The rock musical and the beginnings of rock music in Israel in the early 70s

ABSTRACT

This article uncovers an untold story of how rock music came to the big stages and national broadcasting studios of a country transitioning from the European sphere and a socialist ethos to the American sphere and a market-oriented culture. In demonstrating how the rock musical preceded, anticipated, and likely enabled rock music in Israel, this article will focus on five rock musicals from the early 1970s. We argue that the rock musical introduced a friendly and commercially oriented version of rock and rock’n’roll music and its antics, and thus enabled wide crowds to adopt a foreign-born culture such as rock. By the end of that process in the mid-1970s, the broad acceptance of American rock music and particularly a socially involved rock aesthetic had emerged through the overlooked and unlikely genre of the rock musical.

KEYWORDS:

• Rock
• 1970s
• rock musical
• rock opera
• Americanization

Introduction

Rock music emerged in Israel as a cultural force in the early 1970s in parallel with wider cultural transformations that recalibrated its ethos and society. Rock did not make musical or commercial inroads into the mainstream through the vibrant yet peripheral “beat bands” scene of the late 1960s. It did achieve wide commercial success and gained audiences only a few years later, during the age of the canonical Hebrew rock bands (a novelty before the iconic and groundbreaking albums of Kaveret (1973–1975) and Tamouz (1976)).¹ This article demonstrates how the theater stage provided local audiences with a taste of rock idioms already in the early 1970s, before the establishment of rock in Israel as previous studies have argued.² Particularly we demonstrate how through the processes of copying, reproducing, and adapting, a handful of successful imported and original rock musicals (and several commercial flops) that were staged between 1970–73 offered wide audiences a close encounter with rock music and its culture. Those relative few who attended rock concerts in clubs on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, or who bought the various experimental records that were being released by fringe artists may have experienced an authentic rock aesthetic. However, the “rock musical,” which imitated and recited that aesthetic for commercial gain may have done a more important service to Israeli rock, which was on the verge of emerging, by introducing a friendly and commercially oriented version of rock music and its antics to local crowds. This allowed a foreign-born culture such as rock to be soon after adopted more easily by the public. Furthermore, as we shall see, the rock musical may not have been seen in Israel as inauthentic, as its actors were perceived as “the real thing,” thus blurring the line between life and art, the authentic and spurious.

In demonstrating how the rock musical preceded, anticipated, and likely enabled rock music in Israel, this article will focus on five rock musicals from the early 1970s. While sorting these works — Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Don’t Call Me Black (Heb. Al tikra li shahor), Bald Head (Heb. Karahat), and Jump (Heb. Kfotz) — into clear-cut genres is challenging, the typology musicologist Scott Warfield’s suggests is helpful here. The works at the center of this article fall into Warfield’s three sub-categories of the “rock musical,” i.e., self-identified rock musicals, works that began as concept albums, and musicals that emulate styles that preceded rock: Hair, Bald Head, and Jump belong to Warfield’s first category of works that were identified as rock musicals by their creators and producers.³ Hair famously started as a stage musical although it signified a break with the classic tradition of musicals in practically every aspect including its social statement, music, and staging. The Israeli productions of Bald Head and Jump were obviously imitations of the American original and as such were too self-consciously conceived as rock musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar belongs to a second category of works that began as concept albums. Conceived and executed as a successful and star-ridden LP album, Jesus Christ Superstar was consequently staged and then adapted into a popular movie musical with strong links to the so-called “backstage musical,” a plot set in a theatrical context that revolves around the production of a play. Don’t Call Me Black is the hardest to pin down, as it combines elements taken from the musical, the uniquely Israeli military ensemble program, and the political revue, with its musical style combining gospel, blues, and early rock. Don’t Call Me Black thus belongs more loosely to Warfield’s category of musicals that emulate earlier styles of rock’n’roll (in this case mainly blues and gospel).⁴

Such a typology helps in contextualizing these works, analyzing their impact, and in uncovering how rock music, particularly American rock, came to the big stages and national broadcasting studios of a country transitioning from the European sphere and a socialist ethos to the American sphere and a market-oriented culture. That Israel had become, by the 1980s, and still is, a devotee of America and Americana is undisputed. But the process by which this came to be has not been adequately outlined. Here we contextualize the emergence of a foreign genre of rock music and particularly a socially involved American rock aesthetic through the overlooked genre of the rock musical.

Popular music in pre-1970 Israel

The turn of the 1960s witnessed a significant cultural and material realignment of Israeli society. Up until the beginning of the 1970s, the visible presence of Americana and the soft power that the United States exerted on Israeli society were negligible. This less-than-prominent American cultural influence was evident in Israeli musical preferences. Still dominated by the founding generation that had migrated mostly from European countries, Israel’s musical ethos before the ’70s was oriented accordingly. The folksy Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) were mainstream and hegemonic but eclectic in their musical style. The influence of eastern-European Jewish music, with its characteristic musical scales (Steigers), was predominant in the Yishuv up until the late 1920s when a new generation of song composers adopted a neo-modal approach.⁵ While the newly-found modality permeated both local concert music and folk songs (and remained disproportionally represented in local music education ever since), popular music, especially in Tel Aviv, absorbed a wide array of influences. Some of these influences enjoyed an aura of real and imagined local authenticity, transmitted by singers-informants such as Brakha Zefira (1910–1990), while others were fashionable foreign dance styles like tango, waltz, foxtrot, and swing.⁶ Still, one of the strongest influences remained the Russian and Polish folksong. Through the work of prolific songwriters like Moshe Wilensky (1910–1997) and Alexander (Sasha) Argov (1914–1995), eastern European musical styles predominated popular culture, from the theater to the satirical revue, the early military bands, and their successful nonmilitary successors like the ensembles Batzal Yarok (Green Onion), Ha-Tarnegolim (The Roosters), and Ha-Hamtzitzim (The Wood Sorrels).⁷ During the ’60s, the French chanson style, following the model of Brassens, Aznavour, Brel, and Les Compagnons de la chanson, also gained currency in the local scene.

The sudden and overbearing influence of the United States on Israeli society after the early 1970s that underlay, and was causally connected to, the rise of rock music is a major cultural realignment that has not yet been satisfactorily analyzed. While some of its manifestations and drivers have been noticed and studied, the contextualization of rock music within wider trajectories, such as the emergence of American-style consumerism and capitalism in Israel, is still wanting.⁸ While after the first flourishing of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s American artists including the Golden Gate Quartet (in 1957), The Weavers (in 1959), Louis Armstrong (also in 1959), and Gene Vincent (in 1962) visited Israel, it was a sporadic and inconsistent flow.⁹ The local response to these visits was not always encouraging as even the most distinguished Jazz artists (like Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson Trio) did not stir enough interest in the local scene, which was dominated by musicians who were mostly born, trained in, and had fled Europe during the 1930s, and were thus Eurocentric in their musical inclinations.¹⁰ While American rock’n’roll did gain a foothold in the burgeoning “Salon” urban subculture in the early 1960s, the mainstream cultural prism snuffed and filtered out the more presumably subversive shades of American rock (as well as other styles such as Motown), resulting in a somewhat diminished and distorted view throughout the 1960s of the variety that American music had to offer.¹¹

The British Invasion was a crucial milestone and shaping force in the history of rock music, with its roots traced to the sudden outburst of Beatlemania after February 1964 (following the Beatles’ series of three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show). While its focus was first and foremost on the United States, the Invasion had a great impact on nations on the geographical and musical periphery as well. Hence scholars and critics have rightly emphasized the significance of the British Invasion on the Israeli scene. Due to the great debt British popular music had to contemporary American music those writers consequently understood Anglo-American music as a single shaping force.¹² As such, a distinct and direct American influence on Israeli bands has been identified only toward the middle of the ’70s when the powerful influence of the Beatles as an active band was waning, as modern recording studios emerged (most notably Triton Studios in 1972), and a new approach to music production was attempted in the albums of the high-profile bands Kaveret and Tamouz.¹³ While post-WWII British popular music was in many ways derivative from and imitative of American pop music, a comparison between British and American influence on Israeli music is appropriate. We thus distinguish here British music, which exerted increasing influence on Israeli music since the Invasion, from its American counterpart.

American music recorded by local artists in England was vital in reintroducing the rich tradition of blues music (as well as providing a fresh take on the Brill Building-type song) into the American mainstream, as it legitimized and popularized blues and its black practitioners among white audiences.¹⁴ In Israel, British music played a different role: while British music did not bear the burden of legitimizing blues music as it did in the United States, it was vital in injecting into the Israeli public sphere the exploding energy of rock’n’roll music and aesthetics. Further, the chronology of the distinct Invasions (to the United States and Israel) was different as music originating in the British Isle acted in Israel as a primary model that was separate from music originating from and associated with America already before February 1964 when it “invaded” the United States. Cliff Richard and The Shadows exerted an early and, at least until the mid-60s, major influence: the success of their films The Young Ones (Ha’Zeirim) in 1962 and Summer Holiday (Hoofshat Kaitz) in 1963 prepared the local youth for the group’s sensational Israeli visit in September and October of 1963.¹⁵ The Shadows were subsequently often mentioned by Israeli musicians as an important model for imitation, and the band’s visit was followed by a marked spike in the local demand for electric guitars.¹⁶ Arik Einstein clearly adopted the Richard-Shadows model of a charismatic singer who bestows prestige on his band and subsequently gains musical stature by working with the top instrumentalists in the field. Such a “Cliff Richard model” was evident as early as Einstein’s show and EP Arik ve-ha-Einsteinim (Arik and the Einsteins, mid-1966) and became standard throughout his career.

