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Welcome to the History of Rock, Part One. I'm John Covach.
I just want to take a few minutes as we begin the course to talk a little bit
about the use of the book and some of the musical materials that we'll be talking
about over the course of these seven weeks. the, the philosophy of Coursera is to make
these courses as widely available, and as close to free to people as they can
possibly be. So it shouldn't cost you anything to take
this course. So the course has been designed so that if
you should do nothing more than participate in watching the lectures and the
quizzes, you should have a perfectly satisfactory experience studying the history
of rock with us here. but if you want to deeper experience, one
that goes into more detail one that's able to cover things that we don't have time
to cover in the video and other artists and songs. the textbook is actually
pretty good supplement to that. I've worked with my publisher
and they're, they're making an online version
of the text available to you for a lot less than it would cost to buy the paper text.
so you might want to consider that, even you don't even have to start with that.
But if you, if, if we start to get into the course and you start to feel like
yeah, this is something maybe I'd like to do, I'd like to know more about that.
then you can, you can purchase that text at anytime.
In fact, if you can find a used copy of the first or second edition of my book,
What's That Sound, that would really work just fine too.
The current edition is the third edition, of course we think that's the, the best
and most improved edition. But the first and second edition's are
almost very, very close to the, the same kind of thing, of, some certain sort of
small changing around that we've done. But I recommend the textbook with the
course, but you don't have to. One of the things about the textbook that
is offered though, and that Norton is offering if you buy their subscription,
is you'll be able to see the listening guides for a lot of the songs that fit
with each of the chapters. And these listening guides lead you
through some of the most important songs, representative songs in, in each of the
chapters with each of the weeks. there also will be video guides to those
listening guides on the Norton sites so you can hear me talking about each of the
song saying a little bit about them before you listen to them.
That brings us to the, to the topic of the songs themselves.
In the music business, as we'll study during the course of these cour-, these
seven weeks people in the music business have never really had a habit of wanting
to wait for their money. They want to be paid now.
And when it comes to being able to play music to you here over the internet
through Coursera, that's something that we can't do unless we would pay eh,
exorbitantly high in licensing fees to do it.
And since the idea is to keep this as close to free as possible, I'm going to
leave it to you to find the music. It shouldn't be too hard to do.
People have all ki-, got all kinds of ways of being able to find this music.
It's widely available on the internet, but it's going to be on you to find that.
We will create a playlist on iTunes. So if you want to download and pay for
the exact versions that I'm talking about in the listening guides if you happen to
use the books that would be, in fact the way to do that.
There are some differences in, in versions of these tunes.
So you gotta be careful that you're actually getting the original version.
The one that was originally recorded during the historical period that we're
talking about. A lot of times, artists were able to
re-record the same song. A Chuck Berry may have, you know,
recorded a Roll Over Beethoven in the 50s but he may have also recorded it in the
70s. And you happened to get the 70s version of it. And you say, golly, that sounds just
like a 70s band. Well, actually it is a 70s band,
because that's the recording he did then. So, we really
want to get the right recordings. After we get past about Sergeant
Pepper and start to get into the late 60s and early
70s, the only variants you're going to find are live versions versus the
original studio versions. But anyway, I wanted to say take a moment
just to talk about the recordings. So you decide for yourself whether or not
you'd like to you'd like to use the book and whether you'd like to get deeper into
the material as we go along.