Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Lantern-jawed Carl Perkins’s version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ sold one and a half million copies on Sun in 1956; it topped the Billboard pop, country and R&B charts simultaneously. For a few months, then, Carl had it all, yet he was humble and horribly shy: ‘When you’re a country boy just a month from the plough, and suddenly you’re a star with money in your pocket, cars, women, big cities, crowds, the change is just too fast. You’re the same person inside, but you’re a star outside, so you don’t know how to act. You’re embarrassed about the way you talk, the way you eat, the way you look.’ On tour he got homesick. In another age he could have been a bedsit figure, an alt-country hero, natural student fodder: ‘I think the happiest time in my life was when I was a little boy in the country in the summer. Then I thought time was standing still and the world was mine.’ He could have been a proto-Neil Young. But he was too country for that, and instead wrote a beautiful self-deprecating thing called ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’: ‘Well they took some honey from a tree, dressed it up and they called it me.’

  Johnny Cash was the Man in Black. He had a wood-carved face and a look of resolute danger; when he sang his voice could go deeper than a coal mine. He was all granite and grit, a real man – even Jerry Lee seemed rather childish and squeaky by comparison. His first major hit was ‘I Walk the Line’ (US no. 17 ’56), possessive and paranoiac, sat over a boom-chicka-boom rhythm track he would employ for the next forty years; it sounded like a train running along the railroad, carrying restless Johnny out of Tennessee, to everywhere and nowhere. On ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ he ‘shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’.

  Cash stuck closer to country than any of his stablemates, yet eschewed rhinestones. He was big on causes, cutting whole albums dedicated to the working man, to his homeland (1965’s From Sea to Shining Sea) and to the American Indian, while also enshrining his outlaw status by getting busted for drugs several times in the mid-sixties; he started a forest fire that destroyed half a national park; he slept in a cave and had a religious awakening; most famously, he played shows in prisons. No one doubted that he was a free spirit.

  And, in spite of all this kudos, if you asked anyone to name more than four songs by him they’d struggle: ‘I Walk the Line’, ‘Ring of Fire’, ‘A Boy Named Sue’. That was pretty much it. Still, the music was almost beside the point. If you squinted, he looked like an American eagle; he could even look, with his furrowed brow and soulful eyes, like the pioneering spirit of his entire country, and he was quite happy not to dispel this image. In this respect, he was more of a myth than anyone else in this book.

  Outside of Sun there were dozens of independent labels cutting rockabilly, hundreds of acts, all trying to get a slice of Elvis’s cake. One of the best was Wanda Jackson, the Queen of Rockabilly. She wore fringe dresses, high heels and long earrings, and with her dark hair, dark eyes and porcelain skin she looked like a sexy Snow White. She dated Elvis, and he convinced her that she could switch from straight country to something with a bigger beat. He was right; Wanda could growl. Her biggest hit in the US was ‘Let’s Have a Party’ (no. 37 ’60) but her most incendiary was ‘Fujiyama Mama’, a beautifully mannered shuffler with Wanda wrecking her throat on lines like ‘I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too. The same I did to them, baby, I can do to you.’ It was a major hit in Japan, which says something for their sense of humour.

  Johnny Burnette was a lightweight and welterweight boxer who fought his way to a Memphis City Golden Gloves championship. His brother Dorsey was a Southern pro champ, and they met guitarist Paul Burlison at an amateur boxing tournament in Memphis in 1949. So nobody was about to argue the case when they moved to New York and called their band, with stark efficiency, the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio – one listen to ‘Train Kept a Rollin’’ and you knew they may as well have been the only rock ’n’ roll trio. It was one sustained howl of sexual obsession and torment, basic and impossibly loud. Flick-knife shrieks and a fuzzed-up, deep two-note guitar line pushed it into territory beyond mere aggro – it was a genuinely frightening record. The intensity extended into the Trio’s everyday world; they fought as if they were constantly in the ring and split after just three singles. Johnny (‘Dreamin’’, US no. 11, UK no. 5 ’60; ‘You’re Sixteen’, US no. 8, UK no. 3 ’61) and Dorsey (‘Tall Oak Tree’, US no. 23 ’60) both went on to tame but successful solo careers. Both, not surprisingly, died young. Their sound was all blood and guts and, for rocking country blues, they truly had no equals.2

  By the time Johnny and Dorsey were enjoying hit singles, Nashville had regrouped, after resigning itself to the fact it had lost its youth audience, and many of its younger players, to rock ’n’ roll. Under the aegis of guitarist Chet Atkins, it created the MOR Nashville sound, which was later dubbed ‘countrypolitan’. This was a very smooth version of country, which we’ll return to later; it incorporated straight pop, dropped the steel guitars, lacked any sense of danger, and made stars of Jim Reeves, Dottie West and Don Gibson. When asked to define the Nashville sound, Chet Atkins reached into his pocket, shook the loose change, and said, ‘That’s what it is. It’s the sound of money.’