From the mid-60s, it was mainly the Beatles who influenced dozens of local artists and the underground and socially marginal beat bands that performed English covers in clubs on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.¹⁷ But the Beatles were not playing alone in the field: former members of the dispersed British band The Tornadoes joined the local bands Ha-Churchillim (The Churchills) and the Ha-Arayot (The Lions). The evidently-British sound of Ha-Halonot Ha-Gvohim (The High Windows), whose eponymous album from 1967 is considered a cornerstone of Israeli pop, won them a contract with CBS London during their London tour.¹⁸ It was another British band, The Tremeloes, that topped the Beatles for the title Band of the Year in the 1968 Israeli charts.¹⁹ British influence loomed large both in the fringe of the local scene, for example in the smaller-scale projects of elitist progressive rock musicians, as well as in more mainstream projects.²⁰ That British music invaded Israel before the United States clearly demonstrates Israel’s cultural dependence on American culture at one of the turning points in the history of popular music. In a mere few years, such independence from American culture would be all but unimaginable.

Hair

Although the aforementioned beat bands had been introducing rock to Israel’s geographic and social margins since the early ’60s, these marginal and peripheral groups did not serve as a venue for rock’s eventual breakout into the mainstream as has been previously speculated. Even though these bands experimented sporadically and sparsely with rock’n’roll sung in Hebrew, and by the late ’60s even lent their foreign and mostly British sound to leading singers such as Arik Einstein, during their heyday, they mostly focused either on cover performances or originals in English.²¹ Only a minority of their production before the ’70s was in Hebrew, and of that very little could be specifically identified as essentially derived from anything that distinctly belonged to American music or culture.

American music still played a mere ancillary role as late as the end of the ’60s, as attested by the New Year’s Eve celebrations at the turn of 1969. Partygoers who chose to spend the final hours of the decade in various popular Tel Aviv clubs enjoyed eclectic variety shows that mostly demonstrated provincial tastes and parochial lineups. Those shows included local entertainers, mostly identified with a blend of traditional SLI, French chansons, and contemporary pop. American rock or other manifestations of Americana were noticeably absent from those parties.²² Those who sought younger and wilder sounds could head to the Alhambra in Jaffa, where the Dagan Theater produced an up-to-date pop-rock concert in collaboration with the two leading agents of beat bands, Haim Saban and Yehuda Talit. The description of the Foreign Hit Parade concert significantly placed the British element before the American: “a selection of hits from all 1969 hit parades from Britain, USA, and Galei Tzahal [the IDF’s radio station].” Ha-Arayot, recently returned from a stint in London (where they were styled “The Lions of Judea”), opened the lineup and were followed by an English group, The Cocktail, and by the popular local group, Ha-Churchillim, who had just become top star Arik Einstein’s backing group and represented in name and style the British rock aesthetic.²³

The pop charts of the closing weeks of the decade told a, by now, familiar and complimentary story that underscored the contemporary taste for British, rather than for American music. Six of the top ten artists on the foreign hit parade of the closing week of 1969 were British (The Tremeloes, Barry Ryan, Joe Cocker, The Beatles, Engelbert Humperdinck, and The Scaffold), one was French (Nicole Croisille), one Italian (Adriano Celantano), while the US was represented somewhat obliquely by Les Irrésistibles (an American boy band active in Paris) and The Turtles, whose song “Elenore” was in fact a style-parody, sung by one of the band’s alter-ego groups.²⁴ The separate Hebrew charts (charting songs sung in the vernacular) similarly reflected a merely indirect American influence. In a national radio chart from December 29, for example, the ranking no. 1 was Yehoram Gaon’s “I Have a Dream,” which loosely alluded to Martin Luther King’s famous speech. Although the song may have musically bore a resemblance to “The House of the Rising Sun” (originally an American folk song that was introduced to Israeli crowds through the British band, The Animals), its delivery was operatic and full of pathos, a far cry from rock aesthetics. The rest of the Hebrew songs on the charts bore the trademarks of SLI and soft pop influence. Yet two songs performed by two military song groups, “A Song for Peace” (Heb. “Shir la-shalom”), and “Who Will Carry My Soul” (Heb. “Mi yisa et nishmati”) (nos. 5 and 6 respectively), hinted at a surging wave of American influence on the horizon.

Alongside the aforementioned “Who Will Carry My Soul,” Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam (Navy Variety Ensemble) had no less than three other songs in the charts in the last week of December. While in retrospect it appears overshadowed by its military rival, Lehakat Ha-Nahal (Kibbutzim Brigade Band), at the time the Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam could claim to be the most up-to-date with the latest musical trends. In November, critic Ya’akov Ha-Elyon compared the group’s new set, Blue Barge (Heb. Raphsoda be-khahol, a pun on Rhapsody in Blue) to the greatest hit running abroad – the sensational musical Hair. According to Ha-Elyon, when the group sang “Who Will Carry My Soul:”

The bodies [of the soldiers-performers] stormily twisted. The boys were out of control, the girls, in tight white outfits, did not stay behind, thrashing their tresses to the thundering rhythm. The band almost blew up the loudspeakers and the lights were flickering in colorful frenzy on the stage. Wait a minute, what is happening here? We have already seen something like that, but not here but on Broadway and off-Broadway; is this scene not taken out of Hair?²⁵

Hair was initially produced off-Broadway in October 1967 and then on Broadway from the end of April 1968. From there, in less than six months it caught fire worldwide. Ha-Elyon thus expected his readers to understand the reference to a musical that would not be staged in Israel until June 1970. That the ensemble’s new show lent itself to comparison with the provocative Broadway show was not taken lightly. Many found it disgraceful that young soldiers representing the navy corps before the public should take part in unleashed theatrical avant-garde, drawing inspiration from a musical that celebrated pacifism, drugs, and nudity.²⁶ Blue Barge was also the set for which the ensemble purchased its first electric guitar, an American-made Fender Jazzmaster,²⁷ a potent “instrument of desire,” and one that underscored the powerful connection between an American-made object and American-influenced Israeli rock music.²⁸

The abovementioned “Song for Peace” also had a significant link with Hair. Arguably the most iconic song of the all-important army entertainment and song group, Lehakat Ha-Nahal, the lyrics of “Song for Peace” (Shir la-shalom) were written by Ya’akov “Yankele” Rotblit, who was severely wounded in the 1967 Six Day War.²⁹ The lyrics convey a clear pacifist message, and the opening line—“Let the sun rise”—is often read as a reference to Hair’s finale, “Let the Sunshine In.” Though Rotblit claims he had never heard Hair when he wrote the lyrics, “A Song for Peace” bears the unmistakable characteristics of the Vietnam-era Zeitgeist. Nathan Alterman, the most influential Israeli poet since the late 1930s and a prominent public voice of the country’s founding generation, argued in print that the line “Sing a song for love and not for wars” twists the American slogan by transplanting it in a wrong, Israeli, context. Alterman considered a pacifist sentiment to be viable and relevant within the American context of resistance to the ongoing Vietnam War that was fought on a faraway land with no clear or immediate purpose. However, through the prism of the small country’s siege mentality, it seemed to him a misguided mode of thought. Alterman argued that the song blindly imitated “stylistic mannerisms and protest formulas and demonstration songs, that … in their natural [American] habitat” had a genuine and rightful purpose. In Israel, he insisted, they were “mere fashion.”³⁰

In retrospect, it seems fitting that “Who Will Carry My Soul” and “Song for Peace,” which reflected psychedelic and counterculture sensibilities, were climbing the Hebrew charts. Indeed, as these two songs dominated radio broadcasting in late 1969, a local production of Hair was already being negotiated. Echoing Alterman, the leading producer Giora Godik argued that producing the musical in Hebrew translation would be discordant with the Israeli circumstances of existential war and isolation and that “there is no justification for the Israeli youth to identify with scenes like urinating on the national flag or with pacifism.”³¹ In light of Hair’s authors’ insistence that the Israeli production should be in Hebrew and thus more easily understood in the local context, Godik gave up the opportunity, and Ya’akov Agmon, the producer of the Bimot theater, stepped in. When, in early February 1970, Agmon’s negotiations failed as well, the producer Orgad Vardimon agreed to the musical’s authors’ terms and the parties signed a contract.

