The 50’s
When the party started, and Elvis was King.
“UGGHH, HE’S SO VULGAR! Turn it off!” My mom and I were riding in our
frankfurterlike Nash Rambler, listening to the woofing, staticky radio with the fat white
dials big as saucers. With the windows rolled down, we were cruising in the wind of
1956, the year of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” Again, Mom yelled: “Off! Turn him
off!”
“But what’s so horrible about him?” I asked. She snapped the dial.
“Because he’s sleazy, is why! Calling a lady a hound dog! And using ain’t. It’s
disgusting.”
Like millions of other Americans, my mother was shocked by Elvis’s
performance on the Milton Berle Show (Three Months before Ed Sullivan). This was the
show where he’s done the grunting, spraddle-legged reprise, slow as a burlesque grind,
that has caused such a furor. Frank Sinatra, the idol of her generation, loathed this new
sensation, reportedly calling him a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.
Of course Elvis threatened them. This wasn’t the sad, bloated effigy of the
1970’s, with the sequined bell-bottoms and dyed hair. This was the handsome, snarling,
20-year-old immortal, humping his guitar with hi slegs goinig every which way and that
look of rude ecstasy, singing: You-ain’-tah-nuth-thin-but-a-houn’-dog…
My mother wasn’t some PTA biddy. She was young then, just 31. But with
“Hound Dog” she forever relegated herself to another time and sensibility, unable to
grasp the new in a guise so raw and raucous-to her, unpretty. And so as a kid in 1956,
you hit a wall: You hit that wall of THEM.
And let’s face it, after Elvis, it was THEM, all the post-Depression, postwar, GIbill, up-by-your-bootstraps, white-bread generation, mowing their lawns, drinking their
hard-earned martoonies and struggling, most of them, to clasp that next rung up in the
suburban middle class.
That’s the staid party “the Pelvis” was crashing. In an America so square and
easily shockable, it was virtually inevitable-essential, one might say-that others would
also feel obliged to rock the boat…Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a
Montgomery, Ala., bus (1955)…or beat poet Allen Ginsberg coming out with his wakeup call Howl (1956), rhapsodizing about sex and drugs and “angel headed hipsters.”
Reds, tight pants, juvenile delinquency, necking, girls or boys with “reputations”-all this
and more rattled our parents. Sternly, my father warmed me, “If you let loose with an
off-color story in polite mixed company, people will cut you off forever, do you hear
me?”
Sam Phillips wasn’t worried. “If I cound find a white man who has the Negro
sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million,” said the founder of Sun Records in
Memphis. He started out recording black rhythm and blues artists like Ike Turner, Rufus
Thomas and Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett, and by the early 1950’s, it was clear to
Phillips and other white producers that black music, the music that would spawn rock and
roll, was electrifying white kids, kids who were starved for something hot and liberating.
Elvis, then was the messenger. He was the voice that carried the news of a multitude of
great messengers, black and white, but mostly black. And that was the greatness of Elvis,
it seems to me, that he could have carried so many threads and experiences in a single
voice. It was all there. Blues, gospel and country, Honky-tonks, fast cars, youth and
freedom, and, above all, the incendiary notion that you could actually be white and cool.
Like most miracles, it was short-lived once Elvis became a national commodity
and got mixed up with Colonel Parker and Hollywood and Las Vegas. While there were
some scorching singles from his RCA-record period-records like “Heartbreak Hotel” and
the kick-ass ”Jailhouse Rock”-for me nothing else achieves quite the same free-flowing
purity of those first sessions he did for Sam Phillips in ’54 and’55. “That’s all
Right”…”Mystery Train”…”Good Rockin’ Tonight.” What’s wonderful about these
recordings, as with so much music of the era, is their almost casual simplicity: Scotty
Moore’s great guitar work, Bill Black’s thunking string bass, hand claps, drums. “you
couldn’t just mash buttons and sound like a band.”
