by Bob Stanley
As Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home town in 2005, Fats was initially believed to have drowned. When he was spotted on the roof of his house a few days later, there was an international sigh of relief.
Gene Vincent first emerged when he won a local Search for a Star contest specifically trying to find the new Elvis Presley. His weaselly looks, mop of oil-black hair and manic smile were hardly a match for Presley’s godlike charisma, but his music was on another plane, unhinged, like a freeform rockabilly.
A poor Virginian, he acquired his first guitar aged twelve. In 1955, after joining the navy, he had an accident while riding his brand-new Triumph motorcycle and ended up in the naval hospital with a severely smashed left leg. Doctors recommended amputation; Vincent settled for a steel brace which left him with a permanent limp.
In September 1955 Vincent, leg still in plaster, saw Hank Snow’s All Star Jamboree in Norfolk, Virginia, featuring Cowboy Copas, the Louvin Brothers and the King of Western Bop from Tupelo, Elvis Presley. Almost immediately afterwards, Vincent wrote ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ – based on comic-strip character Little Lulu – while stuck in the hospital. Assembling a hard-bitten band called the Blue Caps, they cut ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ (US no. 7, UK no. 16 ’56) for Capitol and sold half a million copies. Everything was in the delivery: a vocal born from Vincent’s bedridden frustration, Cliff Gallup’s piercing trebly guitar lines that walked the line of atonal, and the impromptu shrieks of drummer Dickie Harrell, so perfectly timed that any other take would fall short of perfection. The gibberish, the echo, the twin promise of sex and violence, ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ had the lot.
Miraculously, Vincent and the Blue Caps held it together long enough to cut a string of breakneck rocking classics. They were all aggro, trouble, you’d cross the street to avoid them. Check the titles: ‘Race with the Devil’, ‘Wild Cat’, ‘High Blood Pressure’, ‘Who Slapped John’. When the wheels came off the wagon, Vincent was brought over to Britain in 1960 by impresario Jack Good. The shy, polite country gentleman who addressed him as ‘sir’ was no use to Good. He revised Vincent’s image, dressed him from head to toe in black leather and placed a heavy silver chain around his neck. Pretty soon he racked up more hits, less brutal but still good, solid rock ’n’ roll: ‘She She Little Sheila’, ‘My Heart’, ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’. He toured the country with Eddie Cochran and, driving between shows, they crashed at Chippenham in Wiltshire. Cochran was killed. Vincent survived, only to enter an alcoholic tailspin which resulted in his death from a perforated ulcer in 1971. It was a rotten waste of talent. Aside from a few stinging folk-rock sides for Challenge in 1966,3 he hadn’t made a good record in years.
Though he was one of his closest friends, Oklahoman Eddie Cochran didn’t appear to carry any of Vincent’s self-destructive baggage. He started as straight country, was a noted guitarist rather than a singer, and his first hit was with a middling teen ballad called ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’ (US no. 18 ’57). It became clear that he was capable of a whole lot more when he sang ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ in the Jayne Mansfield movie The Girl Can’t Help It. The poster for this tremendous rock ’n’ roll sexploitation flick screamed: ‘It’s got the HEAT! and the BEAT! for your happiest time!’ Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and Little Richard also appeared, though ultimately it was jazz singer Julie London who stole the show and made her career with a spectral, sensual performance of ‘Cry Me a River’.
More than anyone, Eddie Cochran was the stereotypical rocker: the perfect greased ducktail, the square shoulders, fists like hams and a permanent look of street-smart confidence. Listen to the lyrics, though, and he was a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Unlike Chuck Berry he was a teenager, and understood the frustrations that Berry skipped over in his search for the promised land. Mostly, these were parental and financial: on ‘Somethin’ Else’ (UK no. 22 ’59) he works real hard, saves his dough and gets both car and girl. Moral: yes, it’s that simple. Moody parents capable of grounding Eddie, not so easily swayed by his cheeky charm and golden quiff, cloud the horizon on ‘Summertime Blues’ (US no. 8, UK no. 18 ’58) and ‘C’mon Everybody’ (US no. 35, UK no. 6 ’59). Weedier yet, in ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ he’s too tired to rock with his baby, because he’s had to climb the stairs thanks to a broken elevator. This was the romance of the American Dream with added naturalism. Cochran developed a semi-spoken, semi-sung style that made it seem like he was sharing a conversation with the teenage world.
