by Ann Powers
As for Janice Escalanti, a poor woman of color who was facing prostitution charges during Berry’s trial and came across in court as petulant—and who, by her own admission, had traveled with Berry of her own free will—she never fit anyone’s stereotype of pure femininity. Afflicted with what one Berry song dubbed “the grown-up blues” at a time when teenagers were often expected to be trouble, Mathis and Escalanti saw their stories swept up within a larger one about race, culture, and modernity, in which teenage girls are more metaphors for shifting attitudes than real people making complicated choices presented to them by men sometimes twice their age.
The shame of Berry’s Mann Act conviction has faded over time, though it was vigorously debated upon his death in 2017. The general embarrassment surrounding Jerry Lee Lewis’s 1958 marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Brown, endures. Myra herself has called the scandal that surrounded the union “the knife” that fatally injured early rock and roll, along with Berry’s imprisonment, Presley’s entry into the army, and Little Richard’s temporary escape into the gospel world. These occurrences all preceded the more controlled era of teen idols and girl groups, when the forces of Top 40 attempted to reinscribe innocence onto teens. Myra was never that American Bandstand type. “I really, truly wasn’t a typical teenager,” a seventy-year-old Myra, by then long-divorced from Lewis and going by the surname Williams, told the journalist Alan Light in 2014. “My generation was taught to hide under our desk when the bomb came, so you always had in the back of your mind that any minute, any day, life could come to an end.”38
In fact, Myra’s feelings of deep instability, at once terrifying and full of an energy that made do it now a new mantra, were emblematic of the 1950s. The frequent retellings of her story have turned it into a Gothic allegory starring the tormented, demonic Lewis as an avatar of the ancient corruption of the Deep South; even in 1958, despite the prevalence of rock and rollers with underage girlfriends and tour companions, marriage between a twenty-two-year-old and his barely pubescent cousin struck most people as perverse. Myra was mouthy—she told reporters when the couple arrived in London, where the scandal first broke wide, that “age doesn’t matter back home. You can marry at ten if you can find a husband.” She was up for the publicity antics Lewis staged with her, including a widely viewed photograph of her feeding him peas (as if he were the baby) and another of the two sharing cotton candy, like two schoolkids, at Coney Island. Jerry Lee also disturbed gender stereotypes with his flamboyant stage act and long curly hair, which he would comb onstage, sometimes to cries of “faggot!” from the audience.
Yet at the same time, it’s possible to see Myra as fulfilling the teenage fan girl’s ultimate dream. She had come to know Lewis in the context of music making—her father was the bassist in his band. She was most visible as a tour companion, a support system and muse dressed in the latest teen styles. And she surfaced as Lewis’s inspiration right when his hit “High School Confidential” was storming the charts. “Open up a-honey, it’s your lover boy me that’s a-knockin’,” Lewis yelped in the tune’s opening line. Myra was living the answer song.39
The family connection, more than Myra’s age, may have been what repulsed the media and many fans. One British reporter who staked out the band’s hotel made sure to provide details of what was going on in Myra’s mother’s adjacent room (not much) as well as the honeymoon suite. In addition, violence followed the pair after the collapse of Lewis’s career; their son Steve drowned in a swimming pool as a toddler, and when Myra divorced Lewis, she claimed she had been abused. The sordid details make the Myra–Jerry Lee romance seem singular, when, in fact, it was not that far off from what was happening throughout rock and roll.
Learning a lesson from the way Lewis let those details fly, Elvis Presley kept his own fourteen-year-old object of fascination, Priscilla Beaulieu, under close guard until she could marry him without scandal. The pair met in Germany, where Elvis was stationed in the army and Priscilla lived with her career-military family. In her 1985 autobiography, Elvis and Me, Priscilla recalled that Elvis treated her like a fan when they first met at a 1959 dinner party. “What are the kids listening to?” he asked, peppering her with questions about his still-Stateside commercial rivals Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Priscilla cemented Elvis’s interest in her by replying, “They’re all listening to you!” A few days later, he would manage to get her alone, cuddle with her, and assure her that he’d “treat you like a sister.” The pair proceeded to go steady as if they were a couple of high school students, exploring the edges of necking and petting, until the singer returned to the United States in 1960. Not long after that, Presley persuaded Priscilla’s parents to allow her to move in with him in Memphis, where they lived “chastely” until marrying in 1967, when Priscilla turned twenty-one.40
Criminality and perversion, romance and ideal companionship—these are the paradoxical elements of the spectacular romances between teenage girls and adult rock and rollers in the 1950s. Little Richard had his own version, with Savannah high school student Audrey Robinson, whom he met when she was sixteen. Rechristened Lee Angel, Robinson became Richard’s traveling companion and active other half. “We could read each other’s mind,” she once said about him, and most of what he thought about was sex. Under Richard’s tutelage, the voluptuous Angel became an exotic dancer and, according to him, a voracious sexual adventurer. As he described it, she was the main player in the scenarios her voyeuristic rock and roller loved to watch, including that three-way encounter with Buddy Holly backstage at the New York Paramount. Angel later refuted most of Richard’s claims, though lovingly. “I guess being in the same room where people were . . . doing things . . . means I was a part of that. But Richard,” she told the British journalist Robert Chalmers in 2010, “would never let anybody touch me. What was going on across the room was a different story. Richard has a wonderful imagination.”41
Like the other teenage queens living on the line between rock and roll fantasy and postwar American reality, Angel found quotidian ways to claim agency within the culture’s highly sexualized and irrefutably male-dominated atmosphere. She continued to dance, became the lover of the eccentric R&B star Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and eventually moved to London. In 2010, she visited an ailing Richard in Nashville. He asked her to lie in bed with him. “I held him,” she told Chalmers. “It was just like it was in the old days; he would never let me wear any clothes in bed, even though I had all these beautiful nightdresses. I held him close, while he went peacefully to sleep. It was as though we had traveled back in time fifty years.”
