Returning home after the show, he couldn’t get the line out of his head, “Don’t step on my suedes.” As he was drifting off to sleep, he thought of an old rhyme: “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.” That’s it, he thought, leaping out of bed, grabbing his guitar and heading for the basement. “One for the money,” he sang, strumming his guitar twice.
Songwriters Arthur Singer, John Medora and David White put their heads together to create a song that would cash in on a new dance craze. They came up with a tune called “Do the Bop,” presenting it to Dick Clark for his consideration. Clark liked the melody but felt the tune needed new lyrics. He told the writers that the bop was a passing fad and wouldn’t be popular when the song came out. He suggested “At the Hop” as a new title. They cut the revised song with Danny and the Juniors, scoring a Number One hit in January 1958.
The clamor woke his wife Valda who came to the top of the stairs. “Carl, it’s three o’clock in the morning! You’re gonna wake up the children,” she said. “Whose song is that?” “It’s ours,” said Perkins, already convinced he was writing a hit. “Write the song, and we’ll rock them back to sleep,” she replied, leaving him alone to work.
In his haste he didn’t take any paper downstairs. He emptied three potatoes from a brown paper bag and quickly wrote the song on the potato sack, including the now-famous line, “Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.” Never having owned a pair of the shoes, he misspelled suede as “swaed.”
Later that month, Perkins showed the song to Sun Records’ chief Sam Phillips who was willing to give him studio time. They ran through the tune three times. On the first try, Perkins sang “… three to get ready, now go boy go!” Phillips suggested he change it to “go cat go!,” giving the record a hipper sound. Four sides were recorded that day, two rockabilly and two country. Sun Records had a policy of coupling a rockabilly tune with a country song in an attempt to catch both markets. This time, though, Sam Phillips decided to break from his usual marketing strategy, going full ahead rockabilly. “Blue Suede Shoes,” coupled with “Honey, Don’t,” was released on New Year’s Day 1956.
Local reaction in Memphis was immediate. The song became a heavy seller, reaching Number One on the Memphis charts and sitting there for the next three months. By the following March, Blue Suede Mania had broken out of the South. Billboard Magazine rated the tune seventy-six out of one hundred, saying, “Perkins contributes a lively reading on a gay rhythm ditty with a strong R & B backing. Fine for the jukes.” By this point, the song was selling twenty thousand copies a day.
In what is probably the clearest indication of its success, “Blue Suede Shoes” was covered by a dozen artists, including Pee Wee King, Boyd Bennett, Bob Roubian, Sid King, Lawrence Welk, Roy Hall, Sam “The Man” Taylor, Jim Lowe and, most notably, Elvis Presley. On March 10, 1956, Perkins became the first country artist to breach the national R & B charts, beating Presley to them by three weeks.
Later, on the twenty-first of that month, Perkins and his band, including his brother Jay, left by car for New York. They were scheduled to make their first national television appearance on the Perry Como Show to receive a gold record on air for “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Near Dover, Delaware, disaster struck. Driver Dick Stuart fell asleep at the wheel, slamming into a poultry truck. Perkins suffered a broken shoulder, lacerations and a cracked skull. The accident prevented Perkins from properly promoting “Blue Suede Shoes,” and due to a loss in momentum, his next four singles fared poorly. “Boppin’ the Blues,” his follow-up release, only reached Number Seventy on the charts. Similarly, “Your True Love” failed to break into the Top Forty.
But even without Perkins to promote the tune, “Blue Suede Shoes” managed to top the country, pop and R & B charts, a feat never before accomplished. Many music historians consider it to be the first true rock-and-roll hit because it crossed over to all three major markets.
Until the time of his death in January 1997, the original potato sack with the words to “Blue Suede Shoes” hung in Perkins’s house next to a gold record for his biggest hit. “After all those days in the cotton fields, the dreams came true on a gold record on a piece of wood,” he said in an interview in 1985. “It’s in my den where I can look at it every day. I wear it out lookin’ at it.”
