Rock Chicks

The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960s to Now

Rockpool Publishing Pty Ltd

Contents

1960s

The birth of the rock band

The cultural revolution that was the 1960s actually began the decade before with the rise of the Beats, a group of American writers who composed riffs challenging the mores of the stuffy Western society of the post-Second World War years. On the surface everything appeared sunny and civil. But there was an undercurrent of fear and oppression darkened by the shadows of the A-bomb and the Cold War and stirred by the increasingly potent black rights movement led by Martin Luther King. And the tidy society of suburbs and wifely submission was about to be shaken by the introduction of the contraceptive pill and women's sexual 'liberation'.

The work of the Beats — most notably Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg — described the alienation of youth, was influenced by jazz and subjected to censorship. They lived on the fringe, experimenting with drugs and writing about subjects not discussed by polite society. Along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, they were 'rebels without a cause'. The Beats hung out in the North Beach area of San Francisco, smoking weed and chewing speed in open defiance of the authorities. Many of the rock chicks — including Janis Joplin, Marianne Faithfull and Chrissie Hynde — cite the writers of the Beat Generation as major influences.

In August 1961 Berliners awoke to find their city divided by an ugly barbed wire wall. Overnight the Soviets had erected a wall dividing East and West Berlin. Protests against racial segregation were splitting America and folk singers were beginning to top the charts with political protest songs. Two years later, John F Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King gave his landmark 'I have a dream' speech and the US Congress held the first hearings into the fair treatment of women where terms like the 'glass ceiling' were heard. There had been a seismic shift in society.

Rock music was born into this world in turmoil. Whether it was a case of life imitating art or vice versa, the artists of the 1960s, and musicians in particular, were central to change. The music of the 1950s — the choreographed girl groups like the Chantels and the Chordettes, female singers Connie Francis, Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Petula Clark, Doris Day and Peggy Lee, and the male jivers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bobby Darin — began to