Overlooked history inspires festival focused on Black rock music

Black visibility in rock music, both onstage and among audience members, sparked the creation of the I Made Rock ’N’ Roll festival.

White musicians are synonymous with many eras—including rockabilly, British Invasion, psychedelic, singer-songwriter and punk—but Black artists have been there from the beginning. Their legacy is represented in the lineup of I Made Rock ’N’ Roll, a festival set to debut May 18 at downtown’s American Legion Mall.

Janelle Monáe and Gary Clark Jr. will top a six-artist bill. Monáe’s credits include two album of the year Grammy Award nominations, while Clark has collected four Grammy trophies by exploring the boundaries of blues and rock styles.

Alan Bacon and Malina Simone Bacon, the husband and wife who founded Indianapolis cultural firm GangGang, designed I Made Rock ’N’ Roll as a crossroads of entertainment and education. And more than a festival, it’s a year-round initiative to elevate awareness of rock’s Black architects—musicians such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

“Rocket 88,” a 1951 tune frequently cited as the first rock ’n’ roll song, was written by Ike Turner and sung by Jackie Brenston.

“This is about authorship,” said Alan Bacon, who cites a visit to the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville as an influence on I Made Rock ’N’ Roll.

One gallery at the museum is devoted to blues music of the South that helped to shape 1950s rockabilly in the United States as well as the skiffle style in Great Britain. Elvis Presley launched his career as a rockabilly artist. The Beatles emerged from a skiffle band known as the Quarrymen.

“This stuff is ripe for learning,” Bacon said. “People are discovering more about themselves and their own identity and how that relates to culture. This is one of those pieces that has been either buried in history or not told in an accurate way.”

In advance of next month’s festival, the I Made Rock ’N’ Roll initiative is presenting film screenings, listening parties and concerts to educate and entertain.

Nicole O’Neal, who sings and plays bass in Indianapolis-based band Wife Patrol, shared a playlist of rock songs by Black artists during an April 11 public listening session in Broad Ripple. The Indiana University alum who grew up in Fort Wayne talked about her admiration of Canadian pop-rock singer FeFe Dobson and learning about an obscure 1970s band from Detroit known as Death.

O’Neal later told IBJ about rock concerts she’s attended where people were skeptical about her reasons for being there and shows she’s played where people expressed surprise about her aptitude.

“Because Black presence has been erased essentially from the history and the progression of rock ’n’ roll, we don’t see ourselves either onstage or in the audience in many of the spaces we go into,” O’Neal said. “So that becomes a place that doesn’t feel necessarily welcome or safe all the time.”

The I Made Rock ’N’ Roll festival is an all-ages event and open to the public. Tickets are priced at $80.

O’Neal recalled gravitating to Blink-182, a rock band made up of white musicians, as an adolescent. The band’s 2001 single “Stay Together for the Kids” resonated with O’Neal, whose parents had divorced.

She describes “Stay Together for the Kids” as a harsh but helpful song.

“It was one of the first times I felt empowered to express anger,” O’Neal said. “I feel like, a lot of times, especially as young girls, we’re not really taught healthy things about anger just as a general emotion. It’s, ‘Don’t be mad. Don’t be upset.’

“Rock music was the space where it was all about freedom of expressing these feelings, whether it was deeply emotional or angry or upset or looking for freedom or looking for righteousness. Or, ‘I’m mad at my parents.’ You could express that in this genre in ways that I was not hearing in the soul and R&B and pop music I’d grown up listening to.”

A series of I Made Rock ’N’ Roll concerts launched last fall at Broad Ripple’s Vogue music venue. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, an acclaimed blues-rock vocalist and guitarist who grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, headlined one of these events.

During a pre-show interview, the 25-year-old said boisterous elements of rock music can be a hurdle for Black listeners.

“My people, they’re not really used to loud guitars and stuff like that,” Ingram said. “I do think Black people can appreciate some great guitar playing, but it’s the whole loud thing. Which is weird, because we’ve seen Jimi Hendrix and we’ve seen Prince. Hopefully, myself and a couple of more young artists can teach people about that.”

