made their Ed Sullivan Show debut, thus sparking U.S. Beatlemania. As the Beatles’ popularity swelled, so did their press coverage.

A few younger journalists appreciated the Beatles well enough to take a detailed look.   

One of these writers was 34-year-old Tom Wolfe, already breaking conventions in a style that would be labeled the “New Journalism.”  Wolfe wrote a piece in the New York Herald Tribune about the Beatles’ arrival in New York that captured the band’s hip insouciance. He described the Beatles as “short, slight kids from Liverpool who wear four-button coats, stovepipe pants, ankle-high black boots with Cuban heels, their bang-mop hairdos and droll looks on their faces.”[4] 

Wolfe’s article foretold the fascination the Beatles would hold for intelligent, open-minded journalists. 

A few days after Wolfe’s article, the Beatles gave their first U.S. concert in Washington, D.C. This was followed by a Carnegie Hall show. After a second appearance on Ed Sullivan, the band returned to England. These performances were among the most historically significant in the history of popular music.

Yet, the press covered them as entertainment events of interest to teens only. Newspapers – in wire stories and local editorials – focused on the mania and the hairstyles. Even John S. Wilson, the respected pop music critic for the New York Times, focused his review of the Carnegie concert almost entirely on fans’ behavior, writing that the “audience shrieks and bays and ululates.”[5]

But a few young journalists on the scene produced genuine insights about the Beatles that went beyond their appearance. For instance, Associated Press writer Francis Stilley co-wrote a series of articles about the Beatles with her 13-year-old daughter Gay. In her first column, Gay wrote that the public should focus less on the hair and the mania and more on the music. She wrote that “Its insistent beat … is great to dance to all the latest dances to …Perhaps most important, the songs are about subjects teenagers can identify with.”[6]

Gay ended with “when John growls during a song, ‘Okay George – give it to ‘em,’ a chill runs down the spine of every girl listening.”[7]

Gay Stilley followed this a few days later with a review of the Beatles’ Carnegie Hall concert. She started with her first-person account of as a teen experiencing a Beatles show: “I’m still in a daze; my throat is out of commission from screaming and I’m completely drained of emotion … Along with all the other teenagers, I was screaming, clapping, and stamping my feet.”  Stilley went on to critique the critics, “doddering, middle-aged adults who don’t understand the Beatles and shouldn’t even try to.”    

A Generational Critique 

But it was Columbia University’s student newspaper, the Spectator, that had perhaps the most acute analysis of the generational bias that underpinned the sour reporting on the Beatles. Writer William Shore attended the Carnegie Hall show and wrote:

The winter drags on. But the Beatles were here, and they warmed things up a little, proving to the skeptics that spring will come when it will. The New York Times, following the lead of its big brother in London, analyzed the situation correctly, and its musicologists, exhibiting the pedantry that strikes at middle age, summed it all up on the telly [television review] page. The other journalists, who probably have not gone to school, showed more tolerance and tried to recapture the humor of their children, but it emerged a little wistful and sad.

Meanwhile, the boys wore ties and the girls had their hair down, and “I Love the Beatles” buttons were shining through the crowd. Inside, the Beatles sang; no one heard them but everyone had a good time. The Daily News, jealous no doubt of the students in far places who, when they riot, riot, tried to stir up its listless readers with tales of blood and gore: but it was no go.

When the winter starts as early as this one did, it begins to become boring. The Beatles came just in time. They came in time, too, to remind us of the fate of our elders who, having learned so much in the battered halls of education, cannot sit back without wondering why. There are few things we have, or do, that go unquestioned. Motivation lurks behind every door. Let’s step back just a while from the brink of middle age, which, sadly enough, has already hit some before their time; enjoy without wondering why.

Music is sung and it is fun and the Beatles more so than some of the stuff that has filtered down off the street with the beat. Someday, the sociologists will tell us how and why it happened. The musicologists will iron out their differences and explain why the music pleased our ears. And the grownups will also know. And it will be a sad day indeed.”[8]

Shore’s account, taken together with those of Gay Stilley and Tom Wolfe, conveyed a fan sensibility that continued into late-1960s rock criticism.   

