Even Billboard, whose bread and butter was the charts on which the new music was prominently featured, ran editorials denouncing it and urging the industry to suppress particularly tasteless recordings. They advised radio stations that there were records on their own Top 10 that might be inappropriate for broadcast. The chart, they explained, is merely a reflection of record sales and not a recommendation. Variety said that rock ’n’ roll was about sex, and that such lewdness was all right in “special places” but was not suitable for “general consumption.” This language is not difficult to decipher. This is black music suitable for black venues but not appropriate for white kids. Pamphlets circulated, warning white parents to keep this music away from their children.
Some radio stations, including six in Boston, set up their own boards of review to censor inappropriate rock ’n’ roll. “Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers was a frequent target. In this song a couple innocently falls asleep in a dull movie and accidentally sleeps through the night. The song makes clear that they really were innocent and had just fallen asleep. There is no other hidden meaning. Fats Waller, Cole Porter, and others had used far more overt sexual innuendos without such ire. Hoagy Carmichael even sang about a couple spending the night together because they were too much in love to say good night. But teenage girls were not dancing to that music, and it didn’t have a hard beat. Then, too, the whole point of the Everly Brothers song, which may have irritated the guardians of morality, was that innocent teenagers could so easily be falsely accused by adult society.
• • •
A major shift was happening in the music world and there would be winners and losers. The older Italian crooners saw it as a shift away from northern Italians to southern whites and blacks. This was not exactly true. Frankie Valli, Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Sal Mineo, and Dion DiMucci, generally known as just Dion, were all Italian rockers born in the Northeast, just as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett had been. But maybe this was even worse news for the Sinatras—younger New York and New Jersey Italians were trying to replace them and their music. The established white media—print, radio, and television—all treated the Italian rockers better than other rock singers because they were used to Italian singers. And in time, some such as Bobby Darin easily morphed into nightclub crooners in the Sinatra mold.
Sinatra was viciously opposed to the new music and seemed never to miss an occasion to attack it. This was particularly striking because Sinatra had a reputation as something of a liberal, supportive of progressive Democrats and civil rights. He also had an image of being hip, but now in his forties, he was aging. In a visible cultural midlife crisis, Sinatra told a congressional investigating committee that rock ’n’ roll was “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” He further stated, “Rock and roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics . . . it manages to be martial music of every side burned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
Sinatra had many allies in his celebrity anti-rock crusade. Bandleader and television host Mitch Miller said that rock music caused teenagers to wear sloppy clothes and was “one step away from fascism.” He called it “the comic books of music.” Composer Meredith Wilson, who became a star when his musical The Music Man opened on Broadway in 1957, said in 1958, “The people of this country do not have any conception of the evil being done by rock ’n’ roll; it is a plague as far reaching as any plague we have ever had.”
Though there is strong evidence that racism was a factor in virulent anti-rock, Sammy Davis Jr. also hated rock ’n’ roll and told Mitch Miller that he would consider suicide if he thought that the music would not soon vanish. Nor can it be assumed that all of rock’s opponents were threatened by it. Pablo Casals, the Catalan master of cello, was anti-rock. Perhaps the greatest classical cellist of all time, Casals was probably not worried about being replaced by Elvis Presley and Bo Diddley. But Casals said rock ’n’ roll was “poison put to music.” A movement of classical musicians against rock ’n’ roll manifested itself in buttons spoofing the “I Like Elvis” buttons that thousands of teenagers wore. “I Like Ludwig” buttons were also worn by thousands, including Casals, violinist Isaac Stern, and conductor Eugene Ormandy. More disturbing was the observation in The Times of London in 1956 by BBC Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent that young people were wrong to think of rock ’n’ roll as new since it “has been played in the jungle for centuries.”
Enough, said singer Tony Bennett, who also hated the music. His fear was that rock ’n’ roll, which would have been a passing trend, was being kept alive by all this colorful and oft-quoted criticism. If everyone would stop talking about it, Bennett told the press, kids would in time grow up and “slow down and require less noise.”
Religious leaders, captains of finance and industry, educators, politicians, and members of law enforcement all weighed in on the harmful effects of rock ’n’ roll. It was a social conflict, but probably nothing fueled the fight more than the increased competition between two music industry organizations, ASCAP and BMI. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was founded in 1914 to register and license popular music and protect its creators. It completely ignored country music and R&B. In 1940 Broadcast Music Incorporated was established to break ASCAP’s monopoly. But for the most part, it was only able to register the marginal music in which ASCAP had no interest.
By the late 1950s ASCAP had a real rival in BMI, which had most of the R&B and rock ’n’ roll titles. ASCAP attacked its new competitor by attacking its music in the press, before Congress, in the courts. Many of the celebrities of Broadway, the record establishment, and Hollywood had strong ties to ASCAP.
