Good Booty
Page 15
Of utmost importance was the way rockabillies confused categories of race, gender, and sexuality, interrupting the “natural” progression young people were expected to make from impulsive childhood to orderly adulthood. And no one confused categories more gracefully than Elvis. Phillips once described the chaos that ensued at the singer’s first show after recording for Sun. “It was just a joint,” the producer said of the Memphis hall where Presley played. “Here is a bunch of hard-drinking people, and here is a kid up there on the stage, and he ain’t playing country, and he ain’t necessarily playing rhythm and blues, and he didn’t look conventional like they did. He looks a little greasy, as they called it then. And the reaction was just incredible.”19
Elvis was certainly slippery—deep voiced but childlike in his exuberance, he had a sound that messed with received ideas about maturity and stomped all over the racial divisions that ruled both public space and the music charts at that time. He crossed into America’s mainstream from a margin, the white Southern side, the same way the doo-wop groups did from its segregated black urban centers. He also blurred gender lines, his soft features perfectly suited to an exaggerated emotionalism that did not diminish his boyish swagger. He sings a threat in “Baby, Let’s Play House,” his greatest early single: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.” But he hiccups in the middle of the phrase, like he’s breaking into a giggle, or like he’s too distracted by Bill Black’s cantering bass line to hold thoughts of doing damage in his mind. The violence surfaces and dips away, submerged again. To his teenage listeners—both boys and girls—hearing it in 1955, this must’ve felt like their own rarely acknowledged experiences of inner volatility.
Using the language of semiotics in his study of modernism and popular song, Sweet Air, Edward P. Comentale writes that the young Elvis was “first and foremost an affective/gestural phenomenon.” A caption writer for an Elvis photo spread in the first volume of the Teenage Rock ’n Roll Review (a short-lived publication founded in 1956) saw the same thing in the star, comparing him to the comical dancer who’d played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. “Possessing one of the most mobile faces of any singer today, Elvis’s facial movements clearly indicate the seriousness and sincerity he puts into each and every word he sings,” she wrote. “Just as Ray Bolger dances with everything he’s got—his eyes, nose, ears, and feet—so Elvis sings with everything he’s got, too. That is what makes them greater than other singers or dancers.”20
Elvis was a genius of feeling and moving, including the way he moved his voice. He found a perfect balance between immediacy and distance. When he jerked his soft body around, he almost lost control—but only ever almost, pulling back that hip thrust or knee wobble just as he did his voice on his earliest hit singles. His actions mirrored the constant and multidirectional internal agitation of the teenage psyche, governed by mysterious drives and emotions that, though they were increasingly named by psychologists, were still not acceptable to air in public. And with that graceful snicker that was half deferential and half permanently subversive, he showed teenagers how to manage the whirl.
Elvis did have artistic role models, and he also had peers who might have matched his level of significance had fate and American prejudices gone a different way. His predecessors included the male torch singer Johnnie Ray, who became a phenomenon in 1952 for, in the words of his supposed friend and fellow vocalist Patti Page, “selling hysteria.” The bisexual and floridly effeminate Ray cried publicly during his performances, and partial deafness caused him to exaggerate his responses to the music around him, flailing about in ways that caused a similar response in his fans. Clyde McPhatter, who began his career in the vocal groups the Dominoes and the Drifters, reached the same heights of flamboyance in his recordings that Ray did in performance. Part gospelizing, part operatic, and part a vaudevillian drop to the knee, McPhatter’s tragicomic emoting on songs like “The Bells”—a mourner’s blues transformed into delirium by the singer’s yelps, screams, and cries—was the first major step away from the orderly rambunctiousness of rhythm and blues and toward the rich apparent madness of rock and roll.
