Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  In her history of the teenager, Grace Palladino crystallized the predicament youth during this era faced at the portal to adulthood. “Thanks to rock and roll and the rebel culture associated with the music, teenagers now had a choice of social identities, whatever their family background. They could see themselves as adults-in-training and use their high school years to hone their skills and discover their talents, as adults had been preaching for years. Or they could join the fast-paced teenager-only world of (loud) music, (fast) cars, and styles that mocked the very notion of adult guidance.”29 This was very confusing for most teenagers, who often vacillated dangerously between these two poles. Rock and roll encompassed the range of experience that characterized teenage life, with its most influential stars acting out different options, also familiar from the films, magazines, and pulp novels they consumed. With Little Richard as the violator of old norms and Elvis as the mediator presenting new ones, Buddy Holly stood for the teenager in process, becoming something no one—including himself or herself—quite understood.

  SWEET LITTLE FOURTEEN

  The truth, however, is that while Holly was creating a way to embody adolescent angst and hesitation, he was also getting laid on the regular by girls he met at the dances and all-night concerts the Crickets played. This reality reveals another crucial aspect of 1950s rock and roll. Like all popular musical styles, it embodied erotic ideals and fantasies alongside sexual fears and problems. But more than in previous eras, the makers of these dreams appeared right in front of the girls and boys who longed for them, in the flesh and ready to go. A unique combination of elements made early rock and rollers accessible in a different way than celebrities had been before. On the one hand, their charisma was mass-mediated and larger than life, thanks to the cheap 45 RPM singles introduced to the marketplace in 1949 and the new teen magazines and other merchandise that promoted them like movie stars. But they also quite literally moved within reach. Regional stars first, rock and rollers played teenagers’ barn dances and local fairs. Instead of the Hollywood glamour that made even the original teen idol Frank Sinatra seem aloof, these boys were messy and rowdy and relatable. Hooking up with one, as a girlfriend or maybe just a meaningful fling, was not an impossible dream.

  From the very start, rock and roll was a boys’ game performed to stands full of females. Crucial women innovators like Ruth Brown and Etta James remained tied to rhythm and blues, and the few mostly Southern white women who tried to make a mark in the rockabilly scene, including Wanda Jackson and Janis Martin, had to really work to not be dismissed as novelties. Unlike sports, another male-dominated culture but one with a mostly male audience, rock and roll made its coin catering to females. It was a ritualized act of seduction framed within a heterosexual story line of boy-bowls-over-girl, and through its fourth-wall-breaking noisiness and visceral punch, it encouraged direct contact between fan and star. Rock and rollers always seemed out of place on television, like they were about to break through the screen. The live concert was their medium. And that medium was activated by the fans who screamed and ripped up their clothes and stormed the stage.

  Feminist historians including Barbara Ehrenreich and Susan J. Douglas have long found the seeds of women’s liberation in Beatlemania, the “sexually defiant consumer culture” formed by thousands, if not millions, of girls when the mop-topped pipers hit American shores in 1964. “To abandon control—to scream, faint, dash about in mobs—was, in form if not conscious content, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture,” wrote Ehrenreich and her coauthors in an influential 1997 essay, calling Beatlemania “the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution.”30 These writers underestimate the fan girls of the 1950s. Media accounts from that time report just as much boldness from female rock and roll fans—and just as much concern from adults realizing that this new music and its subculture were breaking the bonds of conventional gendered behavior.