• • •
But there was an even darker side to the opposition to rock ’n’ roll. In April 1956 Nat King Cole was giving a concert in Birmingham, Alabama, to an all-white audience of 3,500, which was not unusual for Cole. He was about to start his third song, “Little Girl.” Ted Heath’s largely British and white band, modeled after Glen Miller, started the introduction. Three men charged up one aisle and two up the other. According to the following week’s account in Newsweek, “The audience watched curiously as the figures raced into the light, vaulted onto the stage. Cole sprawled backwards under a welter of bodies.”
According to Newsweek and other accounts, the audience was angered by the attack and people shouted, “Bring Cole back” and “Sorry it happened.” Heath was so infuriated, he wanted to cancel the tour, but Cole convinced him to continue. The assailants were thugs with records of mindless assault, but what was disturbing was that four of the five were members of a group called the North Alabama Citizens Council, whose stated goal was to oppose integration. Asa Carter, who headed the group, said that he was not disturbed by the incident, explaining, “I’ve swung on niggers myself.” Carter explained that rock ’n’ roll music “is the basic heavy beat music of negroes. It appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity.” He believed that rock music was part of an “NAACP plot to mongrelize America” and that such Negro music was an attempt to impose “Negro culture” on the South.
According to the police investigation, the attack had been planned in a gas station four days earlier, and 150 people were involved. The target of Nat King Cole and the Ted Heath Band is odd, because no one involved seemed to notice that neither Cole nor Ted Heath’s band played “the heavy beat music of Negroes” and that in fact the only thing to qualify this concert for their attack was the color of Cole’s skin.
Throughout the South racist segregationist groups published literature warning white parents of the influence Negroes were having on their children through rock ’n’ roll. Southern segregationists, on the defensive since the Supreme Court decision on schools, regarded rock ’n’ roll as just on
e more attempt to unravel their way of life.
A month after the Cole attack, the Platters, Bo Diddley, and Bill Haley appeared at the same Birmingham, Alabama, concert hall, and despite the apparent sympathy of the April audience to Cole, this May concert was greeted with signs saying Jungle Music Promotes Integration. Similar demonstrations were seen at many rock ’n’ roll concerts in the South, and at some in the North as well.
Of course, the music, designed to appeal to both races, did promote integration. Some civil rights activists also saw the biracial popularity of rock ’n’ roll as an important force for integration in the South. Alabama-born Shelley Stewart, a popular black rock ’n’ roll radio personality in the South, openly mixed civil rights and rock ’n’ roll in his Alabama and Mississippi radio broadcasts. In July 1960 he hosted a white record hop outside of Birmingham. Some eighty Klansmen arrived, with the intention of breaking up the event. But the white audience of about eight hundred teenagers, furious, attacked the Klan.
• • •
Despite all the angry opposition, black music continued to cross over to white, principally young, audiences more than ever before in history. In 1957 Norman Mailer published an essay, “The White Negro,” about the new white rebel, a “philosophical psychopath” and “hipster” who embraced black culture as a protest against white society and its ignorant fear of integration.
The record establishment tried to whiten the music. After all, if these marginal performers could attract significant record sales, think what a cover by a clean-cut white could sell. And so the Crew Cuts covered “Sh-Boom,” the McGuire Sisters covered the Moonglows hit “Sincerely.” The king of white covers was Pat Boone, a twentyish singer who seemed to try to embody the notion of white with his carefully combed blond hair and trademark white buck shoes. He could sing black R&B and rock ’n’ roll and make it as reassuring, harmless, and white as Patti Page’s 1953 number 1 hit “Doggie in the Window.” The heart of Boone’s repertoire was covers of Fats Domino and Little Richard. Fifty Boone recordings made the charts and thirty-eight were in the Top 40. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the only performer to have more hits than Pat Boone was Elvis Presley.
But Boone was not a hit with black people, whereas Presley from the mid-1950s until the chart was temporarily dropped in 1963 had twenty-four hits on Billboard’s black R&B chart. No other white singer so penetrated the black market, though the Everly Brothers had eight R&B hits, as did the Newark Italian Connie Francis. Rick Nelson had nine, Frankie Avalon had five, and even Andy Williams, who crooned in cardigan sweaters, had three. The days of separate black and white music were showing signs of coming to an end.
But the pioneers paid a price. One of the first victims was Alan Freed, the white deejay who gave rock ’n’ roll its name and through his radio programs, the concerts he hosted, and films, was the single greatest promoter of this new music. His childhood dream was to be a bandleader. Working his way up from smaller stations, in 1951 he began working for WJW Cleveland. There he met Leo Mintz, a record store owner who told him that he was selling an increasing number of records by black artists, R&B, to white teenagers and convinced him that there should be a radio show for this music. Freed began imitating black deejays, using black expressions, black vocal styles, and the personality-driven format of the deejays on black radio. He created a black radio program that played black music for a white audience on the kind of powerful white radio station to which blacks rarely had access. He seemed to genuinely love the music. He always claimed that he played only the records that he loved.
