Much of the “rioting” caused by rock ’n’ roll was a generational misunderstanding. Young people would be inspired to movement because the driving beat of the new music made it unnatural to sit still. You cannot sit still and listen to Chuck Berry. No one had ever heard such a driving beat, and young listeners had to move. So they would stand up at concerts and start moving to music, singing, shouting, and screaming. This would not have been surprising in a black venue, but was something new and alarming in the white world. Audiences shouting in theaters had vanished in the white world in the eighteenth century, though it remains common to this day in black theater. The response was to have large numbers of police to keep the young audience in line. This led to conflicts in which the police tried to force the youths to remain in their seats and the young audience would delight in taunting the police. This back-and-forth became known as a riot. In Britain in the 1950s, before there were rock concerts, young people instead had to riot at movie theaters showing American rock music. When young people lingered outside a 1956 London screening of Rock Around the Clock, singing rock songs, the police considered it disorderly behavior and moved in to make arrests. The revelers were charged with “insulting behavior.” At another screening, one hundred young audience members were forcibly removed by police. There were similar events in Manchester. Some theaters refused to show the film.
In March 1956, Bill Marlowe, a local deejay on WCOP, hosted a concert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The three thousand mostly young people who had paid ninety-nine cents each were irritated from the outset because they thought they had paid for a dance, and the concert was far too crowded for dancing. Instead, the crowd gathered ever closer to the stage, which worried the seven police officers patrolling the event, who panicked and ordered the concert stopped. The angered crowd began smashing chairs, tables, anything they could find, and it took police an hour and a half to subdue the violent crowd.
The authorities identified two culprits—the music and the deejay. At the urging of Mayor Edward J. Sullivan, the city council banned concerts hosted by deejays. Marlowe responded by turning against rock music, refusing to play it and regularly explaining on the air that he played “m-u-s-i-c, not n-o-i-s-e.”
The Boston City Council called for a list to be drawn up of acceptable deejays. An incident at a San Jose, California, concert led neighboring Santa Cruz to bar rock concerts from civic buildings. Jersey City canceled a Bill Haley concert because it feared riots. Around the country, concerts were stopped in civic auditoriums for fear of riots. The belief was often stated that the music drew a “bad crowd” and sometimes just that the music itself caused violence. When a fight broke out during a Fats Domino concert in an enlisted men’s club at a Newport, Rhode Island, naval station, the commanding rear admiral Ralph D. Earle insisted that the commonplace custom of brawls between enlisted sailors and marines had nothing to do with the disturbance but rather the fault was, as reported in The New York Times on September 20, 1956, “the excitement accompanying the fever-pitched rock ’n’ roll.” The press frequently made reference to “the three Rs”—rock, rolls, and riot.
In 1956, when the Columbia film Rock Around the Clock, an almost plotless showcase for rock ’n’ roll starring Bill Haley and His Comets and Alan Freed, was released, a New York Times review attacked it not for its obvious lack of cinematic quality but for the music itself—“this raucous rhythmic commodity that is so far from the jazz with which it is sometimes unfortunately confused.” The reviewer did not seem to understand that the young fans liked rhythmic raucousness exactly because it was a rejection of jazz.
In Blackboard Jungle a teacher brings to class his lovingly collected jazz records. He thought he would show his students their beauty and, through that, he could somehow reach them. Instead the students smash the entire collection. Seventy-eight rpm shellac records were brittle and could easily be broken. The young rockers had no use for jazz. Less remembered but more realistic was a scene from Richard Thorpe’s 1957 Jailhouse Rock. This film was a true product of the 1950s, not only because it starred Elvis Presley in his third movie and was about rock ’n’ roll music, but because MGM released the film with less than the usual publicity because it was based on a story by Nedrick Young, a World War II veteran, who had been blacklisted, banned from work, since 1953 because he refused to cooperate in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s persecution of alleged Communists. The year after Jailhouse Rock, Young, under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, won an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones, an exploration of racism.
