In The Foundations of Rock, Walter Everett has produced a treatise both systematic and idiosyncratic, at once a comprehensive primer on the elements of rock music and a somewhat breathless gallop through the record collection of an ardent fan. Everett claims to have listened to “well over sixty-five hundred songs” in the course of his research, and the book's profusion of musical examples gives the impression that he would like nothing better than to introduce readers to every one of them (vi). The range of examples is appropriately eclectic and refreshingly open-minded in its inclusiveness: Herman's Hermits, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and the Cowsills mingle unapologetically with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and The Band. Basing the book on contemporary commercial successes, rather than on the critical canon, Everett represents a true picture of the pop era that the book engages. He also implicitly asserts that a record collection—in addition to, yet aside from, the cultural, historical, and stylistic contexts of individual discs—is a musical universe unto itself.

Everett intends “foundations” in both theoretical and historical senses. “This book,” he writes, “is defined as covering the ‘Foundations of Rock Music’ in reference to stylistic parentage, in reference to the embryonic nature of the era of repertoire covered, and, most importantly, in reference to the elemental materials—color, pitch, rhythm, form, lyrics, and engineering—that form the building blocks of rock music” (vi). With the acknowledgment that the last of these is his main focus, it is not surprising that the historical foundations receive less attention, but for many readers the book's anachronism will take some getting used to. Basing his research on records in the top-twenty positions on Billboard's Hot 100 from 1955 to 1969 (a period, he writes, that “represents the cauldron out of which rock was born”), Everett includes numerous examples from such stars as Mitch Miller, Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Kay Starr, Henry Mancini, Sammy Davis, Jr., Vaughan Monroe, Eddie Fisher, Mary Ford, Patti Page (actually, “The Tennessee Waltz” example falls a good five years outside the book's nominal time frame), and the Four Lads. The connection to rock's “popular cousins,” as he calls them, is indicated by the motley configuration of the pop charts and by the fact that there are innumerable common uses of musical elements among the idioms. We do not think of any of these pop stars as rock acts, however. If their inclusion makes the point—rightly—that rock of the period shared much with its pop elders, it also blurs what have become conventional historical and aesthetic distinctions.

The book is concerned primarily with syntactic rather than stylistic principles. Although Everett is well aware that certain configurations of musical elements are more or less typical depending on stylistic idiom, he routinely conflates styles in illustrating a syntactic point. Occasionally—as in the discussion of gospel, boogie-woogie, and Nashville “slip-style” piano techniques—style topics surface briefly (67–79). Some examples are grouped together in implicit acknowledgment of their stylistic kinship (e.g., repeated alteration of V and IV chords in songs by the Temptations, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett) (228). Everett is less interested here in distinctions than in commonality, however. So Wynonie Harris, the Tijuana Brass, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Plastic Ono Band, the Grateful Dead, and the Boston Pops all provide examples of backbeat handclaps (19). Eddie Fisher, the McGuire Sisters, Pat Boone, Andy Williams, Frankie Avalon, the Platters, the Safaris, Bobby Lewis, Brian Hyland, the Caravelles, the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Frank Sinatra, the Happenings, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan provide a chronological set of examples for the II^m7 to V progression (271).

On the other hand, the book has a running stratum of interpretation linking song lyrics and topics to their musical settings. Providing readers a sense of the connection between musical function and emotional affect grounds what might otherwise seem arbitrary abstraction. Here is an especially chockfull example:

The broad inclusion—page after page—of so much stylistic diversity asserts the dimensions and versatility of an artistic language whose elements enable a wealth of varied expression spanning pop generations. In demonstrating common practices among disparate examples, Everett implicitly stipulates a provocative aesthetic position. Although the presence of a VI – VII – i chord progression in Ferrante and Teicher's “Exodus,” Bob Dylan's “All along the Watchtower,” and the Cowsills' “Hair” might seem little more than an odd coincidence, aesthetically speaking, the tracks' apparent disparity seems to be precisely what piques Everett's interest—the fact that records of such varying expressive surfaces contain a common musical resource (260). Throw in the many popular cousins cited and, more than the foundations of rock, the book reads like a compendium of postwar pop language aimed at describing what the author sees as its essential resources and functions.