The historical contributions of Black artists are in place, Ingram said, mentioning “Rocket 88” as well as Little Richard and hardcore punk pioneers Bad Brains.

“I feel like that is part of our culture, just as much as any other genre we had a hand in,” he said.

A crucial message

GangGang’s partner in the I Made Rock ’N’ Roll initiative is Forty5 Presents, the company that stages concerts at the Vogue and oversees the Rock the Ruins series at Holliday Park.

As the festival neared its deadline to secure a commitment from headliner Monáe in December, Forty5 CEO Jenny Boyts asked the Bacons to craft a personal note for the singer.

“I said, ‘Tell her about the I Made Rock ’n’ Roll campaign and why her voice is important,’” Boyts told IBJ in March. “We sent that letter, and two days later she accepted the headlining spot. After that, confirmations from other artists rolled in.”

Since its founding in 2020, GangGang has established the annual Butter fine art fair, hired hundreds of artists to perform during the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, organized the “We. The Culture: Works by the Eighteen Art Collective” exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and planned the NBA All-Star Tip-Off celebration at Bicentennial Unity Plaza.

Malina Bacon shared the text of the letter sent to Monáe, which, in part, read: “We want to bring people together through new narratives, through love and campaigns about identity and authorship. We want to tell big, big truths. We are breaking down the construct of race through the transformational power of the arts.”

Going to the source

One big truth of I Made Rock ’N’ Roll focuses on “whitewashing,” or the cultural appropriation of Black music that became mainstream in the hands of white artists.

The Isley Brothers, a band founded in Cincinnati in 1954, watched their song “Twist and Shout” rocket to the top of the charts when recorded by the Beatles.

The list of Presley hits originally recorded by Black artists includes “Hound Dog” (Big Mama Thorton), “That’s All Right (Mama)” (Arthur Crudup), “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (Lloyd Price) and “Mystery Train” (Herman Parker).

Wife Patrol member O’Neal noted that popular British Invasion bands often released covers of songs by American blues artists who were barely known here.

“They were playing music that already existed in the States, but because of segregation and racism, the white majority population had no idea what this music was,” O’Neal said.

Ingram, who will tour this fall as part of an all-star guitarist caravan billed as “Experience Hendrix,” grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a community of 14,000 residents known for its connection to blues icons Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, W.C. Handy, John Lee Hooker and Son House.

Classes at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale gave Ingram his first opportunity to play guitar.

“We didn’t learn too much about the blues genre, so to speak,” he said. “Every now and then, they would break out these packets and we would learn that way. But mostly it was the basic blues and fundamentals of guys like Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Freddie King and the list goes on.”

A spectrum of sounds

The top of the I Made Rock ’N’ Roll festival bill features Monáe, who straddles the definitions of R&B, pop and funk in her work, and Clark, who branches out to African beats and jazz textures on new album “JPEG Raw.”

Gospel-influenced pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph, folk specialist Joy Oladokun, pop-punk band Meet Me at the Altar and Indianapolis-based hardcore punk band Inner Peace will perform earlier in the day.

O’Neal said the lineup shows that rock music can’t be narrowly defined.

“There’s a little something for everybody, whether you’re ready to rock out or you’re thinking, ‘I’ve never really explored this before, but I want to come check it out,’” O’Neal said. “There’s a place for you within this lineup.”

Special guest Malina Moye, a left-handed guitarist from Minnesota, will open the festival with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the tradition of Hendrix at the 1969 Woodstock festival.

Malina Bacon said the festival is already partly successful because it’s generating conversations in the community.

“People are saying, ‘Did you hear there’s a Black rock fest?’ or, ‘Are you going to the Black rock fest?’ or, ‘Did you even know there were Black rockers in this town?’ or, ‘Do you think they’re doing a good job?’” she said. “Even the evaluation of what we’re doing means the topic is being discussed.”•