The Sound Of The City - The Charlie Gillett playlist

  I would like to assume that most of you have read some edition of Charlie Gillett's excellent book. If you haven't then you need to go buy one, they are plentiful and cheap.

In the back of that book Gillett has a 390 track playlist that only someone as crazy as my friend Cliff would set out to actually assemble in it's entirety. Well he did and it plays like one of the better musicology classes one could take. The sequencing essentially give the audio illustration of the book.

If you should notice that the list is larger than the one in your edition of the book, it is because this one incorporates all the material from all the editions. Once again, THIS IS 390 TRACKS! To do this, even in 160 mp3 requires well over a gig so it is a 7 part group of zippyshare links that are connected.

"These are the records which moved rock ’n’ roll another inch or two forward. The reasons for including each record vary, but each of them became a part of the background for anyone making records thereafter. Some are here because they brought a new musical idea into the framework of “rock’n’ roll” – piano boogie, guitar boogie, bass boogie; others redefined the use of an instrument – electric guitar, back-beat drums, electric bass, electric piano. And each new way of using a voice is represented by the person who thought of it first, usually with their first hit. The list is biased against the real giants of the era – Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan – whose every record tended to be a trigger for a host of imitators; for them, and for the Motown artists, a few representative records are listed, trying to catch most facets of what they did. It is easier to represent contributions by the majority of performers who only had one basic idea. Most of the records in the list were best-sellers, and they are listed in the chronological order in which they first surfaced on a national chart in the USA (pop, rhythm & blues, or country and western) or Britain. In addition to the artist, title, and record label, the recording location and producer are listed, to give an idea of the geographical shifts during the period, which saw records made in most regions of the United States and then, increasingly important through the sixties, in Britain. A few records are listed which were not hits, mostly to represent the first recording of a song which became part of the rock ’n’ roll repertoire, but occasionally to acknowledge a record whose value was recognized too late to affect its chance of making the charts. The term “producer” did not come into common use in the music industry until around 1957, so for prior recordings the terms “arranger” and “supervisor” have been used. The letters “p”,“a” and “s” are used in the following pages. Ideally, the name of the recording studio and the recording engineer would be provided too, but as such information is still largely undocumented, I have not attempted to find it. The labels listed sometimes include the original label in parentheses before the name of the label which licensed the record for national distribution; and sometimes add in parentheses the name of a parent company where the record was a hit on a subsidiary label."

Gillett, Charlie (2011-01-04). The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock & Roll (Kindle Locations 9725-9736). Souvenir Press. Kindle Edition.