A dancer in a honky-tonk gave rockabilly legend Carl Perkins (pictured here in a January 1992 photo), the idea for one of the most well-known phrases in rock-and-roll history.
Great Balls of Fire
Jerry Lee Lewis
Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast. — Faust
“Jerry is tormented by his religious influences,” said Great Balls of Fire movie producer Adam Fields. “He sees himself forever torn between doing God’s work and singing the devil’s music.” This dichotomy has plagued Lewis throughout his checkered career but never so strongly as when he recorded “Great Balls of Fire.”
Otis Blackwell, the New York songwriter best known for penning “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” for Elvis Presley, first heard Jerry Lee Lewis in a listening booth at a record store. As “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ” poured out of the booth’s headphones, he became electrified. Already having scored several hits with Elvis, he sensed the same potential in Jerry Lee. In the coming weeks, as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ” rose on the charts, Blackwell tried to come up with a song to present to Lewis. He uncovered a tune called “Great Balls of Fire” by a fellow New Yorker with the unlikely name of Jack Hammer. Changing some of the lyrics and pumping up the rhythm, Blackwell slapped a cowriter’s credit on the song and submitted a demo disc to Jerry Lee at Sun Studios in Memphis.
Jerry Lee was knocked out by the demo. Sun staffers recall he walked around the office mouthing the words as if writing a musical arrangement in his head. Keen to get the tune on tape as quickly as possible, Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Studios, set aside studio time in October 1957. The night of the recording session, Jerry Lee had an unsettling revelation. Studying the lyric sheet, he realized “Great Balls of Fire” had a deeper meaning. It was actually about fire and brimstone — Judgment Day. Jerry Lee had been raised to be a God-fearing man. He may have lapsed at points in his life, but years later, he could still feel the power of his Pentecostal minister’s words reverberating in his head. As much as he loved the song, he wasn’t going to end up in hell for recording it — not without a fight, anyway.
Jerry Lee Lewis, aka The Killer. After a 1958 performance, one fan had nothing but raves for the blue-eyed, fair-haired singer from Ferriday, Louisiana. “He’s tall, he wears thick-soled white shoes and he hits the piano keys so hard that you can’t understand why the piano doesn’t collapse! All the time he’s yelling ‘go, go, go’ and whips up the fans to such a pitch that it takes a bunch of police to stop them from tearing the place apart.”
While Sam Phillips tried to get the session under way, Jerry Lee went into a tirade. A glass or two of bourbon only fueled his mounting paranoia. “Great Balls of Fire” was the devil’s song, he maintained. To sing it was sinful. Someone secretly switched on the tape machine, recording Jerry Lee’s drunken sermon for all posterity. Years later, it appeared on a bootleg of Sun Studio outtakes called Good Rocking Tonight. Here’s an edited version:
“H … E…L … L…!” Jerry Lee yelled.
“I don’t believe this,” Sam Phillips said, sensing what was to come.
“Great God almighty! Great balls of fire!” someone mockingly shouted in the background.
“It says make merry with the joy of God only,” Jerry Lee ranted amid the comments from the band. “But when it comes to worldly music, rock and roll … anything like that … you have done brought yourself into the world, and you are in the world, and you are still a sinner. You are a sinner unless you be saved and borned again and be made as a little child and walk before God and be holy — and brother, I mean you got to be so pure. No sin shall enter there — no sin! For it says no sin. It don’t just say
a little bit; it says no sin shall enter there. Brother, not one little bit. You got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven. You have to be so good.”
“Hallelujah,” someone testified in the background.
“All right,” said Phillips, warming up to a religious debate. “Now look, Jerry, religious conviction doesn’t mean anything resembling extremism. All right. Do you mean to tell me that you are going to take the Bible, that you are going to take God’s word and that you are going revolutionize the whole universe? Now listen, Jesus Christ was sent here by God almighty.…”
“Right!” Jerry Lee agreed.
“Did He convince?” Phillips continued. “Did He save all of the people in the world?”
“No, but He tried to.”
