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 Elvis Presley's signing to RCA in 1956 for the then positively kingly sum of $35,000 aside, rock and roll was mostly ignored by the major labels--and Columbia Records was no exception. Mitch Miller, Columbia's pop A&R chief, flatly dismissed rock as a fad that "makes a virtue out of monotony." He was far from being alone in his opinion. Even a born rebel like Frank Sinatra perceived a threat to his reign at the top of the heap in the alien strains of rock and roll. Taking extreme umbrage, he branded the upstart phenomenon "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear." Of course, rockers like Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis knew otherwise--as did a vast, expanding teenage audience. While suburban dens were likely to have stationed in it a hi-fi console (a formidable piece of furniture) stocked with Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett and the Sing Along With Mitch volumes, their teen progeny holed up in bedroom fortresses, spinning stacks of big-holed 45s on tinny, tiny record players. Thus, between the easy-listening den and the rock-and-rolling bedroom, did the first fissures in the generation gap appear.
With Miller focusing Columbia's energies (successfully, it must be noted) on adult-oriented pop throughout rock's first decade, Columbia didn't enter the youth-must-be-served fray until the early 1960s. At that point, rock and roll was on the ropes. With Holly and Eddie Cochran dead, Little Richard born again, Chuck Berry imprisoned, and Elvis self-exiled to B-movie hell, the mainstream music industry could push easily controlled, safe-as-milk teen idols in their place. Meanwhile, on college campuses and in enclaves of urban bohemia like Greenwich Village, folk music had begun taking wing. The medium may not have been as visceral as rock and roll, but the message was urgent and impolitic. Columbia executive John Hammond, who'd already raised a few eyebrows in 1961 by signing the once-blacklisted, banjo-strumming political activist Pete Seeger, raised them even higher the following year by inking Bob Dylan, a raw, young rebel with a cause from Hibbing, Minnesota, who was already making waves on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene.
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