  Rock and roll served as an activating agent for 1950s teens who recognized that the normal changes they were enduring had coupled with historic ones to push them toward new intimate realities, not just personally, but as a social group. Their moment was one in which racial divisions were being challenged and gender roles had been muddied as America rebuilt itself after the war. A photograph accompanying a Pittsburgh Courier account of a riot at a local show captured the change: it’s the old scene of white observers discovering a new kind of erotic “somebodiness” while interacting with an African American performer whom they view as more liberated than themselves. “The fact is clearly in this photo that the rock and roll craze is not particularly restricted to one special group,” the caption read. “Here a rabid bunch of white teen-agers ‘get a message’ but emphatically, as rock and roll ace Fats Domino ‘turned them on’ at a California dance.”31

  In the many hand-wringing newspaper articles published during its advent, rock and roll’s young fans used the language of illogic and boundlessness to describe its effects. This language always defiantly stank of the erotic. The comments of seventeen-year-old Carole, interviewed by the Washington Post and Times Herald reporter Phyllis Battelle in 1956, were typical: “it moves me, man. Makes me want to jump. It’s a feeling you get there with a person—you’re part of a big thing—you just don’t wanta stand still. It’s impossible to stand still. You get a lift, a real live charge.”32

  Parents feared and teenagers craved the real live charge rock and roll enacted. It turned the typical hormonal development of adolescents neon bright. In the presence of this music, teens performed the confusing transformation that struck terror in the hearts of their parents, sent alarms throughout society, and left teens in a limbo they could not successfully negotiate. “They get that wild look in their eyes, and they talk so funny, and when they’re playing those awful roll and rock things,” one mother told reporter Batelle. “You can’t help thinking, ‘Are these really children of MINE?’”

  The long lens of history allows us to see that this behavior wasn’t utterly foreign. Frank Sinatra’s intimate-feeling performances had given rise to the bobby-soxers, hordes of young girls—real fans augmented by ones the singer’s publicity agent hired—who swarmed outside theaters and, in hysterics and unwilling to give up their vantage points, famously wet the seats within. The Columbus Day riot of 1943, in which approximately thirty thousand young women overwhelmed Times Square the night Sinatra played the nearby Paramount, was, according to one observer, “a phenomenon of mass hysteria that is only seen two or three times in a century.”33 The floodgates were open: after Sinatra came Johnnie Ray, the half-deaf, flamboyant performer who openly wept while performing; Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, and other Italian neocrooners who blended emotionalism with a playful virility that appealed to youth; and those African American artists, like Clyde McPhatter, whose showmanship sneaked gospel’s ecstasies into pop contexts.

  What rock and roll added to the equation was a commitment to representing adolescence, not adulthood, and a unique combination of fantasy and accessibility. To teens, the stars of rock and roll were just like them and could very possibly become their friends—or even lovers. For teenage girls, the sense of intimate possibility within rock and roll blended with a growing social acknowledgment of their own sexuality to form a potent elixir. Going steady, necking, petting, car dates, and other social practices were designed for girls barely in their teens. Rock and rollers spoke to them directly, and created a space where they could answer back. But if the exchange had merely been symbolic it wouldn’t have been effective. The young men of rock and roll—the musicians most of all, but also the male fans—were game to encounter these new girl-women. They weren’t afraid of the ones who were, as Billy Lee Riley’s famous Sun side put it in 1957, red hot.

  Perusing the fan letters of one important rock and roller, Eddie Cochran, reveals just how toasty things could get between these musicians and their fans. Cochran is best remembered for his playful “Summertime Blues,”
which blended Holly’s jumpy charm with the humor of vocal groups like the Coasters. He was a gifted guitarist and songwriter as well as a heartthrob, and would likely hold a higher place in the rock and roll pantheon if he hadn’t perished at twenty-one in a car wreck while on tour in England. His mother lovingly preserved the voluminous correspondence from his fan club, now in the archive at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. These letters span the range of adulation, from a request for a group dinner from the Brooklyn chapter to ambitious attempts to connect professionally—several young women hawked their singing talents, while one male fan penned a slang-packed petition advising Cochran to liven up his lyrics with real teen lingo and offering to become his songwriting partner.