In Jailhouse Rock, Judy Tyler, an actress known to every kid who grew up in the early 1950s as Princess Summerfall Winterspring on Howdy Doody—she died in a car accident before the Presley film was released—finds the young Elvis Presley playing a character named Vince Everett recently released from a prison term for manslaughter. He learned to play music from his cellmate, and Tyler, a music promoter and, of course, in love with Presley, tries to promote his rock ’n’ roll career. She brings Presley home to meet her parents, who are white liberals not particularly fazed by their daughter coming home with this ex-con. They and their friends want to talk music with him and eagerly try out theories about modern jazz. But when one of them tries to include Presley in the conversation, he gives them his curled-lip sneer and mumbles, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
In his song “Rock & Roll Music,” Chuck Berry explains why he does not like modern jazz—because it ends up sounding like a symphony.
In a Darwin-like manner, R&B and rock ’n’ roll ate up the niche in the food chain that had been held by jazz. Jazz, which had been essentially music for the black working class with notable crossovers for white audiences, had been replaced. At the same time, and not by coincidence, vocals were replacing instrumentals. It seemed everyone wanted to be a Frank Sinatra. Even Marvin Gaye, growing up on the black side of segregated Washington, DC, the son of a preacher, dreamed of being a black Sinatra. Nat King Cole had achieved it, abandoning a brilliant jazz career to croon popular songs and become one of the great black crossover stars, along with Johnny Mathis and Sammy Davis Jr. All three were carefully marketed as “not too black.” Mathis had the ultimate triumph, the only black to be featured in a 1958 Life magazine feature on rock ’n’ roll.
The article, part of a special issue on “U.S. entertainment,” prominently featured the clean-cut Dick Clark, a model-acceptable deejay whose show tried to make rock ’n’ roll “decent” and white for television, along with Pat Boone, famous for his antiseptic white covers of black music, and Elvis Presley in Army fatigues, successfully neutered by the U.S. military. There was also Ricky Nelson from the squeaky-clean and swell television family, innocent teen idol Frankie Avalon and slightly edgier Sal Mineo, and the Everly Brothers, a stirring and musically innovative duet. For their wilder side of rock ’n’ roll, the article had a four-frame photo sequence of rockabilly singer Tony Conn’s gyrations in a leopard-skin jacket with the caption “Like Wow.” And in their midst was Johnny Mathis, in his white cardigan and his straightened hair, in Boston singing “Sleigh Ride.” No one had to know he was black or, for that matter, that he didn’t sing rock ’n’ roll.
Jazz became a more elite form, performed in concert halls. Something good happens to an art form when it gives up attempting to garner popular appeal, and it led to a kind of golden age of jazz. Much of this jazz was called bebop, a term of uncertain origin that may go back as far as the 1920s. In the 1940s, this music took on new sophistication with the harmonic innovations of such musicians as horn player Dizzy Gillespie. By the 1950s it had become a profoundly sophisticated music, known for its riffs and lengthy improvisations, often with not always apparent political implications. Musicians such as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Red Garland, Herbie Hancock, Thad Jones, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, and John Coltrane became stars to a smaller black and white fan base. Some jazz musicians attem
pted and occasionally succeeded in reaching out to a wider audience, such as Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderley, and Miles Davis. But after the explosion of R&B and rock ’n’ roll it was an uphill struggle to attract huge sales from an all-instrumental recording.
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One of the most followed of black deejays in the 1950s and 1960s, Nathaniel Montague, who called himself Magnificent Montague, later said in his autobiography, “For my time on the radio was indeed a time of fire. It was a time when music and society and race and technology all exploded like a bomb.” It exploded in the early 1950s and kept exploding for almost twenty years.