1965

In 1965, rock criticism became more focused with the advent of folk rock and its poetics of dissent. This discourse occurred in expected places – such as columns by serious music critics – but also in unexpected places, such as teen fan magazines and general interest periodicals.         

Writing about pop music was big business in 1965. American magazines like Hit Parader, Song Hits, 16 Magazine, and a growing cascade of monthlies with “teen” in the title profited off the interest in rock music caused by Beatlemania.

A range of articles resulted, from frothy “Who are you dating?” Q&As to probing articles that provided social context and analyzed the new sound. Some fan magazines, such as Hit Parader, TeenSet, and Datebook, featured articles that dug deeper into the music and how it gave voice to a new generation. Hit Parader, with offices near the East Village, introduced emergent New York City rock artists like the Lovin’ Spoonful. 

However, American articles and columns about rock music in 1965 were a mixed bag of anti-rock and pro-rock viewpoints. Older critics in particular continued to belittle the music, making obvious jokes about hairstyles and loudness.[9] But some writers listened more closely and appreciated what they heard. The critical discourse of rock that started in 1964 responded to the music’s growing complexity, social impact, and more poetic lyrics.

Before they were Critics

The writers who were later tagged rock critics mainly were in high school or college in 1965 and not yet writing about music for mass publications.

For example, Lester Bangs was in high school, where he wrote “Sounds of the Scene” for the Cajon Valley High School Smoke Signal. Robert Christgau had graduated from Dartmouth in 1962 and, in 1965, covered the police beat for the Newark Star-Ledger. Richard Goldstein had attended Hunter College, where he wrote “The Second Jazz Age,” a column in the student newspaper about rock. He later went to graduate school at Columbia.

Jon Landau was a sophomore at Brandeis University, where he wrote for its newspaper, The Justice.  Richard Meltzer studied art criticism under Allan Kaprow at Stony Brook while drafting The Aesthetics of Rock. Paul Nelson graduated in 1963 from the University of Minnesota. He left the folk-zine he founded, The Little Sandy Review, for another, Sing Out!, which he left in 1965 because of its anti-electric-Dylan stance. He would soon begin writing rock criticism.

Jann Wenner was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley. Paul Williams, like Bangs, was still in high school and had just converted to rock music by way of the Rolling Stones Now and Kinks-Size. That fall, he would enroll in Swarthmore while writing a column for the fanzine Folkin’ Around.

Therefore, in 1965, the writers most closely linked to the emergence of rock criticism were not yet part of the mass media rock discourse that began in early 1964.

A New Sound

But a few critics in other genres wrote thoughtful articles about rock music in 1965. 

For example, blues critic Pete Welding wrote a piece about guitarist Michael Bloomfield in DownBeat that foreshadowed the upcoming coverage of blues rock. Folk music critics Paul Nelson and Robert Shelton defended Dylan’s move to folk rock. Both would write rock criticism in the future. However, it appears that jazz critics other than Ralph J. Gleason, including those at Down Beat, didn’t focus on rock music until Dan Morgenstern became editor in 1967.

One of the first comprehensive analyses of rock was “The New Sound,” written by New Yorker staff writer Renata Adler in early 1965.[10] 

Adler argued that generational differences intensified in the postwar era, beginning with the gap between the rock ‘n’ roll generation and its parents.