By that time, a translation into Hebrew was already underway. The all-important task of the translation of the musical’s libretto was given to the young Ehud Manor (1941–2005), a talented 29-year-old lyricist. While Manor would eventually become a canonical and much-beloved writer, in the late ’60s he was still relatively unknown. Nevertheless, a song he wrote earlier that year about his recently fallen brother, “My Young Brother Judah,” in which Manor held a somber and touching dialogue with a sibling killed in combat in the previous year, was performed by the Lehakat Gyasot Ha-Shirion (Armored Corps Band) to great success. The sensitive lyrics of that stirring song made poet Hilit Yeshurun and director Jacques Katmor recommend Manor to Hair’s local producers. In Manor’s own account, the two apparently felt that “whoever wrote the touching lyrics of ‘My Young Brother Judah’ would probably be the right person to translate the anti-war musical [Hair].” Manor accepted the task and for over a year was consumed by the project. His own personal tragedy undoubtedly played a significant role in his decision to accept the work of translation and was projected into its creative process. Manor worked hard to bring to local crowds the revolutionary nature of the pacifist themes and the underlying social turbulence that engulfed the United States, ranging, in his own words, from “war, racism, poverty, drugs, [and] free love,” to “homosexuality and pornography.” For a still somewhat puritan Israeli public sphere, parading such controversial topics on mainstream stages promised to be explosive. The futile and exasperating death of Hair’s pacifist antagonist, Claude, echoed Manor’s personal loss and mourning. “Has anything changed?” he asked emphatically years later.³²

Local audiences seem to have expected Hair to be more than a theatrical spectacle, perhaps even a surrogate of the flower power phenomenon. In a lengthy preview of the musical, a week before it opened, Mirit Shem-Or (theater journalist and later notable songwriter) described how ordinary Israelis looked at the local cast as they walked the streets of Tel Aviv as if they were “real” hippies abroad:

“Indians!” they are being shouted at on the streets. “Hippies! Degenerates! Filthy! Fie! What’s that?” or simply “Meshigeners,” but they don’t care. They wear their jeans cut up to their knees, hang exotic chains on their bare breast and their sun-burned ankles, stick flowers in their ears or in their long hair and kindly smile at the idiotic world that surrounds them. They—the colorful cast of Hair—catch the sober Tel Avivian eye everywhere possible.

The colorful cast appears to have adopted the Hippie mannerism and lifestyle not only on stage and for promotion stunts (running around “like happy sun children, in [Tel-Aviv’s central] Dizengoff square, doing nude ‘Dolce Vita’ in the fountain”) but carried it over into their lives in “improvised parties that last till morning” in their communal living quarters.³³

Shem-Or attempted to translate, mediate, and ameliorate the cast’s behavior to her readers by describing their communal pastime as “Palmah style,” referring to the easy-going style of the founding generation. This awkward attempt to familiarize American counterculture notwithstanding, the cast undoubtedly seemed out of place: Hair’s members’ behavior, clothes, and demeanor were all foreign. Yet the cast was different not only due to its hippie lifestyle but also because of the backgrounds of its participants. While the bulk of the actors were native Israelis, the cast’s black members came from South Africa, the United States, and Jamaica. The producers recruited white actors from abroad as well – perhaps because too few of their local counterparts conveyed an authentic sense of counterculture. Indeed, the stories of some of the cast embodied genuine subversion: Alice Ormsby-Gore, for example, came from British aristocracy (daughter of David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador to the U.S. and later member of the House of Lords), while Chris Jagger drew the attention of the local media as the younger brother of the Rolling Stones’ superstar Mick Jagger.

Hair represented the cutting edge of the genre of the American musical, and the local production appropriately imported a Broadway approach to increasing the revenue from the play beyond ticket sales. Around the time of the premiere (June 6), RCA released an Israeli printing of the album DisinHAIRited, containing songs written for the musical that were not included in the canonic Broadway production.³⁴ Others tried to capitalize on the production in an exemplary chutzpah manner: Singer Danny Ben-Israel recorded an EP with four songs from Hair without seeking permission from either its authors or the translator. Ben-Israel, who had been a soloist in an army song band in the mid-1960s, became somewhat of an enfant terrible in 1969 when he recorded the album Hantarish 3¼,³⁵ arguably the boldest local attempt at an underground psychedelic, deliberately low-fi project. In his unauthorized Hair EP, Ben-Israel took a similar low-fi approach: his rendering of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” combine the rhythmic freedom of a self-confident vocalist with a backing track strewn with wrong chords and an erratic bass part. Torn from its context as a finale, “Let the Sunshine In” on Ben-Israel’s EP begins from the middle of the song, skipping Claude’s extensive opening verse and recapitulation of “Manchester England.” It appears that Ben-Israel, a skilled musician, was overhasty in producing the EP, and while it is hard to say when and how he received the texts from Manor’s translation, it seems safe to assume that they did not circulate too long before the premiere in June. In all probability, Ben-Israel simply hoped to ride the success of the official LP of the local production. Unsurprisingly, a court order banned the EP from radio play due to copyright infringement.³⁶

Hairy American hippies and Bald-Headed Israeli flower power

Hair was poised to inject a cosmopolitan air into a country that was striving for a taste of the latest cultural developments. The local show-business “industry” expected the translated Broadway show to become a hit, and rightfully so, as Hair had a tremendous impact on the Israeli music business, spurring it into action and producing local variants and Hair spinoffs, proving the market’s quick and decisive response to upcoming opportunities.

As its name implies, the original musical Bald Head was written as a direct response to Hair but, due to the long negotiations around the local production of the Broadway hit, Bald Head opened two months before its American model. Unlike Hair, however, the underlying political message of the libretto (written by Yehonatan Geffen) was vague, to say the least. Kobi Recht, who played a main role in the cast, later confessed that neither he, nor anyone else in the cast (including the director), understood exactly what the libretto was about.³⁷ That vagueness, not to say avant-guardeness, may have contributed to the very limited success of this original production that ran for only two months.

While Bald Head’s rock-influenced esthetics did not engender commercial success, its hasty production made it necessary to recruit an active band, Ha-Bama Ha-Hashmalit (The Electric Stage), and thereby receive a ready-made and consolidated ensemble. Regardless of the fact that it responded to an American production and plotline, Bald Head’s most evident musical influence was more British than American: The musical’s songs bear a strong affinity to Beatles songs (particularly to “The Inner Light” and “Hey Jude”) and one of its hits, “Tnu lanu latzet [Let us break free],” was likely a homage to the Animals’ “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place.”

The musical Jump was another local response to Hair and the cultural revolution it signified. Conceived and produced in less than six months after Hair opened in Israel, Jump was a self-consciously local version of the international musical, reflecting a recognition that a proper response to Hair must address local contexts. Echoing Alterman’s criticism about the foreignness of American-born counterculture sensibilities, the assumption underlying Jump was that Israeli crowds respond to cultural and historical contexts they recognize. Jump did not, however, count solely on the fact that it was locally rooted, and adopted an aggressive marketing strategy that pulled shocking stunts to raise public interest, minimize costs, and maximize profits.

Jump opened on November 28, 1970, at the Alhambra in Jaffa (the same venue that hosted the aforementioned Foreign Hit Parade on New Year’s Eve). Looking back, it is quite astonishing to learn from newspapers that less than three months earlier, the production was still no more than a vague concept. The show’s producers, however, seemed to have blitzed the media with half-baked updates and half-truths. By mid-September, journalist Ya’akov Ha-Elyon reported that the lyrics for Jump were being written by Amos Ettinger and that the music will be written by Robb Huxley (lead guitar in Ha-Churchillim) and Haim Elgranati (singer in Ha-Arayot); none of the three would eventually be involved in the project. Ha-Elyon also describes a 14-piece orchestra (which also did not materialize), and an elaborate staging concept, but without specifying the venue.³⁸ The following weeks proved tumultuous. By the end of September, the papers reported on negotiations between the producers and potential lead singer Mercedes Edri (nothing materialized), and that the executive producer was abroad looking to purchase a psychedelic lighting system.³⁹ Later, it was reported that the producers were negotiating with actor Assi Dayan to co-produce and had chosen the Shavit Theater in Givatayim as the venue for the production. In November, the production switched to Alhambra as the preferred venue, as negotiations with Dayan fizzled. Even closer to the premiere, it was reported that “Judging by some of the [obscene] lyrics, our radio stations will ban broadcasting Jump’s songs.” Newspaper advertisements contained nude figures, and the nudity on stage was publicized directly in the news, and indirectly by the heated demonstrations and even riots sparked when the production toured outside Tel Aviv. Following the nudity controversy, a false report of a bomb in Alhambra disrupted the show’s premiere.⁴⁰

The incorrect report on Huxley’s and Elgranati’s involvement as composers, and the eventual recruitment of Ave Orchover (member of beat bands Revolver and Uzi Ve-Ha-Signonot [Uzi and the Styles]) and Danny Sanderson (then still a soldier guitarist for Lehakat Ha-Nahal), demonstrates that the producers sought writers who were identified with a driving American rock beat. Huxley and Elgranati (neither of whom would be involved in Jump), as well as Orchover, were scions of the local beat bands, which were, as noted, early adopters of the British rock aesthetic. The young Sanderson, on the other hand, who would become a founding member of the famed rock band Kaveret and its central and most prolific writer and composer, was born to American parents and was raised in New York City. His American roots would be obvious during his Kaveret years (1973–76), of which he was the de facto leader, and the band itself followed the Allman Brothers in the unusual setting of the three-guitar, seven-member ensemble, and the southern-rock sounds they created. Following the precedent of hiring a ready-made band as cast members (Ha-Bama Ha-Hashmalit for Bald Head; Ha-Shokolada [The Chocolade] for Hair), producers recruited an active band, Uzi Ve-Ha-Signonot. By doing so they, too, received an already well-trained and consolidated ensemble, simplified the recruitment process, and enhanced the band’s already established reputation.

