For a cultural movement that has no definite beginning, the sense of an ending is never very far below the surface of rock and roll music and lyrics. American popular music—from its earliest hymnals, through its growing commercial presentations via minstrelsy and vaudeville, through the explosion of technology that enabled a market for recorded music—has been shaped by an apocalyptic world view.

In Apocalypse Jukebox,Edward Whitelock and David Janssen, inspired by their recollection of the end-of-the-world paranoia that so deeply infused the music of their youth (1970s-80s), trace the connections between that sense of endings and the surprisingly expansive and all-encompassing mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of American history. That sense of impending doom is palpable from the book's opening in an unexpected place and time, the American South amidst a terrifying meteor shower in 1833. From there, Apocalypse Jukebox traces the influence of apocalypticism upon the development of American popular music, with the premise that America itself can be fruitfully understood, defined, explicated, and sung in apocalyptic terms.

Dr. Edward Whitelock spent most of the year 1978 stealing and hoarding his grandmother's meds in preparation for suicide. Why? Just the usual story: he was a poor, clumsy, socially awkward kid whose daily life was comprised of the slow, lonely, seemingly unending torture of the middle-school outcast. Then, Devo appeared on Saturday Night Live. Everything changed; the future was revealed: The geeks would inherit the earth.

He is now a Full Professor of English at Gordon College. He earned his PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He has published poems in over a dozen literary journals as well as numerous articles in professional journals and anthologies.

Dr. David Janssen grew up in the mountains of the Northwest with blisters on his fingers resulting from his religious devotion to a cheap acoustic guitar. With visions of rock and roll apotheosis dancing in his head, he practiced his faith in his bedroom with Chuck Berry, John Fogerty, and Johnny Cash, copying chords and solos like a rosary. He was told in a dream that he would be the punk Bob Dylan. He ardently pursued his destiny into twenty-something adulthood until one dark day when his guitar and amp were stolen, which he read as a providential sign to enroll in graduate school.

He is now an Associate Professor of English at Gordon College. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia in 1999. He is the associate editor for Studies in Popular Culture. He has also published essays and presented conference papers on English literature, composition studies, popular culture studies. His essay "The Simpsons, South Park, and the Satiric Tradition," published in Studies in Popular Culture in October 2003, received that Association's award for the best essay published for that year.

Four-city author tour: Macon GA; Atlanta GA; New Orleans LA; Louisville KY

From Chapter One:

Everybody, it seems, wants to argue over the question of when rock and roll began. Few realize that rock and roll is all about the end. The spirit of apocalypse infects the whole of rock and roll's history, whenever that history began, and its beginnings are myriad.

Rock and roll is born of the morning of August 6, 1945, as much as it is of the August morning eight years later when Elvis stepped into Sun Studios for the first time. It is born of the cries and hollers of the Civil War as much as of Little Richard's rollicking shriek, introduced to the world in "Tutti Frutti." It is born of the First and Second Great Awakenings, of the slave era, of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, of the World Wars. In fact, we must change the metaphor: rock and roll wasn't born; it developed pupae-like, hibernating and growing in its chrysalis throughout the foundation of this country. All of the above events and more shaped the common folk of America, and it was in the margins of these people's lives that the ideologies and stylistics that we now identify as rock and roll took shape. In tracing the evolution of rock and roll, we must go beyond the 1950s, beyond even the age of recording technology; we must go beyond the individual creators and into the lives of the very folk whose descendants would later worry over this obscene and dangerous new musical form that threatened the moral reasoning of the status quo.

"For some reason, we are powerfully drawn to the subject of beginnings," writes Stephen J. Gould."We yearn to know about origins, and we readily construct myths when we do not have data." Gould is writing about the mythical origins of baseball and Abner Doubleday's alleged invention of it, but for fans of rock and roll, it is no different. We crave origin stories, from Adam and Eve to Abner and Elvis. Such stories are neat and easily contained, and they provide us with a finite frame wherein we can claim a mastery of knowledge. But history is never so easily contained, especially when that history takes place outside the environs of the cultured elite. This is a good thing, for history is always more interesting when it is formed from benevolent accidents bred in the mix of boredom and longing that takes place on the margins of culture. Few of the culture-shock tremors that define the American character were the result of deliberate action and forethought.

Elvis certainly has more claim to an argument of originator for rock and roll than does Doubleday for baseball (The earliest printed mention of baseball appears in a legal document from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, dated 1791, 48 years before Doubleday allegedly invented the game.), but the fact can't be changed that had Elvis or Doubleday never existed, both rock and roll and baseball would still be with us today, albeit in rock's case in a significantly different form, such was Elvis' influence. As Gould expounds on the subject of baseball, it "is a major item of our culture" with "a long and interesting history. Any item with these two properties must generate a set of myths and stories (and perhaps some truths) about its beginnings." Rock and roll fulfills these same requirements and falls into the parameters Gould sets regarding origin myths:"Stories about beginnings come in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of origin . . . or else it evolves and has no definable moment of entry into the world." We argue the latter for rock and roll. In its stylistic sense, we can see rock and roll forming over a significant number of decades in America before the 1950s. And its ideological sense extends back to the founding of the country itself.

The lasting quality of rock and roll is contained in the sometimes volatile mix of the sacred and the profane that shaped its development, just as America's own development took equal parts from those polar opposites. Our history is a parade of good intentions often sullied by shameful indignation. We have created a technologically advanced society that guarantees security to a vast number of its inhabitants, more than the world has ever seen; at the same time, we have been responsible for causing suffering that has at times surpassed the very cruelty of old-world Europe that colonists risked their lives to escape. Our country, which was founded upon apocalyptic visions of America as a "New Heaven and New Earth," is responsible for unleashing the demon of apocalyptic technology that could bring the fires of a New Hell to Earth. Branded as both creators and destroyers within the space of 300 years, precariously balancing those twin god-like powers, is it any wonder that, were there such a thing as a psychiatric historian, our country would be diagnosed as bipolar?