by Bob Stanley
=10 Mario Lanza, ‘Because You’re Mine’ (HMV DA 2017)
‘Because You’re Mine’ was the first-ever hit single as we know it, an actual piece of seven-inch vinyl. As a slice of light opera it shamed British pretenders like David Whitfield and Lee Lawrence, and even Al Martino – all of them sound puny alongside the lung power of bon viveur Mario Lanza.
His meteoric career was decidedly modern. Lanza was an astonishing tenor who studied with conductor Leonard Bernstein before making his stage debut aged twenty-one in 1942 – the New York Times reckoned, very early on, that he had ‘few equals among tenors of the day in terms of quality, warmth and power’. After serving in the war, his career took off and by 1947 his voice was reducing people to tears at the Hollywood Bowl. Louis Mayer was in the crowd, and convinced Lanza that he could be a film star. He was right: in 1950 Lanza starred in The Toast of New Orleans, singing ‘Be My Love’, which became a million-seller; a year later he was the only possible candidate for the lead in The Great Caruso, which played fast and loose with Caruso’s life story and made a pop song – ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’ – out of ‘Sobre las Olas’. Opera critics were horrified. Lanza’s love of food and drink began to bloat him. ‘Because You’re Mine’ became his last million-seller, and by the time of his death in 1959 he was both ignored by opera critics and regarded by pop fans as a has-been. The perils of getting caught up in the machinery would run through the modern pop story – Lanza’s rise and fall would find echoes in the lives of Marc Bolan and Kurt Cobain.
As modern pop grew up, it would subtly attempt to reintroduce elements that had been cast aside in rock ’n’ roll’s birthing. If we can say that the Shadows were subtly bringing the influence of Mantovani back into the chart, then it’s safe to say Elvis was channelling Mario Lanza on ‘It’s Now or Never’ (UK and US no. 1 ’60) and, most obviously, at the climax of ‘Surrender’ (UK and US no. 1 ’61). Elvis was trying to recapture the intangible magic of the music he had grown up with; in turn, the sixties beat era would be a twenty-something’s recap of their Elvis moment, reigniting the thrill they had felt when they first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as young teenagers. T. Rextasy would reference Beatlemania – and the process continued. This was one of modern pop’s magical properties: by participating, you could be more than just a consumer – you were helping to create pop history. There came a point where you realised you were a scholar with access to a personal, hand-built library rather than a rotten pupil who had been bunking off school to buy seven-inch singles.
11 Max Bygraves, ‘Cowpuncher’s Cantata’ (HMV B 10250)
Along with his Mario Lanza albums, Elvis Presley’s record collection included the soundtrack to The Pajama Game, televangelist Jack Van Impe’s Marked for Death: Can America Survive? and Max Bygraves’s Singalongachristmas. This was more likely to be because Elvis used to buy every new Christmas album each year than for any strong feelings he had for the music of Max Bygraves. ‘Cowpuncher’s Cantata’ was a medley of recent country-flavoured songs which, while its humour was fairly lame, at least signified the nascent presence of what the Daily Mirror called ‘commercial folk music’ in Britain.
By 1955 a noticeable breeze would be catching Britain’s weather vane. There was a strong thread of country music, something approximating Americana, nudging to the fore in the British singles charts. Slim Whitman, a yodeller who meant little outside of specialist markets in the US, scored the year’s biggest hit, ‘Rose Marie’ – eleven weeks at number one – which was lyrically as racked as Frankie Laine and sonically quite windswept: ‘Of all the queens who ever lived, I’d choose you to rule me, my Rose Marie.’ It sounded like it was recorded in a ghost town, with clanking pianola and tumbleweed vocal.
Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Sixteen Tons’ followed ‘Rose Marie’ to number one a few months later, a deeply atmospheric piece which featured little more than Ford’s earth-shaking baritone, his menacing finger-clicking and some sparse, strange woodwind accompaniment: ‘I was born one morning, it was drizzling rain,’ he sang, his voice sliding into subsonics on the last word. Jimmy Young’s ‘The Man from Laramie’, another 1955 number one, was similarly minimal, albeit Omo-washed and starched, a cowboy song all the way from the barren prairies of Wiltshire. Yet it indicated a desire for something different, something a little more gritty than ‘Blue Tango’ or ‘Feet Up’. The British public may not have known what it wanted, but it was just about to get it.