Elvis’s two greatest contemporaries were Little Richard and Buddy Holly, each standing at either end of the spectrum upon which nonsense flourished. The Memphis King claimed the middle ground between his rivals’ two extremes: the strategic outrageousness of Richard Wayne Penniman, the original Black Weirdo, bursting every seam apparently for the hell of it, but really as a way of sharing subterranean secrets of two centuries’ worth of racial and sexual nonconformists; and the shy, bespectacled Charles Hardin Holley, archetypal White Nerd, stumbling over his words and music as a way of pushing them into shape. Little Richard represented what happens to unspeakable desires after they’ve been dug out of the dirt where society buried them. Buddy Holly’s singing embodied desire in formation: thoughts that seem unspeakable because they’ve never been spoken before. Elvis came off as wiser than Holly and more innocent than Little Richard. All of them had the same basic mandate—to turn fearful feelings into fun.
Richard Penniman was uncontainable from the beginning of his life in Macon, Georgia, a little queer boy whose penchant for dressing “beautiful” scared his father but whose precocious piano playing saved him from utter marginalization or an even worse fate. Inspired by gospel music and jump blues, he developed a vocal style that was, above all, loud. When a band touring through the South picked him up as a singer, his father finally granted approval of Richard’s pompadour hairstyle—because that’s how artists looked, after all. His early life as an entertainer included tours with drag queens, minstrel shows, and girls who would, as he said to his biographer Charles White in the early 1980s, “roll their bellies and stuff”—Little Egypt’s granddaughters carrying exotica into the nuclear age.21
Unsurprisingly given the company he was keeping, Richard developed a wild act on the road and made a bunch of relatively successful rhythm and blues sides for labels like Peacock and RCA-Victor. But by the autumn of 1955 he was still mostly a Deep South sensation, and when he entered Cosimo Matassa’s famous J&M Studios in New Orleans with producer Bumps Blackwell, nothing was working. Richard felt uptight. He couldn’t get noisy enough. Only when he and the studio musicians took a break at the nearby Dew Drop Inn and Richard decided to show off by playing a very dirty number that made the queens go wild in the drag bars did Blackwell hear the lunacy he knew the singer could deliver.
But the song was obscene—all about “good booty” and what people did with it. Blackwell enlisted an ambitious young songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to sub in some lyrics thin enough that Little Richard could saturate them with libidinal chaos while not breaking any censors’ rules. What Little Richard did on “Tutti Frutti,” as the song was called, was to eliminate double entendres and make matters much more direct. Most bawdy R&B songs pointed toward sex, albeit sometimes with a giant foam finger. Little Richard’s vocalizations enacted sexual excitement itself. Richard spewed notes as if they were raging hormones, growling like a bluesman one minute, whooping like a gospel queen the next, shouting out nonsense words in a way that signified everything and nothing, entering a truly undone state. The historian W. T. Lhamon identified Richard’s particular gift as promiscuity: “The ability to jumble multiple worlds seamlessly, white and black, straight and gay, gospel and blues and pop.”22 If the doo-wop groups cleared space for that sense of play preceding the moment of sexual engagement, and Elvis made such play charismatically personal, Richard grabbed on to the very moment the drive took over and rode it right into his fans’ flailing arms.
This is not to say Little Richard was more primitive than his compatriots. He was just more committed to excitement. He knew what it bought him. After following “Tutti Frutti” with the equally ungovernable “Long Tall Sally” in 1956, Richard became a pop star with an equal number of black and white fans, and protected himself by getting even more outrageous. “The white kids had to hide my records �
�cos they daren’t let their parents know they had them in the house,” he told White. “We decided that my image should be crazy and way out so that the adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and the next dressed as the Pope.” Literally embodying the mixed-up impulses that parents just didn’t understand, Little Richard was happy to be the elephant in the room. He put a big smile on the face of depravity. Fans responded in kind. He was the first rock and roller to be barraged by women’s underwear thrown by the crowd, and one of the first to have his shirts regularly ripped from his body into little pieces.