‘Weekend’, ‘Teenage Heaven’ and ‘Jeannie Jeannie Jeannie’ are fairground rock ’n’ roll in a matchbox: tough vocals, a driving sound, some kind of earthquake. Drive-ins and sock hops were Cochran’s habitat and, even if his pockets were empty, he’d always got the wherewithal to pull. This was nowhere more evident than on his posthumous UK number one, ‘Three Steps to Heaven’: check the directness and confidence of both song and delivery. The almost Spanish guitar line sets up Eddie the matador to give us ‘the formula for heaven’. Women clearly fall at his feet (see Step 2), so, while I don’t doubt his sincerity, Eddie’s formula wasn’t much use to a cauliflower-eared, bandy-legged kid from Croydon. I assume, looking back, that he did know the formula, but why would he tell all and let other kids cut in on his action?
If it’s sad to think of what Eddie Cochran could have achieved if he’d lived past twenty-one, then Buddy Holly’s loss is truly tragic.
Buddy Holly was very important to Britain, and almost singlehandedly responsible for what came later. He was a new kind of hero, and packed an indecent amount into his twenty-two years on earth. For a start, he didn’t look remotely like a pop star, lacked any of the Hollywood gloss or outright weirdness of his contemporaries. Frankly, he looked like a geek. In spite of this he was defiant and narcissistic – he wouldn’t have been content with the small beer of the localised rockabilly scene; he wanted to be a pop star and played up his bespectacled, scrawny look to get what he wanted. He even married the pretty Puerto Rican receptionist at Coral Records.
Holly had been born Charles Hardin Holley in Lubbock, a small Texas town that only wanted him to play straight-down-the-line country – a couple of dispiriting singles on Decca remain as proof. But by 1957, teaming up with drummer Jerry Allison and bassist Joe Maudlin as the Crickets, and working with producer Norman Petty, Holly quickly learnt his way around a studio; Coral in New York signed him on the strength of a demo. The vim of the homely three-piece on ‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Oh, Boy!’, ‘Rave On’ and ‘Maybe Baby’ encouraged shy, bespectacled, skinny-limbed kids everywhere and gave them hope.4
He was a good businessman, too. Records came out by the Crickets and Buddy Holly, giving him double the hit tally of his contemporaries – ten major UK hits in less than eighteen months. It all seemed too good to be true. On a British tour, producer Joe Meek rushed backstage to see Holly – his experiments in the occult had led him to believe the singer would die on August 3rd 1958. The day came and went and Holly lived, but exactly six months later he was killed in a plane crash.
Non-Hollywood looks aside, Holly affected the UK in four ways: as a singer, composer, guitarist and producer. His group, the Crickets, was entirely self-contained. He was just starting to move into an orchestrated sound (‘True Love Ways’, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ – a posthumous UK number one) when he died. Where he’d have gone next is anyone’s guess, but the British beat scene would have been very different without him.
Few of the classic rock figures who survived the late-fifties rock ’n’ roll carnage sustained themselves artistically through the sixties. The exceptions were Phil and Don, Kentucky’s Everly Brothers. They may have looked the very image of Southern hoodlums but they had the voices of harmonising bluebirds, so close in timbre it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
In 1957, after the obligatory country debut single, they hooked up with writers Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Boudleaux had already been responsible for Frankie Laine’s best UK number one, a cackling, bullying, hilarious country lurcher called
‘Hey Joe’ in ’53. The Bryants had light and humour and sly winks in their best uptempo songs (‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, ‘Bird Dog’), which the Everlys revved up with hard-hitting acoustic rhythms. They could also turn around and write the most molten, ancient-sounding ballads, decades of country, folk and old-world influences distilled into two and a half magical minutes. The story goes that Felice was working as an elevator operator in a Milwaukee hotel. One day the lift doors opened and Boudleaux stepped in. She knew him at once – she had seen his face in a dream when she was eight years old and knew he was her future husband. Given this back story, ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ and ‘Devoted to You’ (both 1958), hymnal and heavenly, two of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest love songs, seem like true miracles.