12 Johnnie Ray, ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ (Columbia DB 3060)
Aside from Frankie Laine and Slim Whitman, two other pre-rock American figures suggested pop’s possible futures. Roy Hamilton was a little more subtle than Frankie Laine; he was also one of the few black singers outside of jazz to impact on pre-rock. He never bothered the British charts but, more than any of his contemporaries, his US hits laid some kind of blueprint for the next two decades. Hamilton had studied commercial art, had operatic and classical voice training, then became a heavyweight Golden Gloves boxer, a combination that lent him a sonorous authority, with just a hint of real danger.
His material was strong red meat: he hit the R&B Top 10 with ‘Ebb Tide’, ‘Hurt’, ‘If I Loved You’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (all 1954), before reaching number six in the pop chart with ‘Unchained Melody’ (1955). No one else has sung ‘I’ve hungered for your touch’ as affectingly. Roy Hamilton brought gospel into pop, and dug the earliest foundations for soul.
Almost uniquely, he could appear on the US pop charts while still playing at the Apollo in Harlem; he’d have become a major star but he caught tuberculosis in ’56 and was forced into semi-retirement. Emotive, rocking hits came intermittently to show what might have been (‘Don’t Let Go’, no. 13 ’58; ‘You Can Have Her’, no. 12 ’61), but he never fully recovered. In 1969 he attempted another comeback, recording ‘Dark End of the Street’ in Memphis, while Elvis Presley – cutting ‘Suspicious Minds’ in the adjoining studio – watched on with due respect. Hamilton died of a stroke just a few weeks later.
Arguably the most significant modern pop forebear was Johnnie Ray, who was raised in rural Oregon, where an accident at a Boy Scout jamboree had left him deaf in his right ear. Unlike pretty much all his contemporaries, he was inspired by black singers like Roy Hamilton, LaVern Baker and Ivory Joe Hunter. At the turn of the fifties, in Detroit’s Flame Showbar, Ray mixed up pre-rock and R&B and created a sensation.
Several things marked Ray out as something quite new. For a start he cut a less than manly figure, more emaciated even than the forties Sinatra, and looked in urgent need of a nap as well as a square meal. He also looked uncomfortable on stage, clenching his fists and wiping his sweaty palms on his suit trousers, and – and this was a first – women unashamedly wanted to mother him and smother him. Then there was his hearing aid. Using these props he’d wind himself up with windmill arm movements until, climactically, he broke out in tears. ‘I don’t have a voice,’ he explained to the Daily Mirror, ‘I got a style.’ Johnnie Ray was not easy listening, and he wasn’t about to win any ideal husband poll.
The perception of Ray was also complicated because he had hits on the R&B chart, which was almost unknown for a white singer in the early fifties. He would mess about with black recordings like the Drifters’ ‘Such a Night’, adding his own oohs, mmms and slow intakes of breath to up the ante. ‘When we kissed … I had to fall in love’; if Chuck Jones’s leering wolf was a record, this would be it. ‘Such a Night’ went all the way to number one in the UK (it only made nineteen in the US), between the spectacularly chaste pairing of Doris Day and David Whitfield; that alone goes some way to explaining Ray’s pre-rock impact.
As a record of how audiences – Britain’s first teen screamers – reacted to Ray’s stage act, there was the 1954 Live at the London Palladium album. They sighed and gasped as if they were watching a saucy circus act. They screamed for ‘Such a Night’, which he reprised, and reprised again. And he did this until you can hear girls shout �
�Johnnie!!’, at which point modern pop came alive.8
A mid-fifties British TV documentary called Fan Fever interviewed Dickie Valentine, Alma Cogan and Dennis Lotis, focusing on the new fad for screaming at stars on stage. Lotis, smoking a pipe, recalled with no small displeasure how one inflamed girl managed to grab and remove one of his shoes. The Johnnie Ray Fan Club of Great Britain were interviewed – all of them were girls. Some were content to collect Ray’s records; others knitted their own jumpers emblazoned with their idol’s name. One had a piece of clothing, a sacred shred ripped from his body. Another particularly tough-looking girl had primitively carved Ray’s name on her arm – you hoped for her sake it wasn’t a real tattoo. A studio panel furrowed its brow and passed judgement. A grizzled American psychiatrist gave his opinion. They agreed unanimously – it was a passing craze.