This image of the lonely male rocker gaining strength from a younger woman whose vulnerability he’s carefully maintained is both tender and damning. Such relationships between fully adult men and supposedly precocious girls set the template for rock and roll music, for its lore, and for its realities as it grew to become a worldwide mass phenomenon in the 1960s. Songs not merely naming girls’ ages, but celebrating their jailbait status, form a seemingly endless playlist: they range from the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There” to Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s “Young Girl,” from “Christine Sixteen” by KISS to Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love.” In the 1970s and 1980s rock morphed into heavy metal, a scene notorious for “fresh meat” like Lori Mattix, the fourteen-year-old lover Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page kept hidden away in a hotel room, and Ted Nugent’s seventeen-year-old road companion Pele Massa; in a particularly creepy move, Nugent persuaded Massa’s parents to make him her legal guardian until they could marry. The hip-hop R&B titan R. Kelly nearly saw his career ruined when, after secretly marrying and then splitting from the fifteen-year-old vocalist Aaliyah in the 1990s, he faced charges on fourteen counts of child pornography after being accused of predatory behavior by multiple underage women in his hometown of Chicago. Acquitted in 2008, he still tours and records, supported by a devoted fan base. Even in a pop world growing more equitable in light of feminist activism, very youthful female sexualit
y remains a commodity. As has happened so many times within the realm of popular music, exploitation and the feeling of freedom merge in the troubling, celebrated figure of the teenage queen.
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM
Rock and roll girls and boys weren’t always comfortable with the liberties the music promised. Sometimes they themselves felt like they were growing up too fast. These kids had an unspoken mandate, issued by experts in fields like psychology and sociology as well as by the dictates of an increasingly youth-oriented marketplace, to define an ideal that was appropriate for more prosperous, forward-thinking times, but still able to accommodate traditional gender roles and life phases. “Tell me,” Bo Diddley’s 1956 song insisted, “who do you love?” It wasn’t such an easy question to answer. “Today, custom dictates that young people must learn for themselves, through a variety of dates, just what kind of person they want to marry and live with,” wrote the sociologist Paul H. Landis in the 1955 book Understanding Teenagers. “They have been given great freedom in dating and almost complete choice in developing the type of behavior that will characterize their dating relationships. It is expected that in some way, at the end of this period of trial and error, heartache and thrills, each will be better able to make the right decision concerning his own particular marital wants and needs.”42
The practice of “going steady” encapsulated the hypocrisies of a time when teens could behave as “young adults” without openly enjoying the erotic self-possession adulthood promised. Girls were still expected to remain virginal until marriage, and boys, to want to marry a virgin. Boys and girls could spend private time, kiss, even go further into furtive embraces. But they had to check themselves. Boys were encouraged to channel their sexual urges into constructive activities, like sports; girls had to be both alluring and modest, encouraging boys while discouraging them. Gay teens, one guidebook suggested, could “make good citizens and good friends” as long as they learned how to control their impulses.
The freedom of adolescence sure came with a lot of rules. This made young people very fretful. A 1950 survey found that 41 percent of teens “often do things I later regret,” while 35 percent “worry about little things” and “daydream a lot.”43 And sex, perhaps not surprisingly, was teenagers’ main source of inner conflict. The crux of the problem was communication. Boys cited being bashful as their biggest problem. For girls, it was learning how to say no. Insecurity, shame, and regret hung like a misty cloud over the fun of adolescent freedom as the 1950s sped toward the 1960s. Often, young people felt confined within the giant test tube that was the adult idea of adolescence. They faced myriad confusing choices. Even worse, they were supposed to be able to express who they were. Artists like the Everly Brothers helped.
Though often viewed as a repressive phase spearheaded by music business executives who found well-groomed teen idols easier to manage than rockabillies and other troublemakers, the “taming” of rock and roll after Elvis went into the army in 1958 was equally motivated by the anxieties of youthful fans themselves. In the bedroom universe where young people listened to “rockaballads”—the slower or sweeter songs that still tapped into rock and roll’s fervor—voices like their own spoke with forthright emotion and clarity from between the record grooves. Some were manufactured stars like Fabian Forte, a favorite of the American Bandstand mogul Dick Clark. Others, like the television star Rick Nelson and erstwhile doo-wopper Dion DiMucci, eventually rebelled against their own packaging. But if one sound exemplified teenage bedroom rock and roll, it was the harmony blend of the brothers Phil and Don Everly, the most popular, artistically ambitious, and influential dreamboats in a sea that swelled with them.