“He sure did. Now wait a minute. Jesus Christ came into this world. He tolerated man. He didn’t preach from one pulpit. He went around and did good.”
“That’s right. He preached everywhere,” Jerry countered, talking over Phillips. “He preached on land. He preached on water. Man, He done everything. He healed.”
“Now, now, here’s the difference.…”
“Are you following those that heal? Like Jesus did? Well, it’s happening every day. The blind eyes opened. The lame were made to walk. The crippled were made to walk,” Jerry Lee said, ignoring Phillips’s attempts to interject.
“Jesus Christ, in my opinion, is just as real today as He was when He came into this world,” Phillips sermonized.
“Right. Right. You are so right, you don’t know what you are saying.”
At this point the band was fed up with the polemic. “Aw, let’s cut it,” said one player disgustedly. “It’ll never sell, man,” said another. “It’s not commercial.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Just a minute,” said Phillips, ignoring the band. “I’m telling you out of my heart, and I have studied the Bible a little bit.…”
“Well, I have too,” said Jerry Lee, recalling his days at the Southwest Bible College in Waxahachie, Texas. “I studied it through and through, and through and through, and I know what I am talking about.”
“Jerry, Jerry,” said Phillips, adopting the tone of an older, wiser man. “If you think that you can’t … can’t do good if you are a rock-and-roll exponent.…”
“You can do good, Mr. Phillips. Don’t get me wrong.”
“Now wait. Wait. Listen. When I say do good.…”
“You can have a good heart. You can help people.”
“You can save souls,” Phillips added.
“No. No. No. No!” Jerry Lee responded loudly, appalled at the idea.
“Yes.”
“How can the devil save souls? What are you talking about?” said Jerry Lee, clearly confused. “Man, I got the devil in me. If I didn’t have, I [wouldn’t] be a Christian.”
“Well, you may have him.…”
“Jesus!” Jerry Lee yelled in his best preacher voice, pounding his chest. “Heal this man. He casts the devil out. The devil says, ‘Where can I go?’ He says, ‘Can I go into this swine?’ He says, ‘Yeah, go into him.’ Didn’t he go into him?”
“Jerry, the point I’m trying to make is, if you believe in what you are singing, you got no alternative whatsoever.… “
“Mr. Phillips. I don’t care. It ain’t what you believe. It is what is written in the Bible.”
“Well, wait a minute.”
“It is what is there, Mr. Phillips.”
“No, no.”
“It’s just what’s there.”
“No, by gosh, if it’s not what you believe, then how do you interpret the Bible?” said Phillips, exasperated, trying to end the argument. “How do you interpret the Bible if it is not what you believe?”
“Well, it’s not what you believe. You can’t just.…” said Jerry Lee, confused.
“Let’s cut it man!” said a frustrated and bored band member.
The band finally won out, and they laid down a furious track that writer Greil Marcus says “outsins the version Sam Phillips released to the public.” The tired band did the song several more times, and sometime between midnight and dawn, recorded the version that pumped out of radios later that year. At the end of the session, someone joked to Jerry Lee that the royalties should be split with the Holy Ghost. He didn’t laugh.
Held out of the top spot by Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” “Great Balls of Fire” sat at Number Two for four weeks. It was the biggest hit Sun Records ever had, proving to Jerry Lee that there was money to be made singing the devil’s tune. He joked that there were almost as many zeros on his royalty checks “as there had been Fs on my third-grade report card.”
More than twenty years after that night of drunken sermonizing, Jerry Lee was convinced he would burn for singing rock and roll. Being good isn’t always easy, and most often, Jerry Lee seemed to have one eye looking to heaven while the other was looking for trouble.
In a 1979 interview, music critic Robert Palmer asked Jerry Lee, “What is it about rock and roll that damns you to hell if you play it?” Jerry Lee replied, “I can’t picture Jesus Christ doing a whole lotta shakin’.”