The Bryants and Everlys continued to turn out pristine bopping pop (‘(Till) I Kissed You’, ‘Problems’, ‘When Will I Be Loved’) right up to 1960 – rock ’n’ roll’s annus miserabilis – when they suddenly seemed to stand alone: Chuck Berry had been sent to prison for an indiscretion with a minor; Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran had died; Little Richard had found God; and Elvis had returned from the army, not to deliver us from ‘Living Doll’, but to sing Neapolitan light opera. When the Everlys’ contract with independent label Cadence was up in 1960, Warner Brothers pounced on the last rockers in town.
The brothers got a million dollars for a ten-year contract, pop’s biggest-ever deal at that point. Their first single for the label, like a car with a flashy registration plate, had a catalogue number of WB1. The initial run was pressed on gold vinyl. Confidence was not misplaced. The record was ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and it was a transatlantic number one, staying at the top in Britain for nine weeks.
It’s an overfamiliar tune, but if you’re listening to ‘Cathy’s Clown’ rather than just hearing it on the radio, it is quite extraordinary: the metallic drum roll following the condemned man on the chorus morphs into the bar-room rinky-tink of the verse as Don Everly drowns his sorrows, even slurring his delivery. This was the first time Don had had the time and facilities to truly produce an Everlys record. Even pop’s first master producers, Phil Spector and Joe Meek, were learning their craft in 1960, and here was one of the most bankable pop stars in the world stealing a march. An early pop aesthete, his arrangement for ‘Cathy’s Clown’ was inspired by André Kostelanetz’s Grand Canyon Suite. Warners also saw the Everlys as potential film stars, real actors. They had the looks, and hadn’t blotted their copybook by ogling Jayne Mansfield in a rock ’n’ roll cashin movie. A number-one hit, Hollywood calling, what could go wrong?
Their first mistake was relocating from Nashville to LA. The Kentucky boys fully embraced the California lifestyle, which was fine while they were riding high but not so good to them after they failed a screen test. Next, they recorded an old Bing Crosby song called ‘Temptation’. The crazed arrangement – yeah yeah yeahs battering against a wall of wailing banshees and twelve massed guitars, a vision of eternal torment in two minutes fourteen seconds – came to Don in a dream. The trouble was that their manager and publisher Wesley Rose hated it. He had no financial control over the song and didn’t give a hoot for Don’s producer ambitions if they weren’t going to earn him money. The Everlys wouldn’t back down and ‘Temptation’ finally became a single in summer ’61, spending a month at number one in the UK. Rose, slighted, quit as their manager and prevented the brothers from using any of the writers he published. That included not only Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, but also the Everlys themselves. Then they got drafted, and spent six months in the marines.
Cut adrift, musically and geographically, they still had to produce two albums a year for Warner Brothers. Without access to their touchstone writers the brothers panicked and recorded novelties like ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and country standards. They lost ground fast. Back in civvies, as fast as they could they hooked up with a new breed of sophisticated east-coast writers – Gerry Goffin and Carole King in particular – and crafted the beautiful ‘Crying in the Rain’, which at least put them back in the Top 10 in 1962. A few months later the Beatles arrived and all resistance was futile.
Behind the scenes, Don Everly had been in turmoil. Years later, a cache of his dark, unreleased work from 1962 and ’63 was revealed. One song, the bleak beyond belief ‘Nancy’s Minuet’, was inspired by Henry Mancini’s ‘Experiment in Terror’. ‘I was trying to get harpsichord sounds into my music. We were young, we were in Hollywood on our own, it was terrible actually. Divorces … I was drugged out by then. It was a bitter time for me.’
They recorded a Gerry Goffin/Jack Keller song called ‘Little Hollywood Girl’ – a cautionary tale with cute girly backing vocals that would have been at home on a Cliff Richard single – and shelved it. A few weeks later Don worked up a new arrangement with abrasive piano and an atmosphere of circling menace. In this version, the poppet that Goffin and Keller envisaged has been used and used up by the movie industry. Don Everly recasts the song as if it’s the ravaged climax of Mulholland Drive. Months later, on a tour of Britain, he attempted suicide – brother Phil completed a forty-date tour on his own. They regrouped, abandoned the sonic experiments, and Don channelled his anger into songs like the hard-drinking ‘Price of Love’, which took them back to number one in Britain in 1965.