  What jumps out from this collection are the letters from girls either seeking personal encounters with Cochran or reporting back on them. “Remember: Pennsville Memorial School June 6, 1957,” wrote Nancy Griffith, from Pennsville, New Jersey. “When you were guest of Dick Clark. I was the one you held hand [sic] with and I’ve liked you ever since.” Lorri Eggebraaten, who met the performer in St. Cloud, Minnesota, confided, “Even if you weren’t the famous Eddie Cochran I’d still love you for what you are.” Betty Palmer, a fan club officer from Whittier, California, doled out advice as if she were an older sister: “Remember, Eddie; you can’t win all by yourself—as it take [sic] a lot of little people working behind you—pushing you to the top. That’s why we are here . . . ” And a Dallas fan club president, in a letter marked PERSONAL PERSONAL PERSONAL—VERY PERSONAL, told Eddie of her recent split with his frequent tour mate, the rockabilly pioneer Gene Vincent, whom she’d discovered “had been two-timing me all along.” She was turning her sights on Cochran, as a friend and professional investment, anyway: “Eddie I’ll be eighteen in September, I’d like to come to California to live, it would be wonderful to handle your fan club there.”34

  Male artists’ reliance on a support system of young female fans was (and is) part of the bedrock of rock and roll culture. Cochran seems to have been fairly typical. He was known more as a music nerd than as a wild man, and at the time of his death, he was engaged to the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, who was also in the car that crashed on that English back road. Living in Bell Gardens, a Los Angeles suburb, he had Hollywood connections and appeared in a couple of films. But as an independent musician playing all-ages venues in remote spots from Montana to Kentucky, Cochran also needed—and, judging from the intimacies mentioned in the letters, enjoyed—a close connection to fans who would buy his records and spread the word about his music throughout the halls of their high schools.

  And the girls were not inhibited. “I’m 18, 5 ft. 4 in. 110 lb. dark auburn hair and dark brown eyes. Does that appeal to you?” wrote one named Diana Abbey. “If your [sic] ever in Lexington I’d really be honored if I had a date with you. I’ll send a picture of myself if you want. Phone no. 30187. Love you loads.” Another, Susie Shinsecki, expressed what would become the archetypal fantasy of a rock fan meeting a musician after seeing Cochran at the San Jose Civic Auditorium. “I was sitting in the very first row, and I had a long ponytail and a light green sweater on,” she wrote. “When you first came out on the stage, my girlfriend yelled ‘Hi Eddie!’ and you looked our way. Then I waved my hand at you and you saw me and smiled at me. This got me ‘all shook up.’”

  Susie Shinshecki’s dream was powerful because she could very easily see it coming true. The practice was sanctioned from the top of the rock and roll scene: in his early years of touring, Elvis Presley often dallied with fans backstage, allowing himself to be photographed kissing or lounging with them. One extraordinary account comes from Genie Wicker, who saw Presley perform at Atlanta’s Paramount Theater in the summer of 1956. She was Genie Dettelbach then, and only thirteen.

  Genie wrote a vivid account of her encounter with the King and sent it to her friends at summer camp; now a special acquisition of the Southern Folklore Collection at University of North Carolina, it has become known as “the Kiss Letter.” Six pages long, it describes Presley’s performance in detail—including a slow grind “after which my legs were shakin’ kinda funny,” Wicker writes—as well as the scene at the stage door where she and fifteen other fans lingered to obtain an autograph. They got all that and more:

  A mob of girls leaned on the door + it came open. Then we rushed in. It was terribly hot. He was kissing some girl when the lights went off. There we were in a tiny little room with no lights. It was hot as hell. Policemen had by now cleared half of the screaming girls away but I hid in a sort of dark corner. There were just about 15 girls left I stuck my pen + paper in his face and asked him to please sign it. He made a few scratches on it. He couldn’t see it was dark. Then he put his arms around my neck I did the same to him it was real dark with about 10 girls left. He kissed me. It was wonderful not sloppy just wonderful. It was just about 2 minutes long. I didn’t hold my breath. It was so wonderful.

  His hair smells like perfume. I had touched him about twice but I never dreamed of this then he did it again it was about the same amount of time. Then I went to sit down. I felt like I was gonna faint but I was determined not to. A policeman came up to me + told me to clear out I told him to wait til I got my breath I went up there again and said sort of loud to[?] Elvis do you have my pen?

