Mitch Miller
As head of Artists & Repertoire for Columbia Records
in the '50s, he single-handedly kept rock off the label for 11 years.
''Adults all over the land are yearning for a pause in the day's
cacophony,'' he told a disc-jockey convention in 1958. ''I, too,
believe that youth must be served, but how about some music for the
rest of us?''
Frank Sinatra
Ol' Blue Eyes frequently saw red about rock, and in
1958 in Western World magazine he lambasted it as ''sung, played, and
written for the most part by cretinous goons. It manages to be the
martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the
earth.''
Dan and Steve Peters
''Rock music has become the devil's
playground,'' wrote these Minnesota preachers in their 1984 book, Why
Knock Rock? To keep Satan at bay, they've staged public burnings of
rock records for more than a decade.
Tipper Gore
This senator's wife says she's only against allegedly
violent and sexually explicit rock. But she campaigns against it so
fiercely that many people forget there's any other kind. Her
organization, the Parents' Music Resource Center, works closely with
the National PTA but also has ties to fundamentalists; the Peters
brothers' Why Knock Rock? is featured on its recommended reading
list.
Harry Connick Jr.
The cocky jazz wunderkind has no use for rock. ''If I played rock & roll, I'd be revered as the greatest rock & roll
musician in the world,'' he recently said. ''It's music that requires
very little knowledge and not much talent.''