1 It was the idea of the NME’s Percy Dickins, who compiled it himself by obtaining sales figures from twenty record shops around the country. Initially, the chart was a Top 12, expanding to a Top 20 in 1955.
2 Opportunity Knocks started as a radio show in 1949, moved to ITV in 1956 and stayed on the air until 1978. Listeners and viewers phoned in to vote for their favourite performer, who could be a comedian, a magician or a singing dog – the format survives as Britain’s Got Talent. The show was referenced by George Harrison on the BBC TV show Blackpool Night Out, as the Beatles premiered ‘Yesterday’: ‘For Paul McCartney of Liverpool, opportunity knocks!’
3 Mantovani’s atmospheric arrangement on ‘Cara Mia’, I should add, is something else. Genuinely celestial. If anyone with a degree of subtlety was singing, it would be quite a record.
4 Laine was a rock-era prototype – the bruised, sensitive, big man. His movie-screen mannerisms crop up periodically, notably on Roy Orbison’s ‘Running Scared’ (US no. 1, UK no. 9 ’60), P. J. Proby’s ‘I Can’t Make It Alone’ (UK no. 37 ’66) and Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ (US no. 6, UK no. 10 ’90).
5 Eddie Fisher’s vocal cover version was an American number one in 1954. It was both more cloying than Calvert’s recording and comically damning with faint praise: ‘Oh my papa, so funny … in his way.’
6 Alma Cogan died of cancer in 1965, by which time she had become London’s most famous party hostess, carousing with Sammy Davis Jr and the Beatles alike. When Gordon Burn wrote a novel about Britain in the fifties and sixties, he called it Alma Cogan, fictionalising her life and imagining she was still alive, looking back at her career.
7 Ruby Murray could’ve been bigger than the Beatles … wait a minute, she was! No other act in the vinyl era managed to have as many singles simultaneously in the Top 20.
8 America had already encountered teen screams as far back as October 12th 1944, when thirty-five thousand girls, many wearing bobby sox and bow ties, caused a near riot outside the Paramount in New York because they couldn’t get in to see Frank Sinatra. It became known as the Columbus Day Riot. Sinatra was already twenty-nine; to many of his fans he would have seemed like a father figure, even if he did make them feel all churned up inside. But he was a phenomenon, and the bobby soxers who swooned for him also wet themselves and threw their bras at him. Sinatra was a pointer to the future for youth culture, a harbinger, though the Columbus Day Riot was something of an anomaly. While it was commonplace for Hollywood stars to get mauled and screamed at, no pop star would receive remotely similar treatment until Eddie Fisher (much more gently) at the turn of the fifties. Sinatra’s career was in decline by this point; after attempting suicide, he starred in From Here to Eternity in ’53, then worked with Nelson Riddle on ‘Young at Heart’ in ’54, and successfully recast himself as a purely adult artist just as rock ’n’ roll hit the mainstream. His fans grew up with him.
2
FLIP, FLOP AND FLY: BILL HALEY AND JUMP BLUES
One summer night in 1954 a train travelling from Southend-on-Sea to London came to a sudden halt when someone pulled the emergency cord. But there was no emergency. No one was ill, there was no real reason for it. After a moment’s ominous silence came the sound of smashing glass as lightbulbs got busted, plunging carriages into darkness. When the trashed train pulled into Barking, police arrested a bunch of youths in Edwardian suits.
Teddy boys and Teddy girls pre-date rock ’n’ roll. Theirs was the first public display of fidgeting, the first tangible proof that Britain’s younger generation was restless and wanted meatier entertainment than the gruel they were being offered. Their parents had been too caught up in staying alive; they’d had enough excitement.
The first generation of Teds had their own dances – the creep, the stroll – and danced to the more rhythmically forceful big bands, the ones with a touch of burlesque, like the Kirchins and Ken Mackintosh. Music was part of their identity, as were the coffee bars that had sprung up like bright formica flowers on most high streets since the Festival of Britain. They had no adult supervision beyond the owners, who knew they could get a brick through their window if they interfered with this teenage business. Jukeboxes sat in the corner, restlessly waiting for the new rhythm.