Everett peppers the narrative with details that both contextualize and enliven. In a discussion of orchestral instruments, for example, readers learn that strings may “constitute a post-production add-on of little consequence, as in . . . the filler punctuation added by Snuff Garrett to Bobby Vee's ‘Stayin’ In,' and the many Buddy Holly demos such as ‘Raining in My Heart’ and ‘It Doesn't Matter Anymore’ given posthumous strings by Dick Jacobs” (110). Neither Garrett's nor Jacobs's involvement is vital to the point, but the statement nudges interested readers in the direction of further research and gives them a place to start. Occasionally Everett's command of factual minutiae can become distracting as it strays from relevance amid what is already a packed narrative (e.g., in contemplating instances of snare rudiment techniques in pop, I probably don't need to know that Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's mother won an award in the discipline), but overall the running asides will appeal to rock fans (7).

The Foundations of Rock includes chapters on instruments, voice, melodic design, rhythm, meter, harmony, form, and sound engineering (a welcome addition to the music theory project). However, Everett's greatest interest is clearly in the realm of harmonic structure and function, a topic on which he spends four chapters. The book is largely jargon free, but the Schenker-derived conception of harmonic relationships and the thickets of chord symbols and Roman numerals will take some careful digesting for average pop fans. Still, Everett does his best to present complex issues in a step-by-step way (and the book's companion Web site is quite helpful). He begins with a chapter on “Chord Construction” that explains the concept of consonance and dissonance and presents examples of seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords. A “Diatonic Harmonic Function” chapter follows, outlining types of harmonic motion. Again, Everett illustrates theoretical concepts with interpretations of song lyrics. The IV^M7 in the chorus of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's “Woman, Woman,” for example, is “too fragile” to rise to the V chord. Instead, the V “can only be reached through a stronger harmonic preparation, the falling fifth from ii. The cuckold [the song's protagonist] must gird his loins through ii in the accusatory ‘mi-hi-hi-ind’ [‘mind’] moment” (225). As with all the author's interpretive moves, readers may well have other ideas. The impression Everett leaves convincingly, however, is simply that harmonic function is integral to a song's overall sense, a point at once obvious and yet largely lacking in the music's critical historiography.

Everett reminds us that “the huge majority—by thousands—of top-twenty songs from the 1955–69 period are squarely in the major mode,” but he also presents in the final two harmony chapters (“Harmony in Minor and Other Nonmajor Modes” and “Chromatic Harmony”) a very useful guide to less common harmonic cases (161). Everett's experienced ear takes note of such harmonic phenomena as the major II functioning “not as artificial dominant to V, but as a dead-end color chord” in Barry Mann's “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp),” the Rolling Stones' “Time Is on My Side,” the Beatles' “Eight Days a Week,” and Bob Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's Alright” (278–79). He alerts us to the rarity of “strong tonicization” among scale degrees in the minor mode, assuring us that “only one area, III, is sustained with any regularity” (282). He also presents numerous examples of nontonal harmonic motion along with descriptions of their effect. The harmony chapters demonstrate a signal value of Everett's research and presentation methods. It takes copious analytic listening to uncover harmonic functions across a musical language, and it takes a broad frame of comparison (anachronistic though it may be) to reveal how widespread is a given practice. The book is best taken in the spirit it is offered: as an experienced theorist's considered report on his findings among 2,459 top-twenty singles, “plus hundreds of notable lesser hits and more than three hundred full albums.”

Clearly, The Foundations of Rock is a book not so much to be read through as to be used, studying each example in turn. Readers experienced in the repertory and in music theory will easily grasp many examples in their mind's ear from Everett's integration of prose description, musical description (in scale degrees and chord symbols; there is no musical notation), and song lyrics. Even if one knows the cited example, however, it is well to stop, listen, and savor the point. If, on the other hand, the repertory is largely unfamiliar, readers may need to stop several times in a sentence to verify with their ears what they are reading. In either case, readers have something new and useful in the budding field of rock music theory: a wide-ranging presentation of rock's fundamental elements compiled lovingly by a committed scholar with deep knowledge of the repertory.