  1 Among Sun’s second-stringers were some real finds: Charlie Rich was brooding and scored a hit with the echoing, handclap-led ‘Lonely Weekends’ (US no. 22 ’60); Roy Orbison cut the uptempo ‘Ooby Dooby’ before finding his range later on; Billy Lee Riley sang ‘Red Hot’, which truly was; Malcolm Yelvington was held back by a name better suited to a stockbroker; Charlie Feathers hiccupped passionately.

  2 The Rock ’n’ Roll Trio’s recordings were among the most fetishised 45s when rockabilly became the first modern pop scene to get a serious revival in Britain, starting in the mid-seventies. Rockabilly’s cycle of exclusivity, commerciality and eventual dispersal makes for an interesting case study. When kids whose dads were original Teds began turning up at school in home-made drapes around 1974, a new, younger set of rockabilly fans emerged. They began to dig deeper than the obvious rock ’n’ roll heroes, back to Sun rockabilly acts like Sonny Burgess, Warren Smith and Charlie Feathers. As original singles were already costing up to £100, demand was filled by bootleggers in the Netherlands. Rights to the originals could still be picked up at bargain prices, as no one in America seemed especially interested. Independent English record companies like Charly (who bought the complete Sun recordings, except Elvis) and Chiswick started to reissue compilations of obscure rockabilly legally in Britain; RCA and CBS soon cashed in on the recordings they owned. As for the ‘cat clothes’ look, a shop called Flip opened branches in the King’s Road, Covent Garden and the East End in 1978 selling open-necked shirts, box jackets and peg trousers which arrived in packing crates from the States. Many hadn’t seen the light of day since the fifties. As the scene boomed, Rock a Cha opened in Kensington Market in 1980 selling cheap repro and customised fifties gear, and a new wave of British rockabilly acts appeared: the Stargazers, the Polecats, the Shakin’ Pyramids. The original fans in this exclusive scene – with its own music, fashion, language – felt betrayed as the media pounced on rockabilly as the latest passing trend, and America’s Stray Cats started to score Top 10 hits in 1981. A London Weekend Television programme called 20th Century Box captured the feelings of rockabilly fans, one of whom thought it was ‘all getting commercialised. We want it to be our own little thing, ’cos otherwise all the clothes go, all the records go, and they all go to saps. We’re like our own little family, know what I mean?’ Other fans found that the answer was to diversify into subgenres, or to move back in time to other related musics – hillbilly bop, swing, strollers, jivers, Cajun, black forties R&B – and to start getting deeper into the scene. The word ‘research’ cropped up. Two rocka billies were reaching back to the look and sound of crooners from the forties: ‘It’s like a Rolls-Royce. When something’s good,’ one of them reasoned, ‘it’s good. It’s there forever.’

  5

  TEENAGE WILDLIFE: ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  The obscenity and vulga
rity of the rock ’n’ roll music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can be driven to the level of the nigger.

  Anonymous man, from the documentary This Is Elvis

  Showbiz did not like rock ’n’ roll. Liberace called Elvis ‘dangerous’. Frank Sinatra went further, claiming rock ’n’ roll was the work of ‘cretinous goons … it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth’. Still, this didn’t stop Tin Pan Alley trying to hijack and reinvent the new sound while it continued to bathe the world in a pale late-forties glow. Within weeks of ‘Rock around the Clock’ breaking the ice, white vocal acts like the Crew Cuts (‘Earth Angel’) and Jimmy Parkinson (‘The Great Pretender’) had top-ten hits with sweetened covers of Alan Freed-sanctioned records. Guy Mitchell was reborn in drapes and hit number one in the UK in 1957 with a song called ‘Rock-a-Billy’ (which was nothing of the sort). Kay Starr, in an attempt to narrow the generation gap with ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’ – a transatlantic number one in ’56 – only enhanced it exponentially.

