In the early 1960s the music for teenagers was sweet and soulless, manufactured pop with a beat for crooners such as Bobby Vinton and Bobby Vee. The music of blues singers such as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf was powerful and rebellious and had come out of struggle in a way that spoke to the British Working Class, who were not politically constrained as they were in white America.
In 1962, The Rolling Stones formed and started playing in the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. Their Blues with a British twist proved a hit with teenage audiences. The Rolling Stones began creating their own songs with lyrics loaded with arrogance and sex. Their space at the Crawdaddy club was taken by The Yardbirds, who attempted to produce their own twist on the blues, helped by their guitarist Eric Clapton, who was considered by some[who?] to be so proficient with the guitar that he garnered the popular nickname "God". However, he split from the Yardbirds after their commercial success to become a serious blues musician.
A new wave of British bands were now emerging. The Kinks produced an electrified gritty sound expanding musical possibilities. Inspired by them, The Who combined a macho image, pop art and fast driven rock. In 1965, year zero of rock, the Who released a song that the program postulates defined the era, "My Generation", and was incredibly innovative in both its sound and rebellious message.
The Animals had first opened the path for these bands with the reimagining of "the House of the Rising Sun", which they came across when it was covered by Bob Dylan from the New York folk scene. He now took inspiration from these new British bands by going electric to produce "the Wild Thin Mercury sound of Rock Music", which added sophisticated lyrics to rock.
Back in Britain, Eric Clapton had found creative freedom in his own band Cream, which were much more musically skilled than most other groups at the time. They took the language and feel of the blues producing the 'endless-solo'. Disraeli Gears took the blues and combined it with the drug-filled psychedelia, showing the artistic potential of rock.
When The Who went to the Monterey Pop Festival, they innovated the live performance by channelling aggression, playing at high volume and destroying their instruments. This established the festival as the centre of the rock performance but also signalled the end of the innocent optimism of the summer of love. Anxieties over the Vietnam war and social unrest rising and, after the Woodstock Festival, business started to take over what artists were doing. This new mood was channelled by the Rolling Stones using darkness as a new creative zeal. However, they were plunged into their own darkness with the death of Brian Jones and the chaos of Altamont, where, according to Al Kooper, the innocence of the Sixties finally died.