Jump told the story of a group of Israeli high schoolers and the dilemmas they face, and like Hair it communicated a pacifist sentiment. While the songs’ lyrics touched on local Israeli issues, Orchover and Sanderson did not achieve Jump’s rocking style without making compromises relating to Hebrew diction.⁴¹ The kind of words that “our radio stations will ban” may have been impolite swearwords, such as “She-yikfetzu” (literally “let them jump,” meaning “I don’t give a damn” or rather “screw them”), which referred to canonical writers and figures of the Jewish, Hebrew, and world literary tradition who were invited to “go jump:” among them the national poet, Bialik, the twelfth-century philosopher and theologian, Maimonedes, the biblical prophets, Zarathustra, Helen of Troy, and others.

The talented, young, and restless Sanderson, who was recruited to Jump only to compose music, was already working simultaneously on another ambitious project of his own design. That project will evolve two years later into the epoch-making band Kaveret. Sanderson and Kaveret, in which he was the driving force, were perhaps the most ardent advocate of American music in early-’70s Israel. Born in Israel to American parents but growing up in New York, Sanderson he formed a successful teenage cover band, and upon his return to Israel in 1968, became one of the first and most effective advocates of American blues-rock and rock’n’roll. Just like Jump, Sanderson conceived Kaveret in its embryonic state as an experimental rock opera named Poogy’s Opera, notable for its musical complexity and its nonsense humor. Indebted to Frank Zappa’s theatricality and sarcasm (and Kafka’s and Pinter’s absurd literature), Poogy’s Opera told the absurd and humoristic story of a group of people who broke their promise to wait for their friend, or perhaps master, Poogy, inside a dark closet.⁴² After Poogy’s Opera, Sanderson and his band started to work on at least two more musical-like works, both of which were eventually aborted: Ha-sipur ha-mahrid al ha-yeled mi-Brazil [The Horrendous Story of the Boy from Brazil] and Ha-melech Mambo [King Mambo].⁴³ While the librettos of the three works did not allude directly to the United States, they contained some of Kaveret’s most guitar-heavy recordings (like “Hazarti me-Yapan [I Returned from Japan]” and “Histaparti be-Madrid ve-hitkalachti be-Yavan [I took a Haircut in Madrid and a Shower in Greece]”) and the band’s only attempt at 12-bar blues (modified to 16-bars, in “Okhel ta-tzipornayim [Eatin’ the Nails]” from Ha-sipur ha-mahrid al ha-yeled mi-Brazil.

Jump, in turn, clearly imitated Hair, a fact that was already noted in Ha-Elyon’s preview, and featured prominently in later reviews, some of them harsh indeed.⁴⁴ The fact that the musical ran only a small number of shows was attributed to the powerful public pushback against its anti-war message and, particularly, the live onstage nudity. Whatever the exact reasons for Jump’s commercial failure, it is clear that the local production of Hair sprung A-list show business players to action on multiple fronts, and evidently hit a cultural nerve in Israel of 1970. With the trailblazing military bands leading the way, and a local and successful production of the original with at least two provincial imitations following, it was obvious that themes of race, sex, drugs as well as pacifism and spirituality had arrived in Israel. Yet Hair not only introduced the counterculture to the Israeli public, but the musical also functioned as a vessel through which, for the first time, mass audiences became acquainted, firsthand, with an American brand of rock music that was embedded in its socio-historical context. Two other rock musicals would solidify the genre’s significance by further injecting American rock into the budding Israeli musical scene.

Jesus Christ Superstar

The international impact of Hair was phenomenal. The unleashing on stage of the energy and subversion identified with rock perfectly complemented and further drove the exploration of social boundaries that marshaled the art world in the late 60s. Hair also facilitated experiments in other genres. A young duo, lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Weber, led one of the boldest experiments, releasing a pioneering double LP titled Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970. The album was conceived as an independent concept album and was only later adapted for the stage as a musical, which was adapted into a movie. However, while Rice, Weber, and most of the original album’s cast were English, its musical style was heavily influenced by American rock, and the various American adaptations were far more successful than their English counterparts. It may be argued that, with the release and success of the American-produced movie, Jesus Christ Superstar was as much American as it was English art.

Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock musical, one that was initially conceived as a concept album. With its operatic and progressive-rock inspirations, the musical makes use of rock idioms as primary devices for characterizing its dramatis personae.⁴⁵ Retelling the final days of Jesus’s life, it portrays a tormented protagonist who, while very human, is a “superstar,” an epithet closely related to “rock star.” Jesus is portrayed as the quintessential social provocateur, and as such he naturally carries the aesthetics and the energies associated with rock music. For Judas Iscariot, however, the fact that his rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, transforms into a superstar deprives him of the ability to carry the banner of genuine protest. Hence, Jesus himself becomes the addressee of Judas’ protest, and thus it is Judas’ parts that are written in characteristic poetic and musical rock style. The tragedy of the rocking Judas fueled and driven by his disappointment and anger, clearly resonated with the storm, stress, and angst of the Vietnam-era generation.

In his retrospective poem-novel Jailhouse Rock (Rock be-veit ha-sohar), Yehonatan Geffen provides a link between Jesus Christ’s superstar image (and specifically a pacifist superstar) and the first Israeli rock musicals. Geffen describes his thoughts upon arriving in Tel Aviv as a young man from his native rustic Nahalal around the time he wrote Bald Head’s libretto:

In the 1969th year to the birth

Of the sufferer from Bethlehem,

The perpetual youth,

The first founder

Of all rock groups

His hands nailed sideward

In sweet everlasting grief.

And now he is being drawn

In pink and purple

On all walls

With a slogan at the bottom:

“Make love not War.”⁴⁶

Connections between Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair, the archetypical Vietnam-era rock performance, were too unmistakable and at times material: Murray Head, who sang Judas on the album, was on the cast of the West-End production of Hair. Moreover, Judas’s and the work’s music as a whole clearly echoed the sounds of Deep Purple’s In Rock and Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album – both enormously successful LPs that were also released in 1970. It was more than a coincidence that Ian Gillan, Deep Purple’s lead singer (and for a short while in the early ’80s Black Sabbath’s), was cast to sing Jesus’s lines on the LP.⁴⁷

The three main versions of Jesus Christ Superstar — concept album, rock musical, and movie – were released in Israel in that order and increasingly preoccupied both local audiences and even the establishment. The album received a generally warm welcome from Israeli critics. The negative depiction of the Jews in Tim Rice’s narrative seems to have been initially overlooked or, at the very least, not politicized. The decision of whether to buy the record remained personal and out of the public sphere. As we have seen in Geffen’s case, the ideas expressed in Jesus Christ Superstar echoed in his memory of Tel Aviv in 1969 (whether they had influenced him in real time or not). Critics reviewed the album favorably on the whole, but the staging of the rock opera before a live audience was a different matter. Staging the passion of Christ may not have been in itself problematic, but it became explosive when paired with damning depictions of the Jews’ role in Christ’s death.⁴⁸ Indeed, an early attempt to produce a concert performance in one of Tel Aviv’s premier venues was reported in late 1971 but never materialized.⁴⁹

The movie Jesus Christ Superstar was another product of its time. Like the Broadway musical it followed, its characters embodied counterculture and rock sensibilities. This was evident in the way the movie’s director, Norman Jewison, connected Judea in the first century A.D. to the twentieth century by adding a frame story. The movie begins with a theater troop of young, hippie-looking actors arriving at the movie location in Israel’s Judean Desert to reenact the life of Jesus. The group of hippie actors is depicted working in communal harmony preparing the set, ignorant of the tensions that are about to befall their respective characters as they enact the plot. Jewison followed the Broadway production in casting the black actor, Carl Anderson, in the role of Judas, adding an interracial, a-historical, and modern dimension to the Jesus-Judas conflict. The movie’s Judas is a complex and anguished figure engaged in an inner struggle that propels him toward the inevitable betrayal of Jesus. Accordingly, Judas’s musical persona reflects the caricature of the cunning evil-doer through the prism of sentiments associated with rock. Indeed, Judas’s anger and aggression seem more authentic than the sentiments expressed by the movie’s version of Jesus the social reformer. The musical contrast is nowhere starker than in the grand finale “Superstar,” where Judas addresses Jesus colloquially in an unmistakable soul style, as the choir summarizes his questions formally in “White” classical Anglican style. Judas is the ultimate representative of an aggressive and soulful black American style.