Almost alone among their contemporaries, the Everlys took on and embraced the British beat invasion that had threatened to destroy their career. Violent folk-rocker ‘Leave My Girl Alone’ and the deeply bereft ‘It’s All Over’ are highlights from their baroque mid-sixties period. By 1968 they had reconnected with their country boyhood on an album, Roots, a lightly psychedelicised trip back to Nashville which won them plaudits and was in the vanguard of new country, but brought no sales. They finally ran out of steam in 1970, splitting, then intermittently re-forming. In the whole fourteen-year period from ‘Bye Bye Love’ to 1970 single ‘Yves’, they hardly ever cut a bad record and are maybe the most underrated act of their era.
These were the leading lights of rock ’n’ roll. Outside of the heavy-weights were hundreds of beautiful one-off singles, and acts who came and went leaving a permanent footprint or two. There was Larry Williams, who had an ice-cream bouffant and wrote character sketches, aural cartoon strips about girls like Bony Moronie (‘as skinny as a stick of macaroni’), Dizzy Miss Lizzy and Short Fat Fannie. Williams was groomed by producer Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell as Little Richard’s successor, and his records had similarly raw vocals, piano-driven intensity and the same sense of dumb, sexy fun. Fast on his feet as well as on vinyl, Williams turned out to be the hustler that Little Richard had only appeared to be. He was a pimp and a drug dealer, and allegedly once pulled a gun on Richard over a debt. There’s gratitude for you.
Jack Scott was a pussycat, even though he looked like he’d walked out of a thirties gangster movie. He was the archetypal rock ’n’ roll singer, raised in Detroit on hillbilly music with local blues and gospel bubbling into his laconic style. Like Williams, he wrote vignettes for rocking outcasts like the jailbird ‘Leroy’, gals with names like ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Midgie’ (‘the strangest girl in the land’), and sang them in a gruff, rangy baritone. They were simple, hard and repetitive. ‘Goodbye Baby’ (US no. 8 ’58) was allegedly the first record Elvis would look for on a jukebox and consisted of little more than the title sung over and over with an ever-growing, keening sense of loss. Best of all was the cocksure ‘The Way I Walk’ (US no. 35, UK no. 30 ’59), which had a zen-like minimalism (‘The way I walk’s just the way I walk, the way I talk’s just the way I talk’).
First of the teen-dream pin-up boys who would hog the charts in the early sixties, filling the void left by otherwise occupied or deceased rockers, was Ricky Nelson, who had a light and shoulder-shrugging vocal style that often suggested he was waiting for a bus, slightly bored. He was lucky enough to have guitarist James Burton’s work all over his early hits (‘Stood Up’, ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’, ‘Believe What You Say’ �
� all Top 5 in the US). Burton’s efforts were always surprisingly high in the mix, which was a good thing. In mid-’58 Ricky recorded a ballad without Burton’s fierceness, ‘Poor Little Fool’, and it was his first US number one. From this point on he steadily lost energy, even if some of his later hits (especially ‘Never Be Anyone Else but You’, a UK number three) were quite lovely.
The month that ‘Poor Little Fool’ spent at the top of the chart can be seen as a turning point, the beginning of the end of the rock ’n’ roll era; it was just two and a half years since ‘Rock around the Clock’ had started the stampede.
The first US number one of 1958 had been the Silhouettes’ ‘Get a Job’, which captured the magic of the era almost perfectly: big noise, angry parents, nonsense syllables, snare drums like upturned dustbins, unrefined joy. Who were the Silhouettes? What was their follow-up? Who cares? The relentless run of one-off hits on tiny new labels like Clock (Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez’s ‘The Happy Organ’), Josie (Bobby Freeman’s ‘Do You Wanna Dance’) and Ember (‘Get a Job’) was the very heart of rock ’n’ roll. There was ‘Sea Cruise’, Frankie Ford’s impression of an ocean liner about to hit an iceberg; Ronnie Self’s raucous, demented tribute to ‘Bop-a-Lena’ – ‘man, I dig that freak juvenile!’; Dale Hawkins’s futuristic, rhythmic masterpiece ‘Susie Q’ (which also benefited from James Burton’s ferocious guitar-playing); and the Monotones’ neanderthal ‘Book of Love’ (US no. 5 ’58), which featured nothing but muffled harmonies, a wildly off-key bassman and a frantic beat on a cardboard box. No grace, no streamlining, just pure fun.5 The first wave of rock ’n’ roll had absolutely no rules about who sang, how they sang, how they were recorded or how the record was distributed. It was anarchy, the boulder in the middle of the lake, and nothing was quite the same, or quite as new, or quite as free, ever again.