And depraved Richard was, by his own estimation. In his biography—which mostly consists of outrageous stories he told Charles White—he revealed himself as an omnisexual voyeur especially fond of dressing-room encounters. Richard likely knew that his refusal to play polite or to subdue the signifiers of his blackness would cost him the chance to be the king of rock and roll; and there is little doubt that homophobia, internalized and otherwise, contributed to him leaving the secular music business in 1959 to marry and become a preacher. (He would repeat the cycle of exit and return, minus the wife, many times throughout his career.) Yet the omnivorousness Richard represented both in live performance and on record also couldn’t last beyond the first few years of the rock and roll era. By 1962, when he made a comeback that began with a tour of England, the promiscuous frenzy of the music’s early years had died down, and the old orderly divisions reasserted themselves. Richard was then classified by many as a novelty act, selling outrageousness on talk shows. He continued to be a strong presence within rock, but his most important contribution during the 1960s was to insert a little chaos into the sound of the next big thing: the Beatles, who literally learned at his feet when they toured together in Germany, and included just enough of his squall in their sound to make the girls throw their panties again.
If Little Richard had a mirror image, it was Buddy Holly, the young oddball who came on the scene in 1957, just as Richard was exiting temporarily to hang out with the Lord. Both men were weird in a way that was cooked, not raw. Both came from edges of the rock and roll continent—Richard from the east, in Georgia, and Holly from the west, near the Texas–New Mexico border. And both made music that was primarily exploratory, though Richard rushed in while Holly delicately snuck around. The two men knew each other, and according to Richard, once even shared in a three-way sexual encounter after Holly walked in on Richard en flagrante with Lee Angel, the burlesque dancer who was his female soul mate during the height of his early fame. “He came and he went!” Richard quipped in his biography, sharing a filthy anecdote (that Angel fondly disputes).
Holly’s own biography confirms that he was sometimes “a wild boy with the women” that Richard claims he was, but in his music, he was something different: the soul of tormented monogamy. Or at least monogamy as a teenager might feel it—more like fixation. Advice books for teens in Holly’s era were filled with admonitions to hoist one’s mind out of the gutter, usually directed at boys. “Boys who decorate their rooms with stimulating pictures, and who talk about sex subjects continually, usually experience frequent and strong desires,” wrote the sex-education pioneer Lester A. Kirkendall in the guidebook How to Be a Successful Teenager in 1954. “Often they think this is because they have an unusually strong physical urge. Actually, it is the way they think about sex which produces a large measure of their physical desire. These same boys may go for a week’s vacation, a hunting trip, or take a new job which requires all of their energy and attention. They often find during this period that their mind is so occupied with these new activities that they are hardly aware of sexual desires.”23
Holly’s songs expose what was really happening in boys’ (and, in fact, girls’) minds, even when they were hiking or hunting. His famous vocal technique involves worrying a lyric, taking words and syllables apart and reassembling them using hiccups and tics and pauses and halting breath, exactly the way a teenage boy would mentally rehearse asking a girl on a date, or a girl might go over that very same request in her own head later, until its meaning splintered into pieces. “You’re gonna love me, too”: so many of Holly’s lyrics seem like both threats and promises. He’s always sorting out whether emotion is going to complete his world or destroy it.
Charles Hardin Holley started playing country music as a high schooler in Lubbock, Texas, and briefly tried to make it in Nashville, but he became a rocker—and discovered himself as an artist—in Clovis, New Mexico. There he met Norman Petty, who recorded easy listening music on Columbia Records with his own trio (which included his wife), but invested in rock and roll’s future by recording young artists in his state-of-the-art studio. Musicians liked Petty because he allowed sessions to run as long as the juices flowed. Petty liked Holly because he was ambitious. “He had the eagerness of someone who has something on his mind and who wants to do something about it,” Petty reflected years later. “Really, he was unimpressive to look at, but impressive to hear.”24
Holly was aware that his natural charisma was limited, and he’d need to use persuasion to become a star. Though known for his boundless energy onstage, he was never a pure teen idol, lacking both the undeniable pulchritude of Elvis and the sexual confidence of Little Richard (or of Chuck Berry, an older rock and roll pioneer who was both strikingly handsome and erotically experienced). Jerry Allison, drummer for Holly’s band the Crickets, recalled that when girls seeking autographs backstage would see another act on the bill—say, the Everly Brothers—emerge from a dressing room, they would immediately swarm away and toward the better-looking star. He noted that boys seemed to like the Crickets better than other groups, perhaps because they weren’t so worried that their own dates would run off with them.25
Giving voice to the awkwardness he couldn’t help but embody, Holly developed a unique way of singing. The high-end equipment in Petty’s studio helped, allowing him to experiment with echo and overdubs. Instead of the raucous, endless party happening at Sun, the mood in Clovis was almost scientific. Holly and Petty would work their way through many different takes. The Crickets were able to develop an unusual level of synchronicity as a band, playing off Holly’s odd guitar and vocal lines. These boys worked on their nonsense. Their songs explored why seemingly incomprehensible feelings take over in a lover’s psyche as he pursues his beloved. And with his flexible, androgynous voice, Holly seemed to speak for the uncertainty of girls, too.