In his Sun period, Elvis was part of Phillip’s “Million Dollar Quartet,” which
included Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee, Lewis and Carl Perkins. Now Elvis barely wrote a note
of music-few performers did in those days-but Carl Perkins sure did. Almost out of
nowhere, Perkins hit perfection with such early classics as “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Boppin’
the Blues,” and “Honey Don’t.” Along with Chuck Berry, Perkins also deserves a lot of
credit for inventing the classic rock and roll riffs still heard today. The Beatles idolized
him, especially George Harrison, who taught himself to play guitar by slowing down
Perkins’s records. In fact, you can hear George copy Perkins lick for lick in such high
energy Beatles covers as “Matchbox,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.”
Remember Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, the derangd southern
preacher with GOOD and EVIL tattooed on his knuckles? For me, that’s Jerry Lee
Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart’s wild-eyed, star-crossed cousin. Nor for nothing he was named
the Killer. What a rock schooling! Whorehouse piano player at 14. Bible school
washout. Break in artist and door-to-door salesman with his Sunday airs and chickenthieving grin. Lock up your daughters, Pop, ‘cause this boy’s scary when he starts
banging on his piano-when his golden curls come unhinged and he bolts up from his stool
like a man in the grip of an angelic seizure. Jerry Lee still sends the old tequila-shooter
shivers down my spine when I hear “Whole Lotta Shakin’”
(Mummmmmmmmmmm…………feeeeeellzzzzz geeeeeee-ooooooddddddd) and that
shuddering climax of a morality play, “Great Balls of Fire” (You broke my will, but what
a thrill). Bad? The man’s ancestors must have danced with snakes.
Then, of course, there was Buddy Holly, a singer who makes me wonder if there
isn’t reincarnation. In 1953, at the age of 29, Hank Williams died of drugs and exhaustion
in the backseat of his Cadillac, but to hear Buddy Holly rock in “Rave On,” “Maybe
Baby” and “Oh, Boy!” is to wonder if Hank didn’t somehow book a return seat to the
party. In Buddy’s Lubbock, Tex., voice you hear much of the same lyric purity, plus that
absolute correctness of emotion, of which Williams was a master. Still, the similarity
isn’t all that surprising: Holly was an unsuccessful country artist before Elvis inspired
him to bridge the two worlds. He had little of Williams’s darkness, but in his hiccupping,
often deliberately nerdy phrasings, he perfectly captured something else-youth: its delight
and exuberance, its sadness, sweetness, awkwardness, fugitive longings and, yes, even its
unabashed callowness. Artist that he was, he put it all in.
What’s more, Holly was an innovator, one of the first to use double-tracking and
the one who popularized the classic two-guitar, bass and drum line-up uses by, say, the
Beatles. In fact, it’s no big stretch from “That’ll Be the Day” to “I Want to Hold Your
Hand.” The Beatles borrowed more than their name from Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
Kids don’t, as a rule, write novels or concertos, but with rock, they were able to
grab America like a gooseneck mike and wail their lives into it. And what an array of
styles and voices: the Everly Brothers (“Wake Up Little Susie”), Gene Vincent (“BeBop-A-Lula”), Frankie Ford (“Sea Cruise”), Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”),
Duane Eddy (“Rebel Rouser”), Bobby Darin (“Splish Splash”), Dion and the Belmonts
(“I Wonder Why”).
Now for the flip side, the black side-race music, as it was called until the early ’50
when the NAACP finally put a stop to the segregationist label.
By they, whites were buying black music, but even so, black artists still found
themselves on the outside looking in. Imagine their frustration when, often within weeks,
their hot new records were “covered”-copied-by white performers.