While the music and libretto for Jesus Christ Superstar were originally composed by British artists, the movie that followed was an American production that cast exclusively American singers-actors in the lead roles. The final product, shot in various locations in Israel’s extensive Judean and Negev deserts, was thus conceived, and eventually received as an American composition. While it also stirred a strong reaction from an Israeli-Jewish audience sensitive to millennia-old allegations of “Christ killing,” the LP and later movie helped cultivate an Israeli ear for rock music that resembled Hair rather than the Beatles. Further, like Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar was significantly rendered as a sung epic and not as a collection of 3 minutes hits played by a 4-piece band. In other words, it provided Israeli audiences with yet another example of the genre of the rock opera that was instrumental in the local cultivation of American rock music.

The chronology of rock musicals in Israel appears so far to follow a failed local original production with an American one: first came the obscure Bald Head, followed by Hair, which was soon followed by the failed local attempt Jump. Not long after, the music of Jesus Christ Superstar and the local shooting of its production brought to the fore in Israel the passionate American music but also its operatic essence. Even though for various reasons the movie only hit cinemas in Israel in 1975, Jesus Christ Superstar’s imprint on local popular culture would be long-lasting, evident in the distinctive Hebrew translation of “superstar” (kokhav elyon, literally, “supreme star”), which has since become a common idiom and something of a cliché.⁵⁰ Even more significant, Jesus Christ Superstar became associated in Israel with American culture. By 1981, this identification, which elided the music’s British origins, was manifest in the dubbing of President-Elect Ronald Raegan a “superstar” through the attachment of satirical lyrics to an orchestral performance of the opera’s song “superstar” on Israel’s then only TV channel.⁵¹ Evidence for the fact that religious impediments, whether conscious or not, rather than any stylistic incompatibility, hindered the production of Jesus Christ Superstar, may be seen in a much later television homage to the work. In 1991, singer-songwriter Danny Robas performed the musical’s opening number “Heaven on Their Minds” (Mythos) in Zehu Ze, one of the most successful entertainment shows on Israel’s only channel, but the translation omitted the explicit name “Jesus” which appears six times in the original, including Judas’ heart-piercing cry to his Rabi in the first verse. While the musical was never staged in Israel, in all likelihood due to its controversial interpretation of Jesus’s life and the involvement of Jews in his death, it is still relevant to our analysis. The LP and the shooting of the mainstream film (that was actively aided by the Israeli government with IDF tanks and aircraft inserted into the film as anachronistic images of state power) demonstrate how the genre of the rock musical was becoming a significant source for showcasing and disseminating American rock music in Israel. With audiences attuned and calibrated through Hair (and Jump) and Jesus Christ Superstar, the groundwork was laid for a major local rock spectacle that would make a substantial original statement.

Don’t Call Me Black

As mentioned above, two military-band songs in the charts of December 1969, “A Song for Peace” and “Who Will Carry My Soul,” foreshadowed the American soft power (soft flower power in this case) that was to reshape Israel from the ’70s onwards. “A Song for Peace,” by virtue of its subversive pacifist message, was first censored and eventually gained an iconic stature. “Who Will Carry My Soul,” on the other hand, did not gain traction and is nowadays largely forgotten. Musically, however, the latter song reflected a distinct shift toward American music and served as the immediate precursor of a musical stage hit — Don’t Call Me Black (1972, henceforth DCMB). With its pre-politically-correct and curious name (why would the discriminated voice, a-la Almagor, ask not to be called black in the age of Black Power?), the commercially successful DCMB underscored a full-fledged acculturation of distinct American contemporary music, as well as the out-and-out expression of its contemporary reigning social discourse, moral economy, and sensibilities. Out of the three creators responsible for DCMB — lyricist Dan Almagor (b. 1935), composer Benny Nagari (1950–2019), and stage director Danny Litay (1940–2013) — Litay and Nagari previously worked with Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam, which had recently released “Who Will Carry My Soul,” composed by Nagari and directed by Litay, and served as a laboratory for the two in which to experiment. Considering the restrictions of a military environment, the result was striking and yielded the aesthetic that would soon ripen into DCMB.

Nagari emerged as a musical maverick in 1968 at the age of 18, when he co-wrote the music for playwright Hanoch Levin’s satirical cabaret Ani, at, ve-hamilhama ha-baa [You, I, and the Next War]. With proven experience and thorough classical training as a flutist and composer, Nagari was recruited later that year to the Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam, where he was quickly promoted to the role of music director – a function otherwise reserved for more experienced civilian professionals commonly contracted by the army. In that role, Nagari steered the ensemble’s aforementioned set Blue Barge (1969), as well as their later 1971 set Shirat ha-yam [Song of the Sea].

The song “Who Will Carry My Soul” (from the set and LP Blue Barge) was imbued with gospel music: its lyrics, the distinct use of the organ and blue notes, its calls and responses, and the unmistakable repeated hallelujahs. In a radio interview in 1996, Nagari described his gospel-influenced work as “Israeli Soul Music,” specifically mentioning the Edwin Hawkins Singers as a major influence. He further remarked that his music managed to avoid the accusation of being inauthentic and derivative, criticism often leveled at local rock bands who imitated American and British music but sang in Hebrew.⁵² Alongside “Who Will Carry My Soul,” Blue Barge stretched the accepted satirical boundaries for a military group: it contained a humorous Hebrew version of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” a psychedelic-rock style song (“Sailor Gabriel”) about a dreamy sailor (hinting at his use of drugs), and “America” — a satirical dialogue between Columbus (who eroticizes his newly-found continent) and his sailors who find no merit in the New World, except for “money, rhythm, and Marijuana.” The Hair-influenced directing and staging, as well as the lighting and sound amplification, perfectly fitted the subversive aspects of Blue Barge. The program eventually produced several hits, and more importantly, the set’s unrivaled soloist, Shlomo Artzi, who would become the most recognizable and successful Israeli pop-rock performer and songwriter of the ’80s and ’90s.

Dan Almagor, who wrote DCMB’s civil-rights-era-influenced lyrics, spent 1963–1968 close to ground zero of counterculture in Los Angeles as a Ph.D. literature student at UCLA. During those pivotal years, Almagor witnessed the unfolding of formative events, such as the March on Washington (1963), the escalation of the Vietnam War and the rise of the opposition to the war, as well as cultural phenomena such as the Summer of Love (1967). As a witness, he reported back to his Israeli compatriots in extensive pieces in the national newspapers describing the tumultuous events and atmosphere, highlighting particularly race relations. In January 1965, for example, Almagor interviewed African-American playwright James Baldwin about his recent Blues for Mr. Charlie, which had debuted a few months earlier on Broadway. Almagor took the opportunity of reporting on the play, which is loosely based on the lynch-style murder of the black teenager Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955, to provide an analysis of racism in America. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the Israeli graduate student took it upon himself to mediate the plight of Afro-Americans to his compatriots back home. Almagor did not confine himself to the literary sphere, reporting also on the Los Angeles Watts riots (1965). Less than a week after the deadly riots ended, he reported in New-Journalism-style on the still-tense scene, with the devastated Watts neighborhood reminding him of a “vanquished city.” In this “special,” Almagor described the curfew and hunger among the locals, as well as the plight of the Jewish merchants whose businesses were looted and burnt to the ground. True to his calling as an interpreter and not merely a conveyer of events, Almagor concluded with an analysis of the historical and sociological roots of the riots, ending with a scathing indictment of American racism and inequality.

The seeds sown in Almagor’s witnessing of the plight of African-Americans in the ’60s, and the shock and frustration it evoked in him, would bear fruit upon his return to Israel. After his return, Almagor joined forces with Nagari and Litay on the Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam’s 1971 set, Song of the Sea. The success of the set, even without the charismatic presence of soloist Shlomo Artzi (who had by then completed his military service), convinced the trio to continue their cooperation outside the military. The following year, that cooperation resulted in DCMB, a sophisticated homage to American blues and gospel music, dedicated to exposing and mediating contemporary American social injustices. Most people in Israel had not seen anything like it. DCMB was a powerful cry against prejudice and discrimination, conveying its message in Hebrew through Afro-American-inspired hymns of struggle and triumph, employing themes ranging from recent history to biblical tropes. The ensemble of four male and three female singers were clad in colorful clothes, distinct jewelry, and afros, in an aesthetic apparently inspired by Hair, which had prepared Israeli audiences to perceive the show through racial and counter-culture filters.

DCMB’s songs did not follow a tight narrative but as a group offered a gallery of observations, ranging from the pathetic to the witty, revolving around the cruel implications and the hypocrisy of racism. Not a “musical” in the orthodox sense, DCMB offered an entertaining collage of styles, from rhythm and blues and gospel to the more exotic Caribbean calypso. More a theme-set than a rock musical in a strict sense, the show’s songs harnessed the anger and frustration, identified with black resistance, to a musical-theatrical construct of extraordinary sophistication, combining musical techniques borrowed from classical music and Broadway musicals. The song “The Boxer,” for example, describes professional boxing as a promising, albeit life-risking, way for young black males out of poverty and the ghetto. The rapid changes in tempo throughout the song symbolize the dramatic contrast between the boxer’s youth and his older life, as well as the boxer’s subjective (and distorted) experience of time during the fight. The singers’ slow and monotonous count before the end of the fight — “five … six … seven … eight … nine … ” — creates a dramatic effect similar to that of the flagellation of Christ in Jesus Christ Superstar (“Trial Before Pilate”). The songs “Until When” (Heb. “Ad matai”) and “Snow White” (Heb. “Shilgiya”) use a Schubert-like harmonic tension between two separate keys (one for the verse and another for the refrain), although, unlike in Schubert’s music, here some of the keys are superimposed with Blue Notes scale, connecting those songs to their American roots.