Musicologists and philosophers have pointed to Holly’s singing as a revolutionary expression of how thoughts form in a desiring mind. Some have concluded that he was anti-sentimental, rejecting the soppy meaningfulness of the pop ballads that preceded rock and roll. Others hear the story of child development in his hiccups, oohs, well-a’s, and other “baby talk.” Dave Laing, an early Holly scholar, noticed how the “sudden changes of pitch” mirror “the breaking voice of a young teenager.” The studied quality of Holly’s music reveals him to be much more of a formalist than most early rockers, and while he probably wasn’t thinking in psychoanalytical terms, songs like “That’ll Be the Day” or “Words of Love” certainly can be heard as interior monologues, the fretful dreaming that comes before any encounter is attempted.26
Holly’s alien sound didn’t come out of nowhere. He was aware of doo-wop, and shared bills with doo-wop groups, playing the Apollo and even telling his mother, “We’re Negroes, too!” after a mixed-race tour of the Southern states. His tone sometimes resembles that of Clyde McPhatter, the vocal group pioneer whose propensity for crying and howling at the climax of a song—melded with an elegance that made clear that every wild move was well-considered—formed a bridge between the gospel quartets and the secular styles of the 1950s. While Little Richard scooped up white and black sounds in his manic embrace, Buddy Holly made elaborate constructions from elements of both. His songs are like fetish objects, ritualizing the rampant musical amalgamations that characterized early rock and roll.
The
nonmusical chatter going on between and around teenagers as that cohort’s identity emerged also informed the sensibility Holly’s music tapped. “This whole business of adolescents . . . is a complicated affair that often confuses and worries the adolescent himself and the adults who are part of his daily life,” declared the social-worker authors of Let’s Listen to Youth, one of the myriad navigational guides to youth’s tricky waters published as rock and roll emerged.27 The teen magazines that drew in girls with fashion tips and pinups elaborated on these complexities with articles like “Do You Know How to Flirt and Still Be Feminine?,” “We Like Going Steady—But Why Do We Always Quarrel?,” “Shyness—How to Beat the Problem,” and “My Moment of Love, My Moment of Fear.” These articles gave names to free-floating adolescent anxiety that may have helped or made things worse. They stressed the need for self-management. “Some days just don’t seem worth it!” one declared. “But here’re ways to understand and cope with your explosive emotions!”28
Holly’s songs let kids know that even their new rock and roll idols could suffer from a nervousness that left them at a loss for words. Being a teenager was itself a public experiment in the 1950s, and the speculative sound of Holly’s hits rang true to the young people caught in this unnatural pause in the life cycle. By the time he died in a plane crash in 1959, Holly was moving out of this phase: married to an older woman who led him toward Latin music and other new sources of inspiration (Maria Elena Santiago had been born in Puerto Rico, and worked in the music business before meeting her husband), Holly was on the road to becoming a sophisticated pop auteur. The loss that froze his music in time was, in a way, a gain for those trying to understand the unique ambiguities of self that afflicted teenagers and defined early rock and roll. Every day, Holly was getting closer to pinpointing the nuances of teens who felt caught in between—between childhood and adulthood, being eroticized and being sexually regulated, inventing their own freer world and recognizing that this world was a plastic bubble, and that their parents were watching every move.