I simply can’t let 1956 go without a salute to the year
Rock n’ Roll was born. Or rather, when it hit the charts
bigtime, because Rock n’Roll had been around quite some
time before that. Some say 1953 but in fact since 1948. To
some purists Rock & Roll/R&B from 1948 to 1953 was
the greatest music of all time. Out of Jump Blues a new rocking
beat, hard- driving rhythm like nothing before was born. Its
exponents were Wynonie Harris, Big Joe Turner and Fats Domino.
Rock n’ Roll didn’t just happen, like all of a
sudden, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others were
playing perfectly developed rock n’ roll, as if it came
out of nowhere.
Whenever it was, it was 50 years ago in 1956 when it went
stratospherically mainstream. For in that one year alone Elvis
Presley hit the Top 40 with 9 hits, starting with Heartbreak
Hotel followed up by Hound Dog, Little Richard with 4 hits,
kicking off with Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally, Fats Domino
with 3, Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent with 1 apiece. From that
time on American popular music was never the same. R&B
and gospel, fused with Boogie Woogie and the Blues had merged
with Country & Western and Rockabilly. Black and white
artists borrowed freely from each other and nobody called
it “race” music or R&B any more. It all got
mixed up and burst out on an American youth of the mid-50’s
ready and craving “big beat, cars and young love”,
as one of the smarter record producers of the day observed.
Just imagine the culture shock to the rest of the nation,
who in 1955 bought million upon million of such mega artists
as Pat Boone, Perry Como, Doris Day, Nat King Cole and Frank
Sinatra, not to mention the biggest hitmaking group of them
all syrupy orchestral instrumentals with a million massed
strings. True, in that same year there was the presage of
things to come. No, not from the appallingly pedestrian Bill
Haley and his Comets, who since 1953 had made a profession
of sanitized covers stolen from the R&B charts, but a
real thundering John the Baptist in the person of Chuck Berry
with his first bigtime hit “Maybellene”.
And Lo! Worse, a lot worse, on its way. In a few short months
middle America was confronted with a howling lipstick-wearing
piano stomping bouffant-haired gay black reverend-to-be otherwise
known as Little Richard, and androgynous pelvis pumping quiffed
and duck-arsed grunting Southern white trash kid called Elvis
Presley. Not to mention a reprise from an insalubrious black
petty criminal blues shouter gone manic insulting Ludwig van
Beethoven, an obese very black man called Fats and a young
leather clad greaser known as Gene Vincent, who hiccoughed
gibberish.
That first Rockin’ cohort was very quickly joined in
1957 by the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddy Cochran, Buddy
Holly and the Everley Brothers as talented white kids took
on the music, not forgetting Ray Charles hitting his stride
with “What’d I Say?”. The next 4 years were
the classic years of Rock n’ Roll with a few notable
additions like Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, the Isley
Brothers and Dion. By 1960, shortly after Elvis went into
the army it was all over. Death, the law, religion and Tin
Pan Alley saw to that. The Elvis of 1956-59 was dead and gone
long before 1977. In 1959 Chuck Berry was back in the slammer,
in 1957 Little Richard had flamed out, got religion and quit,
while Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1969 along with
the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. The new decade saw Eddie
Cochran killed in a London car accident, his last posthumous
hit being a prescient “Three Steps to Heaven”.
All of it was mourned a decade later in 1971 by Don MacLean
and his interminable American Pie as “the day the music
died”.
As writer Nik Cohn observed, “For 30 years you couldn’t
possibly make it unless you were were white, sleek, nicely
spoken and phoney to your toenails. Now you could be black,
purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased or almost anything on
Earth and you could still clean up. Just so long as you were
new, just so long as you carried excitement.”