Some of DCMB’s songs were clearly in the gospel tradition. “A Day Shall Come” (Heb. “Yom yavo”) was a prime instance of Hebrew-sung black gospel, both in its unmistakable music and messianically optimistic lyrics of liberation. “A Day Shall Come” was destined to become DCMB’s greatest hit and remains a cultural mainstay five decades later. Other songs took actual incidents as their topic to underscore the toxicity of American racism. Such was “[Who Murdered] Bessie Smith,” (Heb. “[Mi ratzah et] Bessie Smith”) which was based on the tragic death of the early blues diva killed in a car crash and allegedly denied treatment in white-only hospitals.⁵³ Songs such as “The Slave” (Heb. “Ha’eved”) recounted, in the first person, the experience of a nameless slave in the antebellum South from the slave market to the cotton field.

Another cohort of songs took on biblical themes to underscore the role of “blackness” in the Old Testament. Such was the song “Nimrod,” praising the morally ambivalent black hunter-king in the Book of Genesis, usually depicted negatively. “Jacob’s Ladder” (Heb. “Sulam Ya’akov”) retold in song the patriarch’s dream of a ladder of climbing and descending angels as a bi-racial tale. “A Black Woman” (Heb. “Isha kushit”) was a typical call-and-response narration of the story of Moses, with the response line “Because he [Moses] took a black woman” attributing the successes of the prophet to his black wife. “Snow White” (Heb. “Shilgiya”) took on the biases of Western fairy tales, asking bitterly: “Why do all the girls in fairy tales have snow-pale skin and wavy golden tresses? Why isn’t there a story about a curly dark Snow White?” DCMB was thus doubly unique in the Israeli cultural landscape and imagination in combining a wide-ranging attack on racial discrimination with the employment of music associated with African Americans. The fact that the show was well received both at the box office and with the critics (it won the prestigious Kinor David prize) illustrates how a distinctively American piece of popular music had taken a foothold in Israel by 1972.

Listeners easily understood the subtext of the show’s message, which clearly alluded to local Israeli tensions and discrimination toward Mizrahi Jews who had immigrated from Arab countries. It was no coincidence that DCMB alluded to and drew from the Afro-American struggle, as just a year before its 1972 debut a group of young Mizrahi activists had named themselves “Black Panthers” (Ha-Panterim Ha-Shehorim). Protesting the fact that they were relegated to the lowest echelons of Israeli society, the local Jewish Panthers emerged overnight with “a series of raucous demonstrations and attention-grabbing antics.”⁵⁴ They took their symbols from the original American Panthers (the clenched fist and the image of a black panther) and proclaimed pride in their ancestry in the face of criticisms of their culture as failing to modernize.

Whatever the precise political consciousness of Mizrahi Black Panthers, they demonstrated how the counterculture politics of the Sixties were taking hold of the Israeli imagination. The Israeli Panthers brought to the domestic stage an iteration of the larger race, class, and culture struggles then taking place across the ocean, at the very time when televised broadcasting and news reporting (initiated in August 1968) was bringing moving images of the wider world into Israeli homes for the first time. That conjunction facilitated performances such as DCMB and enabled Israelis to better contextualize their local and international references.⁵⁵ At the same moment as the Jewish-Black alliance was falling apart in the United States, a theoretical new alliance was being proposed in Israel in a more radical guise. Within that new framework, American racism was the model used to expose and give meaning to Israeli racism. Hence, the Israeli Black Panthers, the Arab Jews who called themselves “black,” were harbingers of a rock performance that decried racism by, ironically, commanding its listeners: “Don’t call me black!”

The parallels with and allusions to Israeli racial tensions were not a subtle implication of DCMB aimed at high-browed elites, but rather a bold statement. Around its debut in late July 1972, newspapers previewed the show as “a young ensemble trying to ‘relate’ the discrimination of negroes in America to ‘the racial segregation in Israel.’”⁵⁶ While ethnic discrimination in Israel was a social reality, racism was nowhere supported by law, completely lacked the violent and terrorizing aspect of American racism and was thus much more subtle than in the United States. Nevertheless, the comparison of the Mizrahi Jews to Black Americans touched a raw nerve in Israeli society. Prime Minister Golda Meir was a Milwaukee native who would have witnessed first-hand discrimination against African Americans, several thousand of whom lived in her hometown when she left for Palestine in 1917, coinciding with the beginning of the Great Black Migration to northern cities. With her first-hand knowledge of the American brand of racism and discrimination, Meir was among those who pleaded with the Israeli Panthers to change their portentous name. Consequently, DCMB was immediately criticized for its inappropriate comparison of the sufferings of American blacks and Arab Jews in Israel.⁵⁷ It took only a few weeks for the explicit comparison to be taken out of advertisements for the show, which was now sugar-coated as “Pleasant and colorful – mainly for the young.”⁵⁸ Nonetheless, with the Panthers lurking in the background and the American racial experience serving as a template of oppression and injustice, the equation of Jews originating from Arab lands as “black” was clear.

Regardless of generic differences, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and DCMB (as well as the much less prominent Bald Head and Jump) shared at their core a rock aesthetic and counterculture sensibilities that had shock value in Israel of the late ’60s early ’70s. Furthermore, whether these works are classified as a rock musical, opera, or spectacle, and whether they were geographically rooted in Haight-Ashbury, in black urban ghettos, or even in London, they projected to receptive Israeli audiences something they could identify as “American” and that was exciting, rambunctious, and foreign, yet increasingly familiar. In a peripheral country undergoing a major cultural realignment and about to wholeheartedly embrace the grip of American soft power, in the early years of the 1970s rock music became an important venue for acculturating counterculture mannerisms and sensibilities.

The enigmatic graffiti that appeared all over Jerusalem in 1985, “Koko is 19,” provides a case in point. It quickly became clear that the graffitiing was a concerted marketing ploy for a movie about Koko, a teenage leader of a rock band. Koko is a poor Mizrahi teenager who writes a song detailing his rough life in the slums. His band performs a song he wrote in a low-key, rhythm and blues style but does not have a breakthrough. When a band of upper-middle-class Ashkenazi kids covers the song in a guitar-driven, hard-hitting performance they score a big hit. Koko falls into crime and meets a tragic ending. More than a decade after Hair and DCMB brought to the fore social and counterculture rock sensibilities, local audiences were ready for a plot that pitted Israeli ethnicities against the soundtrack of American music, ranging the whole gamut from R&B to a biting rock.⁵⁹ By the mid-eighties, other exceptionally successful bands were riding that same wave: Benzine, a working-class band led by a local guitar hero Yehuda Poliker, and Tislam, whose mega hit “Strong Radio” (radio hazak) employed powerful distorted guitar sounds and a hard drum beat, topped the charts and had numerous followers and groupies. Shalom Hanoch, former leader of Tamouz, released his epoch-making album Waiting for Messiah (mehakim la-mashiah, 1985), which included blunt criticism of Israel’s involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War, social critique and a flamboyant rock sound that was clearly riding the success of Bruce Springsteen. American rock in Israel had not only come of age but also topped the charts. An emerging stadium-concert culture later in that decade completed the “American turn” of Israel’s musical culture.

Conclusion

Studies of Israeli popular music have convincingly established the importance of the first American-influenced albums of the mid-’70s: Danny Sanderson, co-composer of the Hair-like rock musical Jump, would form the iconic band Kaveret in 1973, whose distinctly local mannerisms were nonetheless based on the guitaristics of the Allman Brothers. The distinctive production style of Tamouz’s epochal and only album, The Orange Season is Over (sof onat ha-tapuzim, 1976), was shaped by Louis Lahav, mere months after his work officially as an engineer but as a de-facto producer on Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (1975). By the time The Orange Season is Over was released, Israeli rock, now with a distinct American flavor, stood its own.⁶⁰ While we agree with the general lines of that narrative, a central chapter in the history of Israeli popular music, and in a larger sense of the rise of America’s influence in and on Israel, has yet to be told: both the timing of the birth of Israeli-American rock and the means by which it was born, need to be recalibrated.