  He said yes kissed me and said I gotta go sugar.

  Then he went out upstairs to change for his next show. A girl grabbed his shirt right before that + I got a big piece of it. The last time I kissed him he only had on half a shirt. He has a wonderful chest.35

  The Kiss Letter is the most spectacular account of early rock and rollers rewarding their aggressive female fans with exactly what they wanted in the excited atmosphere following a show. The music answered this desire directly, with myriad songs about teenage queens finding freedom on the dance floor and becoming musicians’ objects of desire. Some of this was marketing, but the enthusiasm in the songs rang true. Chuck Berry, who at twenty-nine became one of the most sophisticated and influential songwriters on the rock and roll scene, specialized in paeans to junior misses like “Little Queenie,” who is “too cute to be a minute over seventeen.” Johnny Cash’s early single “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” told a conventional story of courtship and early marriage, but the chanted chorus—“dream on, dream on, teenage queen, prettiest girl we’ve ever seen”—stimulated ambitions beyond the story’s frame. “Only Sixteen,” by the prototypical soul man Sam Cooke, told of romance between a girl who was “too young to fall in love” and a boy who was “too young to know”; the twenty-seven-year-old singer, with a long gospel career behind him and the suave moves of a notorious ladies’ man, was the fantasy figure to which teenage listeners attached the story. Before the full onslaught of teen idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, who were carefully packaged and sold to magazine readers as potential prom dates, rock and rollers were much more forward, presenting musical propositions meant to sweep girls off the dance floor—or out of the crowd at a show—and into a tight squeeze.

  There was a dark side to this exciting action. Many musicians did not hesitate to pursue the kinds of “crazy little mamas” their songs celebrated, and the girls often responded with little hesitation. Some were victimized. Sometimes the scenes were downright ugly. In his autobiography, Chuck Berry recounted a fan encounter after a concert at the Howard Theater in Washington, DC. “The Cleftones singing group scored a playmate from the audience who appeared overwhelmed by the spirit induced from the rock and roll songs,” he wrote. “The next morning one of the Cleftones summoned me to show and boast about the girl, who they’d seen me speaking with the evening prior. At their room, I was shown her lying sprawled on her back upon a bed undignifiedly exposed and obviously drunk as a skunk. The male singing group, in their early twenties, were boasting that they’d all enjoyed the fruits of her femininity and could not resist offering a sample to someone else, namely me.”36

  Writing in 1987, Berry adopted a tone of moral superiority, describing
how he helped the woman to put her clothes back on—after taking a look that he just couldn’t resist. But thirty years before he published his book, he’d been embroiled in two of the most controversial cases involving the connection between male rock and rollers and female fans. Twice accused of violating the Mann Act, a 1910 law criminalizing an adult male’s transportation of an underage female across state lines, Berry spent twenty months in prison in 1960 for bringing Janice Escalanti, a fourteen-year-old Native American runaway whom he’d met in a Mexican hotel, from the Southwest to St. Louis, where he’d employed her as a hatcheck girl in his nightclub. Escalanti testified that the two had been sexually involved. Berry tacitly denied this in his autobiography, writing that though they had shared a room as his tour made its way back to Missouri, he’d resisted her charms, only to be “sentenced to serve time for what I was convicted of just having the intention of doing.”37 In the other case, Joan Mathis, the Berry paramour involved, was a little older—seventeen, by most accounts—and declared herself in love with Berry when on the stand. He was acquitted of her corruption.

  In the late 1950s, Chuck Berry challenged racist assumptions about what an African American man should be free to do. His Mann Act conviction has been viewed as a form of undue persecution of a gifted and outspoken African American entertainer crossing the same racial lines the civil rights movement would seek to eradicate. Joan Mathis was white, and clearly cared for Berry. The fact that she had been sixteen the first time she encountered the thirty-two-year-old Berry was the sticking point that put them both in a courtroom, but it’s been overshadowed by legitimate outrage at the way the legal system has treated Berry throughout his career.