"The 50 Moments that Changed Rock 'n' Roll"

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The Moments


Fifty years ago, on the Fourth of July, three men got together to rehearse some songs they planned to record the next evening, a Monday. One of them was a nineteen-year-old Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley. There is no one who doesn't know what happened next.

Moments like this -- the turning point in rock & roll -- are what we chose to celebrate in the second of our three special issues devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of rock & roll.


There are, of course, an untold number of crucial moments in rock's history - just as many as there are listeners who have had a song or a show change their lives. We chose to focus on the universal moments, those that changed the way all of us listen to music and see the world. Some of the moments we chose were accidents: five teenagers calling themselves the Kingsmen spending fifty dollars to cut the greatest party song of all time. Some were the result of painstaking work: Chuck Berry pushing through thirty-six takes of his first single, "Maybellene." There were ecstatic celebrations, as when 400,000 fans came together to turn a disaster area into Woodstock, and times of tragedy, as when a worldwide audience observed ten minutes of silence after John Lennon's death.


Together, these moments tell the story of rock & roll's invention and reinvention across half a century. What they have in common is that they draw on the same rhythms and freedoms that Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black tapped into on July 5th, 1954. Fifty years later, the sound they stumbled onto that night still resonates.