The theater stage had, as we have seen, took part in importing countercultural sensibilities into Israel, as it bridged the chronological gap between the first local flirtations with the musical style of American rock (around 1970) and the fruition of the stadium rock concerts (around the summer of 1988). The behavior of the Israeli cast of Hair functioned as a surrogate of the flower-power phenomenon; the subversive Jesus Christ Superstar albums sold like hotcakes and their presentation of Jesus as “superstar” did not seem to bother anyone (the public sphere erupted however once a public staging was proposed). In 1988, both Shlomo Artzi and Shalom Hanoch would promote their unprecedently-ambitious double LPs, with correspondingly ambitious stadium concerts. The ability to sound their social critique before thousands of fans was apparently the piece that was missing from the jigsaw of Israeli rock for almost two decades. A few months into the violence of the first Intifada (which began in December 1987), Israeli audiences needed to hear and resonate with that critique, and Israeli rock could, at last, fulfill its social function.

The early years of the 1970s were crucial for the unfolding of this story, during which a succession of productions, rock musicals, and concept albums that were based on American blues, rhythm and blues, and rock were commercially successful. Those spectacles presented novel musical aesthetics reflecting the social sensibilities in which they were bred. In other words, the rock musical was useful in introducing Israeli crowds to the American rock aesthetic. In order to better understand and contextualize that rocking “American invasion” we need to include into our account the emergence of the rock musical in Israel of 1970–72. It will also be a promising starting point to make better sense of the overwhelming dominance of the United States in the life of the Israeli nation.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous readers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa generously funded a work group on the origins of Israeli rock music. In that forum, we benefited from the helpful suggestions and insights of Tal Vaizman, from the assistance of Noa Toib who discovered exciting archival sources, and from Yair Raviv (and Noa) who transcribed video interviews with the founders of Israeli popular music. We are grateful to Dadi Shlesinger, guitarist with Lehakat Heil Ha-Yam at the time of the Raphsoda be-khahol production, for supplying first-hand knowledge on the production.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alon Schab

Alon Schab is a musicologist, composer, and recorder player. He is a faculty member in the Department of Music at the University of Haifa, a committee member of the Purcell Society, and he chaired the Israeli Musicological Society from 2019–2022. He is the author of The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and A Performer’s Guide to Transcribing, Editing and Arranging Early Music (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Eran Shalev

Eran Shalev is a member of the history department at the University of Haifa. He is the author of American Zion: The Bible as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press 2012), and Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2009). He is currently completing a book titled The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy in the Age of the American Constellation.

Notes

1. The present study refers to a large number of bands, musicals, albums, and songs, both from Israel and abroad. In some cases, the same title denotes both the name of a band and one of its albums; an album and its stage production; or a musical and its film production. Many Hebrew names and titles are significant for the study and hence merit translation. To ease distinction, Hebrew names of songs, albums and musicals are translated into English unless indicated otherwise. Band names are given in the original Hebrew. Titles of musicals, musical programs, albums (including singles and EPs), books, theater plays, films, and radio and television programs are given in italics. Song titles and lines quotations from song lyrics are given in double quotation marks.

2. Michael Figueroa has recently pointed out that musicals in late 1960s’ Israel carried over some of rock music’s countercultural ethos. Figueroa concentrates on two musicals created by lyricist Dan Almagor before his involvement in Don’t Call Me Black (that will be discussed later in the article) — Once There Was a Hasid (Heb. Ish hasid haya) (1968) and My Jerusalem (1969) (Heb. Yerusalayim sheli) — that mark the rise of that ethos in Israel. These two musicals certainly demonstrated what Figueroa identifies as an “aesthetics of ambivalence” toward Zionist ideology, but their musical style was far removed from the novel and subversive contemporary sounds of London and Woodstock: the music of Once There Was a Hasid was based on Hasidic tunes and that of My Jerusalem was written by classically trained Noam Sheriff, and song composers Sasha Argov and Nurit Hirsh – both indebted to the SLI tradition and its predominantly Russian roots. See Figueroa, “Aesthetics of ambivalence,” 261–82.

3. Jump was often referred to as a pop opera, rather than rock opera. Nonetheless, its clear framing as an answer to Hair may justify its classification as a rock music, if not to Warfield’s first category, then to his third (“and most arbitrary”) category – works “that used rock styles […] yet were never identified (at least not publicly) as ‘rock musicals’ by their creators […].” Scott Warfield, “From Hair to Rent and Beyond,” 282. See also Shuker, Popular Music: The Key Concepts, 109–11; 179.

4. One should note that some of these definitions could be challenged by contemporary perspectives: Jesus Christ Superstar, for example, shows more affinity with Pink Floyd’s style in 1970 than with Lloyd Weber and Rice’s own later style (for example, in their 1976 musical Evita). Thus, John Rockwell’s classification of Jesus Christ Superstar as a rock musical rather than a rock opera challenges Rockwell’s own definitions, and owes perhaps to Lloyd Weber and Rice’s subsequent mainstream success in the West End more than to the music and the lyrics intrinsically.

5. Harzion, “Dorot u-tmorot ba-zemer ha-ivri”; Burstyn, “Shira hadasha-atika.”

6. Schab, “Ancient Modes in the Modern Classroom;” Flam, “Pe’ulata ha-musikalit shel Bracha Zefira;” Tolnai-Torkan, “Bracha Zefira;” Topelberg, “Ha-Muzika ha-popularit be-Tel Aviv,” 98–104.

7. The musical style as well as the arrangements of contemporary songs were heavily influenced by the quintessential accompanying instrument of Russian folksong, the accordion. Cojocaru, “Jestot ha-accordion.”

8. For an excellent recent study of the early Americanization of Israel see: Frankel, ”Your Part in the Phantom”; Ram, The Globalization of Israel; and Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem.

9. The Weavers’ visit seems to have appealed to audiences outside Tel-Aviv, particularly in villages and kibbutzim like Ein-Gev, Kfar Warburg, Na’an, and Sha’ar Ha-Negev. Their concerts in Tel Aviv (some of them were closed events) were perceived as events of genuine diplomatic significance. The presence of Abba Eban, recently returned from his tenure as ambassador to the United States, and the American Ambassador to Israel, Ogden Ried, was prominently noted in the advertisement. See for example Davar, June 24, 1959, 5; and Haaretz, July 1, 1959, 5. Paradoxically, it was the SLI that influenced The Weavers more than the Weavers influenced the local Israeli scene – most notably in the Weavers’ rendition of the songs “Tzena Tzena” and “Artza Alinu” in their 1951 films Tzena Tzena Tzena and Around the World respectively. When Giora Godik, the producer who had arranged the visits for The Golden Gate Quartet and The Weavers, brought over Los Paraguayos in October 1959, he advertised the tour as the third in a series of tours by “folklore ambassadors.” By that he was hinting that folk music from America and Paraguay are equally exotic for the local Israeli audience. See advertisements in Ma’ariv, September 16, 1959, 3.

10. Sagee-Keren, “Hishtarshut ha-jazz be-Israel.”

11. Heilbronner, “Tzrima: tarbuyot mishne, muzika u-mehaat tze’irim Yisraelim;” Katorza, “Hashpa’at ha-rock ha-psikhadeli al Poozy ve-Shabloul.” The fact that the Doors, Janis Joplin, or Marvin Gaye never reached the top 20 in the Israeli charts, and that the Jackson Five, which had four no. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970, were not ranked in that year’s chart demonstrates the limits of the infiltration of American culture at the time.

12. Regev and Seroussi, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, 137–60.

13. Alongside Kaveret and Tamouz, one should also mention Shlomo Artzi’s To All the Friends from the Trip from Sea to Sea (Heb. Lekhol ha-haverim me-ha-masa miyam el yam) (1974), and The Popolim’s eponymous album (1974). Zvika (then Henryk) Pik’s single What Now? (Heb. Ma akhshav?) has the singer with tight Stars and Stripes shirt as the predominant element on the cover.

14. Brill Bulding music took its name from the Brill Building in New York City, where numerous teams of professional songwriters penned material for girl groups and teen idols during the early 1960s.

15. Surely not by coincidence, while The Young Ones was released before Christmas of 1961, its release in Israel was perfectly timed for the beginning of the school summer break in July of the following year. Richard’s next film, Summer Holiday, although released in February 1963, opened in Israel also in July.

16. See Yoav Kutner’s interviews (for the epic series of Mif’al Ha-Pais) with Yitzhak Klepter and Ilan Virtzberg. https://israelimusic.pais.co.il/desktop/ accessed: December 1, 2022; See Dudi Patimer’s interview with Richard Peritz in Dudi Patimer, “Go, Richard, Go – sipuro shel ha-yotzer ve-ha-musikai Richard Peritz [The story of Richard Peritz],” Dudipedia – Israeli Music Conservation Project, May 10, 2020. https://dudipedia.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/ accessed: December 1, 2022; Poliker, Ha-tzel sheli va-ani, 221–3; and Lamrot ha-kol, Ep. 29, Galatz November 1995. Advertisements of arrival of stocks of Egmond electric guitars in January-February 1964 correspond exactly with the Richard-Shadows tour. See for example advertisements for the Somerfeld music shop in Tel Aviv in Ma’ariv: January 5, January, 24 January, February 3, February 4, and February 7, 1964.

17. See Yoav Kutner’s interviews with Yehonatan Geffen, Arale Kaminsky, Danny Litani, Dori Ben-Zeev, Menny Begger, Misha Segal, Mickey Gavrielov, Sholomo Yidov, Rami Kleinstein, among others. https://israelimusic.pais.co.il/desktop/ accessed: December 1, 2022.