In 1955 Bill Haley and his Comets released ‘Rock around the Clock’, and it was the sound the Teds had been waiting for. It was the first record to have – all in one place – a lyric about all-night partying, a thrilling guitar solo and a rock-solid beat, with its drums way up in the mix. What’s more, its success was on an international scale, and this is why it crossed a generational threshold, ushering in the rock ’n’ roll era.
The beauty of rock ’n’ roll was not just its newness but its gleeful awareness of its newness, wiping out the repression of the post-war decade. It wasn’t as if the old guard didn’t put up a fight, but once the door was opened, once ‘Rock around the Clock’ hit number one in Britain and America in 1955, the heart of pop beat differently. At least fifty per cent of the genre’s biggest hits could conceivably be filed under novelty: Buddy Holly’s hiccup, Little Richard’s shrieks, Elvis’s pelvic thrusts, gimmicks all over, go ape crazy – everything was now permissible as long as it created the most stupidly, gloriously distorted noise.
Whether the sounds were created by genuine madmen or were manufactured mayhem was irrelevant; the rock ’n’ roll aesthetic was anti-boredom. Suddenly, noise and overexcitement became values rather than marks of low quality. It was here and gone in a flash – hardly more than two years between initial explosion and self-parody. When later generations coined the term ‘rock ’n’ roll lifestyle’ for leather-jacket-wearing, TV-smashing, Jack Daniels-swilling, smacked-out oblivion, they did the innovators a bad disservice: first-wave rock ’n’ roll was fast-moving, fun, disposable and defiantly youthful, no time for cliché. There is more rock ’n’ roll in the three minutes of passionate dishevelment in Barbara Pitman’s ‘I Need a Man’ than the combined catalogues of Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe.
The codes that have riddled modern pop since the rock ’n’ roll explosion – rock versus pop, underground versus Top 40 – were some way off in the mid-fifties. Almost nobody aside from radio DJs was collecting records or filling in catalogue numbers. Ideologues weren’t yet squabbling over Ricky Nelson or Buddy Holly or Johnny Burnette’s place in the rock pantheon because nobody was talking about a rock pantheon.
In the twenty-first century Bill Haley is rarely included in any critic’s list of prime movers, which is sad and a little ridiculous. Whichever way you slice it, he was at the front of the queue. Haley invented rock ’n’ roll. No one had blended country and R&B before Haley wrote and recorded ‘Rock the Joint’;1 no one hit the Billboard Top 20 with something that could be safely labelled rock ’n’ roll before ‘Crazy Man Crazy’; and no one scored a rocking number one before ‘Rock around the Clock’ turned the music world upside down.
* * *
Teds had been searching for their own musical identity, and it was clear that minor variations on the big-band music their parents had danced to were unsatisfactory. Equally clearly, the opening sequence of 1955 movie Blackboard Jun
gle was just what they needed: juvenile delinquents take over a school and symbolically smash a teacher’s collection of jazz 78s into little pieces, to the soundtrack of ‘Rock around the Clock’.
In America, a potential musical revolution had been flagged as far back as 1951, when Leo Fender sold his first electric bass guitar, and early adopters – like Shifty Henry of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five and the Lionel Hampton band’s Roy Johnson – began to change the dynamics of R&B and jazz. But in 1955 Britain, the metallic backbeat of ‘Rock around the Clock’, the walking bassline and the perceptible change in volume would have seemed to have come from nowhere, a total shock to the system; it unleashed a whirlwind of media attention as cinema seats were slashed by Teds across Britain.
The film’s progressive and controversial take on racial integration was enough to get Blackboard Jungle widely banned in the States, and the Eisenhower administration kept it from being shown at the Venice Film Festival. ‘Rock around the Clock’ and Blackboard Jungle’s two-pronged assault effectively compacted white teenage self-assertion and black political justice; on one side an adolescent matter, on the other very much not. This coming together, symbolised in Haley’s single, was a very big deal – for the times and for modern pop.2 It transformed a raucous hit record and a pop moment into something teenagers of the fifties could look back on later with more than just nostalgia, something all young people could take retrospective pride in. By the first week of July 1955 government edicts counted for nothing – ‘Rock around the Clock’ was America’s number-one single.