Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Musicians who would once have toured the country with a band now remained in the TV studio as part of a resident orchestra. Initial experiments with presenting music on television in the late 1940s quickly revealed that viewers felt uncomfortable if there was no reaction at the end of each song, so live audiences were brought in for some shows, and ‘canned’ applause used elsewhere. On the rare occasions when a jazz band was requested to appear, certain guidelines had to be heeded, as Down Beat magazine warned: ‘One of the rules peculiar24 to a TV music show is a strict taboo on slow numbers. Everything must have jump and verve, and if a ballad is allowed, it has to be a rhythm ballad with which liberties can be taken. Novelty tunes are more successful, and no number must last longer than 2:45, with the exception of the finale. For television, a band must have totally different arrangements than for ordinary dance dates. For one thing, there must be plenty of sections [e.g. saxophones, trumpets, etc.] playing, since the cameras have to keep changing pace to maintain audience interest.’

  Ultimately, the two acts to attract most enthusiasm from US audiences in the 1950s were not jazz stars or even crooners, but performers who were carefully removed from the music that had been driving young America wild since 1935. One was Liberace, the unctuously sincere, extravagantly tasteless pianist, who used his classical training to froth up every piece of material with excess arpeggios, trills and flourishes. ‘The secret of his success25 is his knack for reducing music to small, easily swallowed capsules’, a critic wrote. ‘Liberace makes his fans feel that he is helping them to enjoy “good” music, treating them to a cultural and uplifting experience … [He is] pioneering in a field in which the great bulk of listener-watchers are not sensitive to musical values.’ Here was a new genre entirely: music for people who didn’t really like music.

  His companion in vapid musical entertainment on 1950s US TV was Lawrence Welk and his ‘Champagne Music’: ‘a carefully devitalised style26 of dance music’, the same critic adjudged, while admitting that at least Welk wasn’t pretentious. With his gentle rhythms, seamless style and ever-smiling young dancers, Welk set the tone for variety TV shows worldwide into the 1970s and beyond – in Britain, that endless parade of song-and-dance, stage-school troupes, from the Tiller Girls to the Young Generation, who delivered the veneer of youthful happiness for audiences whose own youth had been lost to war or the Great Depression.

  If the Liberace and Welk vehicles were equivalent to the personality radio shows of the 1930s, how could television conjure up an alternative to radio’s staple diet of gramophone records? One of the stars created by radio, Rudy Vallee, believed he had engineered the answer. In 1949, he formed Vallee Video in the old-time movie capital of Culver City, California, to produce ‘16 mm telepix’ designed to accompany an individual song – with either a live or a mimed performance. He envisaged these being shown alongside feature films, and then on TV. Another company, Telescriptions Inc., went further, producing several hundred three-minute films during the early 1950s, in which artists from Nat King Cole to R&B star Amos Milburn performed their hits. These were screened across America, both as fillers between scheduled shows, and as thirty-minute packages. Similar films, known as Scopitones, were made in the late 1950s and 60s, although (like the MTV videos to come) these featured lip-synced performances on stage sets.fn6 Each new venture in combining music with television edged closer towards a core audience of teenagers, who had otherwise been ignored by programming targeted either at adults or children. The sociologist David Riesman had noted that for teens, the contents of their record collections helped to establish their position within their peer group: ‘the teenagers showed27 great anxiety about having the “right” preferences’, he said. The record industry had identified the existence of this market, but had no idea how to satisfy it. In a 1948 advertisement, the British label HMV offered a selection of records ‘For the Teen-Ager’, which included Perry Como, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw and Fats Waller – any of whom a teenager could feasibly have enjoyed, but none of whom had set out specifically to attract a teen audience. Yet the style which would bind teenagers to popular music for life already existed: it just hadn’t been brought to their attention.

  [Teenagers] are still swooning28 to mellow music, but this year they sigh and ‘oooh’ at the pulsating tones of Frankie Laine or the heart-rending throbs of Mel Torme. Their old yearning for Frankie Sinatra has faded into nostalgia. ‘Poor Frankie,’ said a girl in Chicago. ‘He’s old now and has three kids.’