18. Their band’s lineup resembled that of The Seekers, then at the height of their success. See analysis of the album in Wagner, “Lehakat Ha-halonot ha-gvohim.”

19. The main riff from of their hit “Suddenly You Love Me” (ranked no. 2 in that year) is still one of the best recognized riffs in Israel through its quotation in Gabi Shoshan’s 1974 “Le-hishtatot lif’amim.”

20. See for example The No Names (Heb. Ktzat aheret) (1974) and Avner Kenner and Yoni Rechter’s album 14 Octaves (Heb. Arba-esre oktavot) (1975). Even farther from the mainstream, the British band Revolver (which, like The Tornadoes, disbanded during its long stint in Israel) recorded one of the most advanced-sounding psychedelic singles ever produced in Israel — Imagine/I’m Down — in 1970. The taste for British music persisted as evident through the radio charts well into the 1980s. More than half of the entries in the Reshet Bet annual radio charts for the years 1969, 1973, 1976 and 1981 were British.

21. “Ho yaldonet” of Ha-Hedim (The Echoes) from 1962 is such an example, importing the sound of early rock’n’roll.

22. Partygoers who went to the Ganei Noga club in central Tel Aviv (near the famed Mughrabi Cinema), for example, could see the (former) American actor Jimmy Lloyd alongside Zaza, a stripper from the Lido de Paris, the Yiddish comedian Ya‘akov Bodo, and a local magician named Kazablan. Ma’ariv, December 29, 1969, 28. At the Validor Hotel in Herzliya, the taste was even more provincial, and consisted of comedian Ticki Dayan, and The Great Suliman Band led by communal singing leader Shlomo Cohen, and Cohen’s son Yizhar (still fairly unknown; he would win the Eurovision song contest a few years later): Ma’ariv, December 28, 1969, 15. A richer variety show was staged at the Tel Aviv Cinema, where Pashanel, the country’s top producer, held a celebration starting at 23:45, where the lineup was adorned with the top entertainers that he represented, including well-known and beloved comedians alongside known singers like Yigal Bashan, Riki Gal and Rivka Zohar: Ma’ariv, December 28, 1969, 15.

23. Also on the lineup were Ha-Shokolada (The Chocolate), Ha-Bama Ha-Hashmalit (The Electric Stage) and Kokhavei Tzion (The Stars of Zion).

24. “Elenore” was taken from the band’s 1968 album The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands. It is worth noting that the song was released as a single already in September 1968, so its presence in the Israeli charts more than a year later reflects a chronological lag in the following of the musical fashion of the US.

25. Ya’akov Ha-Elyon, “Raphsoda be-khahol [Blue Barge],” Ma’ariv, November 6, 1969, 18.

26. Noam Shachak, “La-pizmonim yesh gam tzililim tzormim [songs also have discordant tones],” Ma’ariv, December 11, 1969, 28.

27. Dadi Shlesinger, guitarist with the group at the time, supplied us with first-hand knowledge on the rehearsals, the work with Benny Nagari, the instruments used by the band, and the production concept.

28. Waksman, Instruments of Desire.

29. The song was controversial to the utmost upon its release. IDF General (later assassinated in his role of extreme right-wing politician) Rehabam (“Ghandi”) Zeevi notoriously deemed the song defeatist and censored it under his military jurisdiction. The song later became the unofficial hymn of the political left and the peace movement and was famously sung by the crowd during the 1995 mass peace rally at the end of which prime minister Yizahk Rabin was assassinated. The blood-stained lyrics of “Song for Peace” became central in the national memory of a martyr for peace.

30. Natan Alterman, “Ha-shir, ha-mehaa, ha-menifest [The song, the protest, the manifest],” Ma’ariv, December 5, 1969, 10.

31. “‘Se’ar’ la-azazel, Tehi ‘ha-karahat’ [The hell with ‘Hair,’ long live ‘Bald Head’],” Lahiton 8 (January 9, 1970), 5.

32. Ehud Manor, Ein li eretz aheret, 178–9.

33. Davar, May 29, 1970.

34. “Ha-Sipur she-meahorei ha-taklit [the story behind the record],” Davar, June 12, 1970, 38.

35. The slang hantarish (signifying low quality) defies translation and therefore the Hebrew name of the album is retained here.

36. “Neesar al Danny Ben-Israel le-hashmi’a pizmonei ‘Se’ar’ [Danny Ben-Israel was prohibited from playing songs from ‘Hair,’]” Ma’ariv, June 17, 1970, 8.

37. Lamrot ha-kol, Ep. 25, Galatz, October 14, 1995.

38. Ya’akov Ha-Elyon, “masakh u-masekha [Curtain and Mask],” Ma’ariv, September 13, 1970, 14.

39. Talila Ben-Zakai, Ma’ariv, September 27, 1970, 17.

40. “Assi Dayan be-‘Kfotz’? [Assi Dayan in ‘Jump’?],” Davar, October 8, 1970, 6; “‘Kfotz’ in ‘Alhambra’ [‘Jump’ in ‘Alhambra’],” Davar, November 5, 1970, 10; “bi-ktzara [Shorts],” Davar, November 27, 1970, 39; and “Az’akat shav be-‘et hatzagat “Kfotz” [False alarm during a “Jump” show],” La-Merhav, November 30, 1970, 2.

41. Note the wrong accentuation on the word musagim (terms), pronounced musagim in the song “Let the Man Choose” (Heb. “Tnu la-adam livhor,”) or the word talmid (student) pronounced talmid in “Sodom and Gomorrah” (Heb. “Sdom va-amora.”).

42. The strange situation described in Poogy’s Opera bears some resemblance to Becket’s Waiting for Godot, only that here the plot begins with the unexpected arrival of the Godot-like Poogy.

43. Versions (apparently not full length) of all three works were eventually released in an official anthology in 2013.

44. Ya’akov Ha-Elyon, “masakh u-masekha [Curtain and Mask],” Ma’ariv, September 13, 1970, 14; “ha-kfitza ha-gdola kadima [The big leap forward],” Davar, November 30, 1970, 7; Nahman Ben-Ami, “Ha-kaftzan ha-mevulgan [The messy jumper],” Ma’ariv, December 29, 1970, 4.

45. See brief discussion of the problems in classifying Jesus Christ Superstar in note 4 above.

46. Yehonatan Geffen, Rock be-veit ha-sohar, 15.

47. Gillan joined Deep Purple shortly before work on In Rock, which marked a stylistic watershed for the band, showcasing Gillan’s hard-rock style, most notably in the 10-minute “Child in Time,” influenced by the American psychedelic rock band It’s a Beautiful Day.

48. The arguments for and against staging a perceivably anti-Jewish play, no matter its aesthetic and musical value and appeal, had been tested months earlier in a debate concerning the performance of J.S. Bach’s Passions. “Hashma’at ha-pasionim meet Bach – be’ad veneged [Playing Bach’s Passions – For and Against],” Davar, June 11, 1971, 15.

49. “Hafakat ‘Yeshu kokhav elyon tluya be-misrad ha-hinukh [The Production of Jesus Christ Superstar Depends on the Ministry of Education’s Decision],” Lahiton 90, November 1971, 3.

50. This invented idiom was famously used again in the Hebrew title of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), translated as Brian kokhav elyon (Brian Superstar. Literally: Brian Supreme Star).

51. “Parodia al Ronald Reagan [parody of Ronald Reagan],” YouTube video, 6:12, posted by Mike Burstyn, May 29, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sopa43-9Fn0.

52. Benny Nagari interview with Yoav Kutner, Lamrot ha-kol, Galei Tzahal, Ep. 53, June 28, 1996. The Edwin Hawkins Singers recorded a cover version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar for their 1972 album I’d like to Teach the World to Sing. For the album they also recorded “Hurshat ha-ekaliptus [The Grove of Eucalyptus],” an SLI song from the repertoire of another military band.

53. The story was probably familiar to the Israeli theater audiences from the production of Edward Albee’s one-act play, The Death of Bessie Smith, in Tel Aviv in 1969.

54. Frankel, “What’s in a Name?” 9.

55. It also challenges attempts to equate “Americanization” with consumerism and the marketplace. Frankel, “What’s in a Name?” 10.

56. “Mumlatz [Recommended],” Ma’ariv, August 10, 1972, 20.

57. See, for example, Hava Nowak, “Tzoakim u-metzigim [Shouting and Staging],” Davar, July 20, 1972, 9; Yael Lotan, “Hashvaot mefukpakot [Dubious comparisons],” Davar, August 16, 1972, 10.

58. “mivhar mofa’im [Selected shows],” Ma’ariv, December 12, 1972, 18.

59. The film’s score, which was released as an LP, was recorded by well-known artists such as singer Danni Bassan (of Tislam fame), bass player and producer Mickey Shaviv, and respected guitar player Shlomo Mizrahi, known as “the Israeli Hendrix.”

60. Regev and Seroussi, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, 151–60; Cohen, U-khshe-eftah et ha-delet.