Out of this came, in the 1950s, the “New Sound”:

New rhythms, new chord progressions, new timbres, new subject matter for the lyrics. It is a lively, aggressive, often funny, seldom sentimental sound, and though much of it is downright ugly … much of it is very good.[11]

Adler proceeded to provide a detailed overview of the history of rock from hot rod music to death ballads. Regarding the latter, Adler wrote,

With a total incongruity of musical style and verbal subject matter … a number of harsh and serious realities can be lightheartedly accommodated in the New Sound. Sociological themes, for example, can be treated with a certain subtlety and depth.[12]

One of these themes was sexism, and Adler touted “the development of a truly formidable female aggression” in the New Music.[13] She said that the music expressed a transgressive sensibility in “the primitive tempo and high noise level.”[14] Adler stated that rock music deserved a serious hearing:

The sheer eclecticism of the New Sound – the incorporation of various musical strains, the unlikely combinations of instruments … the persistent phenomenon of white performers trying to sound like Negroes and (through overdubbing) of a single performer sounding like man, the occurrence of English groups … with Negro-American accents … and the generally wide range of the subject matter of the lyrics – makes for a creative ferment and may lead anywhere.[15] (p94).  

Adler backed up her points with song lyrics and quotes from record reviews. She described a fascinating scene inside the studios of WABC in which programmers and DJs looked over a new batch of records.

Adler’s essay sketches a rock aesthetic based on experimentation, dissonance, loudness, skepticism, aggression, realism, and transgression – a New Sound for a rebellious new generation.     

Purple Lamps and Hostile Statues

Another American writer who took rock seriously in 1965 was Robert Shelton, the folk music critic for the New York Times. He had already published one of the first major reviews of Bob Dylan during his folk-singing days.

However, Shelton criticized Dylan’s turn to rock music in 1965. When Dylan debuted his new electrified sound at the Newport Folk Festival, Shelton wrote that Dylan “introduced very unpersuasively his new fusion of folk and rock ‘n’ roll.”[16]

Despite that reaction, Shelton’s view of Dylan evolved. A few weeks after Newport, he published one of the first interviews with Dylan after the festival controversy. Through Dylan’s quotes, Shelton introduced readers to a new type of surrealistic patter that referenced “green clocks, wet chairs, purple lamps [and] hostile statues.”[17]  Shelton wrote that while some of Dylan’s lyrics were “‘camp’ fantasies … others are poetically profound.”[18]

That same month, Shelton wrote a lengthy article about the Beatles and their influence. It preceded the band’s famous 1965 Shea Stadium Concert. Shelton wrote that an “American invasion” led by Dylan, the Byrds, and other musicians had joined the British version.[19] He wrote:

The ‘Liverpool Sound’ is a buoyant, urgent, infectiously rhythmic series of cadences, with some unsettling, exciting harmonies (in open fourths and fifths), a bedrock blues beat, and an aura of youth, channeled sexuality and exuberance. Often, there is a wistful, plaintive quality to their slower ballads.[20]

Looking at American rock bands, Shelton wrote about their “message songs” which “examine conformity, the nature of freedom, teen-age clothes, brotherhood, recording executives and the right to wear long hair.” He said the music had been labeled “folk rock … a marriage of the vitality and popularity of rock ‘n’ roll with the folk movement’s concern for saying something about social injustice.”[21]

The First Blues Rock Discourse

In addition to folk rock, Shelton liked another emergent rock idiom: blues rock. He wrote:

A musical trend that might be described as the Beatles backlash is sending many American folk and pop musicians into the modern blues … Several folk musicians … have become enamored of the electric, amplified guitar.”[22]  

Shelton noted that blues harmonicist Paul Butterfield “praised the Beatles for developing an original musical approach,” in contrast to the Animals and the Rolling Stones, who were “mainly imitating.”  Shelton wrote that Butterfield’s “wild harmonica sorties, against the surging heavily amplified rhythm of drums, electric guitar and bass, are without parallel in blues or jazz,” comparing his style to saxophonist Sydney Bechet.

(For more on the fascinating development of blues rock criticism in the mid-1960s, see my articles, The History of the Blues-Rock Press, Parts 1 and 2.[23])

Shelton’s 1965 music writings foreshadowed the wave of rock criticism to come in 1966. His writings expertly addressed rock music’s aesthetics, instrumentation, techniques, and historical context. Like Adler, he was interested in creating a new language of rock criticism that captured the new sounds. And he understood the potential of rock to shape society by catalyzing the youth subculture around an agenda of fighting social injustice and conformity.