  Life magazine, December 1948

  It all started with Vaughn29 Monroe’s ‘Riders in the Sky’. Remember? Forest murmurs … Cowboys added to angels … Before long, all manner of fauns and satyrs began to clutter up the backgrounds of vocal records. Vaughn started it; Mitch Miller took it from there. He laid on the wild animal and woolly plant life so thick you couldn’t hear Frankie Laine for the hollering and the whooping.

  Metronome magazine, July 1950

  ‘Arrangements and interpretations30 have become so big that they’re bigger than the music’, complained producer and bandleader Paul Weston in 1950. ‘You’ve got to snap whips and crack bones to get attention now. Playing and singing a song is nothing.’ The fetish of sound effects, one of the unforeseen products of multitrack recording, had become so prevalent that the most talented songwriters couldn’t compete with the gimmicks. ‘I don’t think anything has been written in the last few years that has a chance of becoming a standard,’ Weston added, ‘nothing that can compare with the wonderful tunes that were being turned out in the 30s.’

  Weston was perhaps overlooking the Nat King Cole hit ‘Nature Boy’, one of the more individual compositions of the immediate post-war period. But even there, the selling point was less the jazz hipster’s almost static performance than the way that the arrangement jumped, sprite-like, around him. This was an era for novelties, for sonic tricks, and for records on which the crack of a rider’s whip – as on Frankie Laine’s ‘Mule Train’ – counted for as much as a memorable chorus. (Typically, the AFM set out to investigate all the cover versions of ‘Mule Train’, to ensure that on each of them the whip had been handled by a union member.) Yet Laine’s early hit singles had already won him a following that was both younger and more passionate than those of his rivals. It stretched beyond the English-speaking world into territories such as Argentina; evidence of a steady and unstoppable drift in international tastes from local talent to a homogenised form of American pop, in keeping with the United States’ apparently irresistible strategic power.

  After a decade as a minor jazz singer, Laine had broken out in 1947 with the blues ballad ‘That’s My Desire’ – not a paragon of melody or lyrics, but a blank canvas for what Metronome called his ‘shameless emoting31’, his vocal slurs and rasps and affectations, borrowed from black band singers rather than Bing Crosby or Rudy Vallee. With its simple orchestration, this was a record that sold nothing weightier than Laine’s presence: an almost physical intervention into the listener’s life, with a lack of subtlety which made it perfect teenage fare. He continued with a mixture of ballads and mock-western story-songs that were corny beyond belief, but which were unashamedly his – a quality that no cover, regardless of its pedigree, could match. The critics were appalled (Gramophone said he had ‘no voice32’) but the fans packed out the halls in which he played, and responded to his unfussy charisma with near-hysteria. Nor was Laine alone in eliciting this reaction: white girls screamed for the veteran band singer Tony Martin in New York; black girls for Duke Ellington’s vocalist, Al Hibbler, in Oakland. Newspaper columnists decried the stupidity of the teenagers’ reactions, without realising that they were based on a mixture of calculation (it was safe to let go in the company of those equally afflicted) and instinctive frenzy, beneath which was the word nobody dared to mention in the late 1940s: sex.

  While Laine, Martin and Hibbler were all old enough to have fathered their fans, the biggest teen idol of the early 1950s was just young enough to serve as a fantas
y lover. Moreover, Johnnie Ray was needy (with a severe hearing deficiency which required him to wear an aid offstage) and every bit as hysterical as his followers. His gimmick was apparent on the 1951 single which coupled ‘Cry’ with ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’: 24-year-old Ray was so emotional that he could not help but weep. ‘I just felt like God33 picked me up in his arms and said, “Johnnie Ray, I love you”, and then he kissed me’, he announced on stage, before another bout of sobbing racked his body. Fans didn’t know whether to mother him or ravage him. ