Korea Rediscovers Its Rock 'N' Roll Soul

Shin Joong-hyun remembers the first time he took the stage 55 years ago in Seoul. Just 18, he had passed an audition for the U.S. Eighth Army and was selected to play top American hits to the troops. “I was too young to be scared,” the 73-year-old rocker said in a telephone interview, “so I just tried to do a good job.”

Soon, he was playing 20 to 30 dates a month at U.S. military bases all over South Korea, songs like “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” “40 Miles of Bad Road” and “Rock Around the Clock” — the first song Mr. Shin sang, instead of just playing guitar. “The soldiers seemed to like my guitar playing,” he recalled. “They were really enthusiastic and often asked for more solos.”

Bands that got their start rocking out on U.S. Army bases became the vanguard of a new music scene in South Korea. Mr. Shin was at the heart of it, creating bands, finding singers and writing many of the most memorable rock songs recorded in South Korea, especially from 1968 to 1975.

He has been called the godfather of South Korean rock. Mojo magazine likened him to Phil Spector for his ability to discover talent and create sounds. Mr. Shin’s sound was low-fi and psychedelic, freely mixing genres and, as time passed, it grew ever more wild. His albums typically had short, poppy songs, on the Aside, but side B was for Mr. Shin and the band, featuring free-flowing instrumentals up to 22 minutes long.

“The man was a revolutionary who mixed Western music such as rock, soul, and folk with the sound of traditional Korean music,” said Matt Sullivan, founder of Light in the Attic Records, an American boutique label that in September issued two retrospectives of Mr. Shin’s music.

A government crackdown in 1975, on rock music, marijuana and the counterculture in general, put an abrupt end to Mr. Shin’s career. Changing tastes hastened the public’s amnesia for his music, and he spent most of the next years in obscurity running a live music club. His albums finally began to be issued on CD in the mid-1990s, but there was little mainstream interest at a time dominated musically by teenage-oriented dance-pop and syrupy ballads.

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