The new music of the 1950s featured blacks who were idolized by white youth and whites who acted black and were embraced by black audiences. It was all part of that very dangerous idea of the times—integration. A white singer with sex appeal like Elvis Presley was more threatening than a black singer without it. But in a world where white teenage girls swooned, a sexy black man such as Chuck Berry was the most threatening figure. Antoine Domino, Fats Domino, from New Orleans, a great piano player, was acceptable because he was roly-poly and not in the least sexy. Richard Wayne Penniman, who called himself Little Richard and was a pivotal figure in carrying R&B to rock ’n’ roll, exhibited calculated sexual ambiguity in sequined outfits, makeup, and false eyelashes, his hair puffed high on his head. Later in life he openly admitted that he had created this persona so that he would be perceived as sufficiently non-threatening to be allowed to play white clubs and break into white radio. Little Richard had an irresistible hard beat and played the piano standing up as though too energized by his music to sit, which may have been true.
Little Richard’s producer H. B. Barnum, Hidle Brown Barnum—though when asked, he always insists his initials stand for “Handsome Boy”—said of the early age of rock ’n’ roll, “Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry—all of them had huge numbers of white fans. Many times we would cross Chuck on the road and he was playing all white audiences with white groups. Bo Diddley, too.”
Elvis Presley was white, but not in the least reassuring. His hair was long and he was impossibly beautiful and sexy; his body movements, which won him the nickname “Elvis the Pelvis,” and his music were all about black culture. His hair was even shaped with pomade, a black product for straightened hair. Music historian Nelson George has pointed out that this hairstyle was always said by blacks to be an attempt to look more white. So Presley was a white who tried to look like a black trying to look white. Even his flashy, iridescent tight-pegged clothes were a black style. He was a bridge that helped bring black music to white teenagers. He sang both black and white music, but sang it all with the beat of R&B and with the gimmicks and flair of blues and R&B, such as “the freeze,” where he would halt all movement for a half beat, and then burst forth again. And yet an Elvis recording never sounded like anyone else. Although rooted in traditions, he was at the beginning of his career an iconoclastic innovator, a rebel in the mold of James Dean and Marlon Brando.
Presley first gained widespread notice with his 1954 cover of Bill Monroe’s 1947 bluegrass hit “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Suddenly this beloved waltz, which was becoming almost an anthem of white Kentucky, sounded black. Presley was recording a session for “That’s All Right,” a cover of a song by black Delta blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. According to legend, his trio was taking a break and he was playing around with his bass man, Bill Black. They started parodying Monroe’s redneck hit as a joke. It ended up as the B side.
They picked up the tempo and turned the waltz, a song that ironically constantly repeats the word blue, into the blues, but with a hard beat. It was rhythm & blues. To listen to the slow and sentimental waltz in 3/4 time and then hear it souped up to an upbeat 4/4 with an insistent beat is the quickest way to understand what rock ’n’ roll was all about. In fact, for years, rock hits were created by switching an existing piece to four-beat measures with an upbeat tempo. In 1965, the Toys got to number 2 on the charts covering Bach with “A Lover’s Concerto,” in which songwriters Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell set words to Bach’s G major minuet and switched it from 3/4 to 4/4 time.
Crossover became a growing idea and not only in music. In 1950 Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first black to win a Nobel Prize. Also in 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen. James Baldwin, starting with his 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, became a literary star frequently published in mainstream white magazines such as Esquire. Sidney Poitier became Hollywood’s first black leading man and also starred in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play by a black woman and the first Broadway play to be directed by a black, Lloyd Richards.
And yet blacks were producing little of black music. Independent studios for R&B music, most of which were not black-owned, were dying off with crossover. In the early 1950s there were about a hundred, only about a quarter of the number in the 1940s. In any event, a black musician could choose between being exploited at a major studio in which a musician would be paid five dollars for a finished side, or an independent, where songwriters gave up their rights to a work for two dollars. This stirred a New Orleans black musician named Harold Battiste. In the mid-1950s Battiste was moved by the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, leader of a growing black group called Nation of Islam. Among those ideas was the belief that the way for blacks to obtain their rights was to seize economic power, to become players in the economy with black-run businesses. “We sing and dance. We ought to own that,” said Battiste. And so in 1959 he organized All For One Records and At Last Publishing. This idea of separate tandem record and publishing companies would later prove essential to the economic success of Motown. But Battiste was not a success. The cost of producing a record, including studio rental, musicians, record pressing was at most $1,000. The independents had been built on underpaying. It was hard to compete while paying artists fairly. Battiste went on to be a successful musical director for black singers such as Sam Cooke and white singers such as Sonny and Cher.