Child stars of country radio who loved the blues and could meld their voices like the members of the greatest gospel quartets, the Everly Brothers created something new out of pieces of different musical traditions. Their hits, including the playful “Wake Up Little Susie,” the irresistibly fatalistic “Cathy’s Clown,” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” the erotically charged rockaballad that simultaneously topped the Billboard pop, country, and R&B charts in 1958, showed how rock and roll could fit in with pop traditions without losing its deep pathos and integrity.
The Everly Brothers created songs that were metaphors for the unmoored feeling that defined the middle-class teenage experience in the 1950s and early 1960s. The duo’s sound spoke to young boys feeling the pressure to man up, not only in the career counselor’s office or among their male friends, but in the pursuit of girls who expected them to be assertive while also sensing limits: to know when the necking session should stop. “We took a special survey,” wrote the editors of one teen girls’ magazine in an article on necking. “A lot of boys admitted to us that they prefer girls who know how and when to prevent warmth from becoming heat! Otherwise there’s too much of a strain on them . . . The honest truth is, they don’t like a situation that puts too much of a strain on their new and awakening sex drives any more than you do.”44
In the years after rock and roll’s meteoric rise there was almost a panic, not just about teenagers, but also about the heavy burden of adulthood. It turned out that Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry weren’t the only grown-ups attracted to teendom’s allure. Mom and Dad were messed up that way, too. Between the pinups and the advertisements for deodorant, teen magazines regularly carried articles about parents in crisis, with titles like “Are Your Parents Delinquent?” and reports of thirtysomething mothers who embarrassed their children by wanting to go out dancing themselves. Many grown, married people felt lost—scattered from their childhood homes after the Great Depression, which made clear the fragility of prosperity, and then traumatized by war. This adult crisis had been brewing for most of the twentieth century. “Frequently a most serious element from the adolescent’s point of view is that his parents are also groping,” Katharine Whiteside Taylor wrote in the 1938 book Do Adolescents Need Parents? “For perhaps the first time in history, adolescents and parents alike are facing similar problems in adjusting to a rapidly changing world.” Parents never really set themselves aright.45
Interactions with parents in Everly Brothers songs are often almost comical; the bounce of “Wake Up Little Susie,” the quintessential story of two horny teens dodging parental observation, suggests a caper, not a walk of shame. Such lightheartedness symbolically diffused the very real tensions between parents and children that inevitably arose as teenagers fulfilled society’s mandate to remake themselves. The music of the Everly Brothers showed listeners, young and older, that the most fraught moments of intimate conflict, whether internal or with family and other loved ones, could include grace and lightness. It suggested that sexual desire and its fulfillment could also be that way. This is one secret the Beatles borrowed from the Everly Brothers a few years later, when their international breakthrough secured rock and roll’s position as a native tongue for both teens and young adults. In “Please Please Me,” the band’s first No. 1 hit, John Lennon and Paul McCartney borrowed the same static upper harmony style that made “Cathy’s Clown” so special—one voice pulling back and staying still as the other tumbles into an oil slick of heartbreak—and, in doing so, added an element of ambiguity to what was otherwise a straight-up, aggressive seduction. That held note is the sound of a boy’s uncertainty. It preserves all of the complicating emotions in the situation “Please Please Me” describes, the subtlety that might otherwise have vanished into the crash of Ringo Starr’s drumbeat.
“Please Please Me” became an American hit in 1964, a decade after Elvis Presley first met Sam Phillips at Sun Studios and Frankie Lymon wondered why fools fell in love. With its direct if not utterly explicit demand for mutual erotic satisfaction, this key volley in the Beatles’ invasion can be viewed as a kind of crowning point in rock and roll’s confrontation with youthful sexuality. It addressed the desires and worries of youth in an immediate and serious way, facing sex in its troubling ugliness as well as its thrilling beauty. “Come on!” snarle
d John Lennon, and no one could mistake what he wanted. It was a tipping point.
The Beatles loved nonsense; they learned much from Little Richard, who became their mentor when he traveled to England on his first comeback trail. They obsessed over the Everly Brothers, whose harmonies and intricate guitar tunings inspired the more reflective elements in their music. But the Beatles, of course, also built their music for girls, and their unique appeal was grounded in the fact that their songs had an extraordinary emotional range. In April 1964, when the Fab Four occupied every spot in the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and seven more in the Top 100, what they expressed beyond the particular complexities of “Please Please Me” included 1950s-style wildness in their covers of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and their own “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; Everly Brothers–style melancholy in “She Loves You”; rebellious antimaterialism in “Can’t Buy Me Love”; bitter jealousy in “You Can’t Do That”; chivalric faithfulness in “All My Loving”; roguish mystery in “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” The desired subject described in “I Saw Her Standing There” might have been just seventeen, but she was wise to both romance’s freeing aspects and its traps. And this was just the beginning of the expansion of youth music’s language of love that happened as rock and roll became rock and soul in the 1960s.