The Beatles: the Sixties Start Here Photo: Mark Lewisohn R&B's popularity had been building steadily through 1962 in London and a few halls to its south and west - an area that would soon be dubbed "the Thames Valley Cottonfields." The sound was as pure black as these white English boys could play it, not music from New York or Detroit but the hard-ground Delta states. The young northerners and young southerners in England shared an affinity with Chuck Berry, Arthur Alexander and Bo Diddley, but preferences beyond here deviated down the two accepted definitions of R&B over which Brian Jones had publicly argued in Disc: the kind the Beatles did and the kind the Stones did. The Beatles went for Motown, the Stones for Chess; the Beatles for Goffin-King, the Stones for Howlin" Wolf; the Beatles for Richie Barrett, the Stones for Jimmy Reed; the Beatles for Luther Dixon, the Stones for Willie Dixon. Alexis Korner was R&B's focal point. A year to the day after Peter Cook opened his satirical comedy club the Establishment, the 5 October issue of its offshoot arts magazine Scene profiled Korner and his band, concluding: They are, you might say, on the brink of a trend. What will happen next depends on the public outside of Central London. Alexis thinks they will like the music - once they get used to it. If so, the group could go a long, long way. But it wouldn't be Blues Incorporated taking it the distance, it would be the group whose first booking filled their absence. Back on 12 July, Korner and Blues Inc made their debut radio broadcast, live in session on the BBC Light Programme's Jazz Club. It was a Thursday night, Marquee night, so this week another group took their place, one the club's Jazz News ad called "Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones." Jazz News continued to be R&B's only soapbox, and it was this magazine that announced the birth of the Rolling Stones. In an 11 July piece headlined MICK JAGGER FORMS GROUP (which must have galled Brian Jones), the singer and harmonica player leapt instantly to allay any fears their name might spark regarding their musical direction. The result is that this first-ever published quote by Mick Jagger about the Rolling Stones is "I hope they don't think we're a rock "n" roll outfit." This same Friday 5 October, EMI released its first Beach Boys record. It's there in the company's Record Retailer ad, facing Brian Epstein's full-page splash for Love Me Do. The song was Surfin" Safari, an upbeat chunk of Chuck Berry-like guitar rock with appealingly unusual vocal harmonies. West coasters both, Los Angeles and Liverpool, the Beach Boys and Beatles were having simultaneous breakthroughs; they also shared some influences and were similarly self-contained, playing their own instruments and singing their own songs. Surfin" Safari was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love; Wilson - an exceptional talent at twenty - was the eldest of the three brothers at the heart of the five-piece, and their father was the manager. Murry Wilson agreed the Beach Boys" contract with Capitol Records on 10 May, the day after George Martin, in London, offered Brian Epstein a Parlophone contract for the Beatles. In America, the Beach Boys" first Capitol 45 was issued in a colour picture sleeve showing them as five young lads with clean, well-brushed hair a little shorter than the Beatles," wearing uniform blue check shirts over white T-shirts and jeans, carrying a surf board. No advertising or publicity value was perceived in electric guitars, and the surfing sound - in tandem with music for driving Hot Rod cars - had become big in Southern California: guitar rock (mostly instrumental) for the idyllic male teen lifestyle of sunshine, surfing, beaches, cars and girls. Surfin" Safari caught on big in America, reaching 10 in Cash Box and 14 in Billboard, and EMI picked it up for British release. It attracted similar press reviews to Love Me Do - generally positive, hardly overwhelming - and had the same battle to be heard. Beyond a couple of Radio Luxembourg spins, it wasn't, and it didn't crack the charts, but it did confirm a change to the vocabulary. Record Retailer had the Beatles in mind when it commented on the Beach Boys being "Another group that is new to us." It was a crystal-ball moment: groups were coming ... The Beatles at Ingra (Photo: Mark Lewisohn) Flying high (at 13) in the Cash Box Top 100 of 6 October 1962 was If I Had A Hammer, by the acoustic guitar and vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary - but theirs was mostly a different market, a little older, one that had money to buy albums. The trio's first long-player was in its second week atop the Cash Box chart - and a style of music that had been around forever burst right into the mainstream with a resounding strum. The coming buzzword was hootenanny, though when that odd appellation went away it would be recognised as the great breakthrough of folk music in America. Not pop, not rock, not R&B, not electric at all, but poetically-written protest songs, songs acoustically performed for a literate and socially-conscious audience, songs of dissent against the world's ills and injustices, intelligently articulated in college campuses and coffee houses. Folk was a musical explosion that detonated in San Francisco and in Greenwich Village, New York; it was music for beatniks - now, inevitably, folkniks. Peter, Paul and Mary were the first to have the hits, but another artist (like them, managed by Chicago-born entrepreneur Albert Grossman) was already shaping up to be its hero: 21-year-old Bob Dylan. On Friday 5 October 1962, Dylan was top of the bill at one of his earliest important New York shows, The Traveling Hootenanny, at the Town Hall on West 43rd Street. One could quibble about time differences, but Nuneaton, North Cheam and New York were in sync this night, united by voice, guitar and harmonica, played differently in each arena but from the heart at all, the sound of music young audiences hadn't even known they wanted. The last of Dylan's four numbers was new and not yet recorded, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. His future biographer Robert Shelton was present and would write, "Those who doubted Dylan's poetic gift began to see what all the fuss was about." Folk was already on the rise in Britain. Most of the new US recordings were picked up for release, where they were reinvigorating a centuries-old and always active indigenous scene, a fair number of the songs having old-world roots to begin with. The 13 October Melody Maker reported strong growth in the British folk circuit, with an estimated 150 clubs dotted around the country. On both sides of the microphone and on both sides of the Atlantic, the first post-war generation - young adults now - was ready to tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it.