Conclusion

The first seeds of post-Elvis rock criticism can be seen in the writings of Shelton, Adler, and a group of emerging journalists in 1964 and 1965. These writers left behind a legacy of in-the-moment explorations of one of the most significant periods in pop music history. These writers not only introduced themes that underpinned rock criticism to come, but they also advanced the sensibilities and attitudes of the rising youth culture.   

Bringing these writers and texts into the canon of rock criticism history fills a gap in that account. It helps us understand an incredibly fertile and consequential period in the co-development of rock music and its press.

One last note:

After the Byrds released their groundbreaking album Mr. Tambourine Man in the spring of 1965, a recent U.K. immigrant to the U.S., Derek Taylor, wrote:

It’s different, sympathetic and gentle. It has a plaintive, melodious insistence which means that once having heard it, you recognize it the first few seconds when it is replayed.[24]

These are graceful words that take a moment to sink in. They came from a regional rock music tabloid, KRLA Beat, named for a Southern California radio station. The magazine launched in 1964, but took a new direction in 1965, as rock music evolved. Its editors aimed to create an alternative to the norm of gossipy entertainment news.

The Beat is just further proof that the roots of rock criticism extend deeper into the soil of American publishing than we thought.    

Notes  

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[1] Derek Jewell. “Big Racket in Liverpool,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 6, 1963: 3.

[2] Erskine Johnson. “Warning to US; ‘Beatles’ on Way,” St. Albans Daily Messenger, Dec. 26, 1963: 4.

[3] Jack Gould. “TV: It’s the Beatles (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah),” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1964: 47.

[4] Tom Wolfe. “Beatles Conquer New York with Rag-Mop Hairdos, Guitars,” Boston Globe, Feb. 8, 1964: 1.

[5] John Wilson. “2,900-Voice Chorus Joins the Beatles,” New York Times, Feb. 13, 1964: L26. Wilson later became interested in the Beatles in 1965 and wrote several solid articles about them for the Times.          

[6] Gay Stilley. “‘Okay George, Give It to ‘Em,’” Beatrice Daily Sun, Feb. 9, 1964: 6.

[7] Gay Stilley. “‘Okay George, Give It to ‘Em,’” Beatrice Daily Sun, Feb. 9, 1964: 6.

[8] William Shorr. “At Carnegie Hall: New Bug in Town,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Feb. 14, 1964: 4.

[9] Art Seidenbaum. “Natives Quite Restless,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1965.

[10] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965. In 1968, Adler became the film critic for the New York Times.

[11] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965: 69. 

[12] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965: 78.

[13] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965: 86.

[14] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965: 93. 

[15] Renata Adler. “The New Sound,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 1965: 94.

[16] Robert Shelton. “Beneath the Festival’s Razzle Dazzle,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1965: X11.

[17] Robert Shelton “Pop Singer and Song Writer Racing Down Bob Dylan’s Road,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1965.

[18] Robert Shelton. “Pop Singer and Song Writer Racing Down Bob Dylan’s Road,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1965.

[19] Robert Shelton “The Beatles will Make the Scene Again” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1965.

[20] Robert Shelton “The Beatles will Make the Scene Again” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1965.

[21] Robert Shelton “The Beatles will Make the Scene Again” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1965.

[22] Robert Shelton “The Beatles will Make the Scene Again” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1965.

[23] Don Armstrong. “The History of the Blues Rock Press, Part 1. Webpage.  retrieved Aug. 6, 2025: https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-history-of-the-blues-rock-press-part-1.  Don Armstrong. “The History of the Blues Rock Press, Part 2. Webpage retrieved Aug. 6, 1965: https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-history-of-the-blues-rock-press-part-2.

[24] Derek Taylor. “The Byrds Fly High And It’s Time To Crow,” KRLA Beat, June 23, 1965.