There were a handful of successful black record producers. Don Robey, a big, burly, light-skinned black man, started Peacock Records in 1949. He then acquired Memphis-based Duke Records and between the two became a leading producer of both R&B and gospel. He helped to popularize gospel as secular music by hardening the beat, and was one of the first producers to get a gospel recording placed in a jukebox, “Our Father” by the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Robey had a reputation for ruthlessness, and he became wealthy from his records. According to an unproven legend, when Little Richard complained to Robey that he had not received all the money due him, Robey hit him so hard, he knocked him down.
In 1952, Vivian and James Bracken, a black couple in industrial Gary, Indiana, were selling the new 45 R&B records in a small store where aspiring young black singers gathered. Vivian was also a Chicago deejay. They created Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, which, until Motown, was the model of a successful black company. Starting with “For Your Precious Love,” written by Jerry Butler, Arthur Brooks, and Richard Brooks and sung by the Impressions, they had a more than ten-year string of hits such as Betty Everett singing Rudy Clark’s “Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” and Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl.” They also recorded white musicians such as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, who specialized in the black device of singing in falsetto. They were even the first American company to release a Beatles song, “She Loves You,” but this British gold mine was quickly taken over by Capitol. To everyone’s surprise, by 1965 Vee-Jay was bankrupt, allegedly due to mismanagement.
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For those who denounced the three Rs, physical movement itself became the crime. The widely believed myth that The Ed Sullivan Show refused to film Elvis Presley below the waist seemed plausible because Presley was so often attacked for his movement. It was more serious when black people moved. When Bo Diddle
y appeared on national television in 1958, his contract stipulated that he was not to move. When he did, he was denied his entire fee.
A January 1958 New York Times Sunday Magazine article tried to understand the curious effect rock ’n’ roll was having on teenagers. The article begins:
“Rocking” the song as though in a life and death struggle with an invisible antagonist was a tall, thin, flaccid youth who pulled his stringy blond hair over his eyes and down to his chin. He shook his torso about as the beat of the band seemingly goaded him on. Screams from thousands of young throats billowed toward him. In the pandemonium, youngsters flailed the air with their arms, jumped from their seats, beckoned madly, lovingly, to the tortured figure onstage.
The song could scarcely be heard over the footlights. No matter. The kids knew the words. They shrilled them with the singer—and kept up their approving, uninhibited screams. . . .
What is this thing called rock ’n’ roll? What is it that makes teen-agers—mostly children between the ages of 12 and 16—throw off their inhibitions as though at a revivalist meeting? What—who—is responsible for these sorties? And is this generation of teen-agers going to hell?
This article, which at one point began sounding like the lyrics to “Dancing in the Street” as it listed the cities where the phenomenon was occurring, contained interviews with remarkably cogent and articulate teenagers. One identified as “brown-haired Vivian” said “The main thing about this music is that it’s lively—it’s not dead. It makes you want to dance.”
Another girl named Jerilyn said of Elvis Presley, “My girl friend says he sends chills up her spine. But I think the majority of the girls just like the beat. It’s new.”
The music industry itself attacked the new music in the mid-1950s. Deejays denounced the music on the radio. Peter Potter of KLAC-Hollywood was particularly influential because he hosted a popular television show, Juke Box Jury, which broadcasted from 1956 to 1959. The program invited celebrity guests to vote “hit” or “miss” on the latest records. Many artists and fans in the R&B and rock ’n’ roll world may have been bemused by the dubious relevance of having their music judged by the likes of aging crooner Dean Martin, the blond celebrity Zsa Zsa Gabor, or the folksy character actor Walter Brennan. But the show had a following. Potter seemed almost on a mission to attack rock ’n’ roll, which he claimed was “lewd” and “not fit for radio broadcasts.” He later said that such music was “as bad for kids as dope.”
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 4