By then, whites were buying black music, but even so, black artists still found themselves
on the outside looking in. Imagine their frustration when, often within weeks, their hot
new records were “covered”-copied- by white performers. And sanitized. One famous
example is Joe Turner’s lascivious “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” a tune almost instantly
covered in 1954 by Bill Haley and His Comets. The less fortunate got waxed by the dean
of diluters, the squeaky-clean Pat Boone in his white bucks. Such a covering genius was
Boone that he even turned Little Richard’s outrageous “Tutti Frutti” into slush.
Today, Little Richard says Boone’s version “opened the highway for acceptance.”
On the other hard, Richard claims it was his version that “really started the races being
together,” the whites jumping down from the segregated balconies to rock with the blacks
by the stage. With his gospel frenzy and mascara’d eyes, he bridged the races and sexes
both, the papa and big mama of such provocateurs as David Bowie, Prince, Michael
Jackson and Madonna.
In the ‘50s we likewise see the black genius for making art out of making do. In
much the way rap music was the brainchild of kids who couldn’t afford musical
instruments, doo-wop came from urban kids catting it up in alleys, tenement hallways
and subway stations. Dom-dom-de-dom. Ramma-lamma-ding-ding-ding. A bass so low
the guy sounded like he’d had a lobotomy- and on the upper end, a guy dizzily trilling,
singin’ and poppin’ alo about this li’l girl, an’ I was walkin’ down the street, an’ she was
lookin’ so fine.
Among the groups that started as street corner amateurs were Little Anthony and
the Imperials (“ Tears on My Pillow”), Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (“Why
Do Fools Fall in Love?”), the Dells (“Oh What a Night”), the Crows (“Gee”) and the
Flamingos (“I only Have Eyes for You”). These last two are what rock ornithologists call
the Bird Groups, which also include the Penguins (“Earth Angel”) and the Oriels
(“Crying in the Chapel”). The list of classic black vocal groups goes on and on: the
Platters (“The Great Pretender”), the Drifters (“There Goes My Baby”), the Five Satins
(“In the Still of the Night”) and those wonderful clowns, the Coasters (“Poison Ivy”).
For last, I save the greatest of any of them, black or white. For me, that’s Chuck
Berry, the man who comes even closer than Elvis to bridging the races. Berry credits
blues masters Muddy Waters and Elmore James as two important early influences. Still,
it’s a stunning leap from the brooding, slowhumping power of blues, or the high-energy
twang of country, to the walloping, locomotive force of:
You know my temperature’s rising, the jukebox blowin’ the blues
Roll over, Beethoven, Tell Tchaikovsky the news…
The freshness of these songs, their wit and rapid-fire narrative compression- the
sheer volume of information they pack- never fail to astonish me. Duck-walking and
firing off bursts of that itchy, machine-gun guitar, Chuck Berry was as instrumental to the
Beatles as to the Rolling stones, who must hold the record for covering Berry classics,
like “Around and Around,” “Little Queenie” and “Carol.”
Everything has its time to be, and by the late 50’s the early miracle of rock was
foundering. In 1957, claiming he feared damnation, Little Richard stopped performing
and took refuge in religion. Then Chuck Berry ran afoul of the Mann Act, transporting
Sweet Little Sixteen (she was actually 14) across the Missouri line in a red Ford, a charge
that eventually landed him in prison for two years. And at the height of his fame, Jerry
Lee’s career crashed and burned when he married his 13 year old second cousin, Myra.
Like Judas goat, he was driven for yeas into the American wilderness of third-rate clubs,
booze, drugs, mayhem with loaded guns and tragedy. Elvis, meanwhile, got drafted into
the Army, and Buddy Holly’s plane plowed into an Iowa cornfield, taking with him
Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”) and the Big Bopper (“Chantilly Lace”).
Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and so in Liverpool, England, four young
men learning their lessons from giants like Carl Perkins, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry.
A tornado was brewing, and we now know precisely when and where it set down:
February 7th, 1964, in New York’s Kennedy Airport, with cordons of cops and mobs of
screaming fans. Gentleman that he was, Elvis even sent his heirs apparent a
congratulatory telegram.