The big record producers still didn’t get it, alarmed
by the explicit lyrics, raw emotive singing and what they
saw as crude arrangements. So they got the crooners to do
covers. That’s how a retch-inducing version of Tutti
Frutti from Pat Boone actually outsold the real thing. Boone
tried it again with Long Tall Sally but it didn’t work
and the original prevailed. It was some years before they
realised that people who liked Pat Boone, liked him singing
“April Love”, not this nasty new stuff, as for
the kids they just thought it a joke
Actually, given how it was back in the Eisenhower years, the
industry had reason to be worried. The new music really was
raunchy, but they didn’t know the half of it. Tutti
Frutti was a thinly veiled homage to anal eroticism: “Tutti
Frutti, good booty/ If it don’t fit, don’t force
it/ You can grease it, make it easy.” In the closing
minutes of the recording session, the producer funked it and
“good booty”, became “aw rooty”. Not
much of an improvement I’d have thought, given that
the rest of the lyrics remained. But then again, back then
I don’t think most of the major record producers would
have known what a booty was, even if it got up and kissed
them.
Throughout the early 60’s the recording industry sort
of got the reins back, but the genie was out the bottle. No
way it could be stuffed back. The first half of the 60’s
saw talented artists like, B.B. King, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke,
Roy Orbison, Marvin Gaye, Joe Tex, Solomon Burke, Bobby Darin,
Gladys Knight, Mary Wells, Ben E. King, Aretha Franklin, the
Coasters, the Supremes, Dionne Warwick and the Beachboys dominate
the charts. It was the time of Dylan, Joan Baez and all that
folk thing. True, the truly awful were there in good measure
too. Tony Orlando had his first hit then. There was a succession
of anodyne young male singers, Frankie Avalon, Bobbys Vee
& Vinton and Fabian. The laborious Chubby Checker and
The Twist followed by all those other silly “fad”
dances clogged the airwaves. More fun, those girly groups,
the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Chiffons, the Miracles, and
Martha & the Vandellas. And by 1964 Motown started showing
up in full force hitting its stride with Wilson Picket, Otis
Redding, et al.
Then along came the Brits. In 1964 the Beatles, no longer
the leather clad greasers who’d backed Chuck Berry on
his tour of Hamburg, but adorable cute mop heads hit the U.S.
with no less than 17 hits. With them came the edgier Kinks,
Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Moody Blues,
Yardbirds and a returning Jimi Hendrix. Alas, Americans also
developed a taste for the dross of the British music scene,
the likes of Freddie & the Dreamers and a raft of other
inane imports.
But by 1966 Rock n’ Roll had morphed into “Rock”
and the years 1966-69 were the glory years, eerily echoing
the great years of Rock & Roll of the 50’s. This
was the time of Janis Joplin, Big Brother & the Holding
Co., Jim Morrison and The Doors, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin,
Jefferson Airplane, Cream, The Who, Steppenwolf, Country Joe
Fish, the Velvet Underground and The Band. And a fair number
of these didn’t make it far into the 70’s either.
By 1969 the Woodstock generation had gone toxic, too many
bad trips. The Summer of Love was long gone, and if the loving
farewell was the Woodstock concert itself, the final sinister
nail in the coffin were the killings at the Stones “Gimme
Shelter” concert at Altamont a few months later. Those
four years had also seen the assassinations of Martin Luther
King and Bobby Kennedy, gunned down in 1968. Richard Nixon
inaugurated President in 1969. And capping it all, in 1970
the terminal shock of the Kent State shootings. America was
starting to kill its own children. It couldn’t go on.
The 1970’s were necessarily very different and so was
the music. Less intense more self-involved, a time of introspection
and consolidation. By the 1980’s we were right back
where we were with Reagan, faux Eisenhower years without the
innocence.
Each generation thinks the music of their youth was the best.
Each generation as it ages progressively loses touch and interest
in the music of the young. God help us, we go mainstream.
That’s in the nature of things. But apart from Jazz
I don’t think there has ever been more revolutionary
changes in popular music than those last 4 years of the 50’s
and the 60’s. It was good to be around for both.