  Independent labels, especially in the South, flourished as New York’s Tin Pan Alley tried to keep its hands clean. For old-time record labels, publishers and entertainers, rock ’n’ roll was simply a passing fad to be treated with the same gravitas as the mambo craze which hit in early 1955 (Rosemary Clooney had scored the biggest hit – a UK number one – with ‘Mambo Italiano’).

  The singer who took most of the flack for this grubby business was Pat Boone, a devout Christian in his twenties who tamed some of the wildest rock ’n’ roll hits – ‘Ain’t That a Shame’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Tutti Frutti’ – for a more mainstream, largely white, audience. It worked. Boone became a huge star and was soon able to switch from neutered R&B to pre-rock ballads and softer covers (the Flamingos’ ‘I’ll Be Home’). On his better ballads (‘Friendly Persuasion’, ‘Love Letters in the Sand’) Boone could be almost as effective as the crooning Elvis of ‘Loving You’ and ‘Love Me Tender’; he was seen in the media as the good-guy sheriff to Elvis’s Captain Black throughout 1956 and ’57, and a genuine equal.

  As a rocker Boone was horribly out of his depth, but the mellifluous ‘please wait for me’ leading into the sweet octave change on ‘I’ll Be Home’ (US no. 4, UK no. 1 ’56) anticipates Roy Orbison, and has a square-jawed, unbreakable sound that could well indicate incarceration for the wrong reasons: soldier, prisoner of war, or someone similar to Henry Fonda’s tragic character in The Wrong Man.

  Still, he was so clean-scrubbed it was nauseating: he refused to give Shirley Jones a screen kiss because she was married in real life, and point-blank refused a role alongside Marilyn Monroe, possibly because she was too blonde and curvy. It was hard not to cackle when, in the eighties, Hustler magazine claimed to have a photo of a young Boone exposing his genitals through a hole in a cardboard box.

  Boone was some way short of an innovator, and 1956 brought an abundance of them. So let’s move on, further south, and take a look at Little Richard Penniman. What is our initial reaction to this strange-looking man? He could be a pimp with his pencil-thin moustache and red velvet suit, or a transvestite with his caked make-up. Listen to him sing and he could be a voodoo practitioner, possessed, bawling out nonsense: ‘Awop-bop-aloobop alop-bam-boom!’ After Pat Boone’s scrawny version, Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ is like an electric shock – it knocks you back physically.

  And, thanks to Alan Freed and other brave souls like the Specialty label, the spontaneity and cri de cœur of Little Richard’s originals – the needling, throat-shredding ‘Lucille’; ‘Jenny Jenny’, on which he literally screams until he runs out of breath – overcame the showbiz enemy, made the Top 10, and a T-junction was reached; pop turned left. Rock ’n’ roll had won. It was as significant as Dada taking over the art world. All manner of outsiders and maniacs now blew in; every week seemed to usher in a major new talent. And the freakiest freak of them all was Little Richard.

  ‘I am the beautiful Little Richard from way down in Macon, Georgia. You know Otis Redding is from there, and James Brown’s from there … I was the best-looking one so I left there first. Prettiest thing in the kitchen, yes sir!’

  Richard’s raw noise – pounding piano, driving rock rhythm, insane shrieks, unavoidably sexual lyrics – wasn’t easy to hum or whistle. It was hard to listen to more than a couple of his singles in succession without getting the jitters. There were virtually no tunes (check the Everly Brothers’ 1960 cover of his ‘Lucille’, on which their voices merge in a monotone biplane drone); it was all energy. This makes his breakthrough and vast success all the more incredible: in Britain he had seven hits in 1957 alone. And then, in 1959, with a diva’s sense of drama, he threw it all away, chucked his jewellery into a river and declared he’d been playing the devil’s music. He turned to preaching and returned to Georgia. Of course, he staged the occasional comeback, but the momentum was gone and he never scored another major hit. He still thought he was the greatest, but he was gracious in decline.

  ‘When I came out they wasn’t playing no black artists on no Top 40 stations, I was the first to get played on the Top 40 stations – but it took people like Elvis and Pat Boone, Gene Vincent to open the door for this kind of music, and I thank God for Elvis Presley. I thank the Lord for sending Elvis to open that door so I could walk down the road, you understand?’