Tequila
The Champs
A solo artist named Dave Burgess thought he had a hit with an instrumental track called “Train to Nowhere.” Previously, he had recorded four singles for Gene Autry’s Challenge record label, all of which failed to chart. This time he felt in his gut he could hit the big time. “Train to Nowhere” didn’t grab anyone’s attention, but the 45’s B-side, a hastily recorded instrumental called “Tequila,” went to Number One in March 1958.
When lead guitarist Dave Burgess, pianist Danny Flores, drummer Gene Auden, guitarist Buddy Bruce and bass guitarist Cliff Hils recorded “Tequila,” they were session musicians hired to play backup on a Jerry Wallace album. Wallace knocked off the session early, leaving the musicians with a few spare minutes to goof around in the studio. With Wallace picking up the tab for the studio time, Burgess grabbed the opportunity to record a B-side for his “Train to Nowhere” single.
Flores proposed they cut a tune he had written while visiting family in Tijuana. While on vacation in Mexico, he drank a lot of that famous local liquor, and a bartender suggested he write a song about his favorite drink. He took the advice and wrote the melody, often using it as a break song during his club dates. In the studio, he taught it to the other guys, writing a quick musical arrangement on the spot. After the first run through, Burgess thought something was missing. He asked Flores to shout “tequila” in his big baritone during the song. Using the last few remaining moments of studio time, the session players recorded the tune, committing it to tape just as the next band was arriving to set up in the studio. Time was so tight that they didn’t even bother to listen to a playback of the tune before grabbing the reel-to-reel tape and going their separate ways.
Several days later, they met again to decide on a band name under which to release the single. They came up with the Champs in tribute to Gene Autry’s horse Champion. Flores also decided on a name change for the writer’s credit on “Tequila.” Using a combination of his middle name and his father’s given name, he came up with the stage name Chuck Rio.
The title “Train to Nowhere” proved prophetic. Released on December 26, 1957, the record sank without a trace until a disc jockey flipped the single and played the B-side. By March 1958, the quickly recorded throwaway “Tequila” was burning up the Billboard charts. Meanwhile, ABC Paramount recording artist Eddie Platt released a cover version of the tune that ultimately made it to Number Twenty, but it was eclipsed by the Champs’ spirited rendering.
In mid-March, “Tequila” hit Number One, a spot it would hold for five weeks, establishing several firsts in rock-and-roll history. The Champs became the first instrumental group to top the charts with their first release. “Tequila” was the first tune of the rock era to jump from outside the Top Ten to the Number One spot. It also won the first-ever Grammy Award for Best R & B Performance.
The success of the tune took the band by surprise. Conceived only as a studio project, several of the guys were unprepared for “Tequila” ’s sweeping popularity. Buddy Bruce and Cliff Hils had families and were not able to tour with the band to promote the record, so they were replaced. After a nationwide series of shows, Flores, aka Rio, left for a solo career, with Alden following soon behind. Jim Seals and Dash Crofts, who would later find fame as Seals and Crofts (“Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl”), were brought on board to fill the gap. The band’s last incarnation saw Burgess as the only original member, backed up by Glen Campbell on rhythm guitar.
Despite the ever-rotating lineup, the Champs placed two more singles — “El Rancho Rock” and “Too Much Tequila” — in the Top Forty before disbanding in 1965.
Ricky Nelson’s 1958 hit “Poor Little Pool” was penned by Sharon Sheeley, girlfriend of rock pioneer Eddie Cochrane.
Book of Love
The Monotones
A radio jingle inspired Charles Patrick to write a novelty tune for the amusement of his friends, a New Jersey doo-wop group called the Monotones. “Book of Love” peaked at Number Five on Billboard magazine’s Hot One Hundred in April 1958.
Warren Davis, George Malone, Charles Patrick, Frank Smith and brothers John and Warren Ryanes sang together in a church choir in Newark, New Jersey. Inspired by the success of Dionne Warwick, one of the choir’s alumni, they formed a group to sing secular music. Fast friends, they dubbed themselves the Monotones because “the word means ‘one tone,’ and we were so close, like one,” said one member.
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 4