As early as 1952 Freed became a target of law enforcement and anti-rockers. That year one of the first rock riots broke out when a show he sponsored at the Cleveland Arena was oversold and angry ticket holders were denied entry. The crowd at the Cleveland Arena had been an equal blend of black and white, something troubling to a lot of citizens of Cleveland, a city where races had always been separate. Freed was blamed for the riot, though charges were later dropped.
Freed continued to be a controversial figure and a target of legal actions, ostensibly for his promotion of rock ’n’ roll, but really for his racial integration, and he seemed to be able to attract equal numbers of both races. Racists found it particularly infuriating that he tended to ignore white covers such as those by Pat Boone, preferring to play the black original.
In 1954 he moved to WINS in New York, where he had the most popular show, which gave him the power to host more concerts and to break into television and movies. It was disillusioning when teenagers got to actually see Freed, because he was the ultimate dorky white guy who couldn’t dance. But he wore bright-colored, outrageous clothing, often plaid.
In 1957, at the height of his popularity, Freed had his own rock ’n’ roll television show on ABC. But on one episode he let Frankie Lymon, a rising black star who would later influence the music of such Motown greats as Smokey Robinson and the Jackson Five, dance with a white girl. There were angry protests, especially from southern ABC affiliates, and Freed’s show was canceled.
He was not a completely innocent figure. He often did not treat artists on his shows well, was accused of stealing song credits, and very much underpaid the talents who created the music he loved. But in 1958 his life began to unravel in ways he did not deserve. On May 3 one of the worst rock ’n’ roll riots took place at an event he hosted at the Boston Arena. A sailor was stabbed and others were punched, beaten, or robbed by an unidentified gang in satin jackets. Freed was charged with inciting violence. The charges were later dropped, but Freed was ruined financially after WINS would not renew his contract. He landed a job on WABC radio and also a dance show, Big Beat, on WNEW, a local New York channel.
The Boston incident increased pressure not only on Freed but on all of rock ’n’ roll. Many towns simply refused to allow Freed to hold events. ASCAP had been intensifying its war against rock ’n’ roll, which was really a war against BMI, by pressuring leading politicians. The junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, representing Boston, which had always been a very anti-rock town, stood with archconservative Barry Goldwater in the Senate, opposing rock ’n’ roll. Kennedy had a Newsday article attacking the music read into the congressional record. A segregationist Florida senator, George Smathers, was supported by Kennedy in his call to investigate rock ’n’ roll.
It was then, in 1959, that ASCAP opened a new front in its war on rock. They discovered that certain deejays, the ones who played BMI music, of course, were receiving money from record producers to play their records. The investigation went to the U.S. Congress. A number of deejays were found to be receiving “payola.” In reality, the practice was fairly widespread but with different levels of payoffs. In a recent interview, Cousin Brucie Morrow laughed about it. “I took payola once. The manager of a local New York group had a mother who owned a bakery. I was told that if I played their record I would get two cherry pies. I played the record and took the pies. Everyone else was getting money, cars, and televisions. I got two cherry pies.”
But in 1959 no one was laughing, and the deejay the investigation chose to go after was Alan Freed. He was the only deejay subpoenaed. Freed admitted to taking money but said that it was legitimate consulting fees. He was prosecuted and convicted on twenty-nine counts of commercial bribery and given a six-month suspended sentence and fined $300. But he was fired from WABC, though the station would give no reason for the dismissal. His six-day-a-week television show was canceled. Freed, a ruined, impoverished man, lived quietly. But he remained a target, charged in 1964 with income tax evasion on unreported income from 1957 to 1959. On January 20, 1965, he died of kidney failure at the age of forty-three. Alan Freed simply disappeared, but to the frustration of his enemies, rock ’n’ roll didn’t.
Bill Haley’s attempts to avoid trouble by cleaning up his lyrics did not spare him criticism, but sat poorly with his fans, who started to see him as too old. Chuck Berry, a restlessly innova
tive rocker who combined the hard beat and body antics of rock ’n’ roll with the ribald sense of humor of old-time Louis Jordan–style R&B, was always targeted by rock haters.
On August 28, 1959, after a concert in Meridian, Mississippi, a twenty-year-old white woman and her boyfriend approached Berry and asked for his autograph. For reasons that were never clear, he was arrested for attempting to date a white girl and was immediately jailed. He was released the next day. The same year he was arrested under the Mann Act for “transporting a minor across a state line for immoral purposes.” The Mann Act, passed in 1910, supposedly to prevent white slavery, had loose enough wording to be regularly used against blacks involved with white women. Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, was arrested under the Mann Act twice, in 1912 and 1913. In Chuck Berry’s case, he met a Mexican Indian woman in Juarez, Mexico, named Janice Escalanti and hired her for his St. Louis nightclub. They quarreled and she went to the police. It turned out that she was only fourteen years old. It is not clear if Berry had known her true age. It didn’t matter. Law enforcement finally had him. In the indictment they accused him of luring her “to give herself up for debauchery,” despite the fact that the girl was known to have worked as a prostitute before meeting the rock star.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 5