  Like Little Richard, St Louis-born Chuck Berry’s chart career predated Elvis’s, first scoring with ‘Maybellene’ in 1955, an R&B/rockabilly hybrid that went as high as number five in the US. He had the look of a card sharp blessed with luck, a brown-eyed handsome man with a cherry-red Gibson and a major thing for cars and girls that he syphoned into super-detailed lyrics. He became the chief correspondent for young America. Some think he was the most significant figure in all rock ’n’ roll; certainly, he was an A-grade innovator.

  His presentation of the rock ’n’ roll experience, as lived by real-life teenagers, was so exact and vivid that it’s quite likely Berry mapped it out and then real life followed his plot. ‘Hail, hail rock ’n’ roll, deliver me from the days of old.’ The odd thing was that Berry was already in his mid-twenties when he cut ‘Maybellene’. He was always the first to admit that his inspirations came from the days of old – lyrical sauce from Louis Jordan and guitar licks from T-Bone Walker – but he honed them into motorvating marvels, without any of the forties murk that clouded his antecedents’ work. These songs were bright, shiny, very fast and super-modern; they sounded like the tail fins on Cadillacs. He also wrote some of the best guitar lines ever recorded. Though he had a tendency to use the same R&B riff as a chassis (‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Carol’, ‘Back in the USA’), his best singles are among the most joyous in all pop. The lyrics were exclusively about dancing, driving, sex and rock, the consumer society, and all delivered with the machine-gun vocal rhythm of an auctioneer: ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘School Day’, ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, ‘Rock and Roll Music’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Nadine’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, each one a beautiful two-minute youth-culture libretto.

  Yet no matter how accurate, original, sharp and funny his songs, the man was hard to love: ‘The dollar dictates what music is written’ was his mantra. He would duck-walk across the stage in a strange, crouched shuffle, and seemed disdainful of his audience. He was the least charming of the original rockers, rude and incredibly tight-fisted. Publicising his biography on British TV in the eighties, he was asked if he could play his signature tune, ‘Johnny B. Goode’. ‘No,’ he said. ‘For second-class money you get a second-class song,’ and he played ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ instead.

  Had it not been for cover versions of some of his songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, Berry might have slipped into obscurity after doing a four-year jail term for driving an underage girl over state lines to work at his St Louis nightclub. Instead, he re-emerged in 1963 to a hero’s welcome; ‘No Particular Place to Go’, with the lyri
cal motif of a girl trapped in his car, gave him a number three in 1964, his biggest-ever British hit.1 The cat had landed on his feet again.

  Bo Diddley was Berry’s labelmate at Chicago’s Chess Records. If Berry had the lyrics down pat, Bo had the beat. Take his onomatopoeic name for a start – it was so good, he used it in a dozen different song titles: ‘Bo Diddley’, ‘Diddley Daddy’, ‘Bo Diddley Is a Lover’, ‘Bo’s a Lumberjack’. He chopped up rock ’n’ roll’s square 4/4 rhythm into jagged pieces with his rectangular guitar, hired a maracas player called Jerome Green to add a counter-rhythm, and rarely bothered with chord changes. Bo claimed to have come across his patented beat while trying to play Gene Autry’s ‘(I’ve Got Spurs That) Jingle Jangle Jingle’, though it more closely recalled the rhumba rhythm of the Andrews Sisters’ 1945 hit ‘Rum and Coca Cola’.

  Futuristic beat aside,2 Bo was a stylist. He rode a scooter with his name emblazoned on the side, and hired female rhythm guitarists – first Peggy Jones, and later a beautiful woman known only as the Duchess – who provided a luminous visual foil to his solid frame as well as future inspiration to Suzi Quatro and Joan Jett. The only thing he couldn’t do was score major hits – ‘Say Man’ (US no. 20 ’60) was his only Top 20 hit in Britain or America.

  Going further back than any other classic rocker was the round, kind-faced Fats Domino. His first R&B number one, ‘The Fat Man’, had been as far back as 1950, but his easy style and soupy New Orleans beat sat alongside the emerging rock sound quite perfectly. He was a master entertainer, and not flamboyant in any way. Nothing ever changed. He just sat at his piano and let the good times roll: ‘Blueberry Hill’ (US no. 2, UK no. 6 ’56), ‘I’m Walkin’’ (US no. 4, UK no. 19 ’57), ‘Be My Guest’ (US no. 8, UK no. 11 ’59), all impossible to dislike and all served from the same stewpot. The last of his twenty British hits, 1961’s ‘Let the Four Winds Blow’, was recorded at his sixtieth recording session, and featured almost the exact same line-up of musicians as ‘The Fat Man’.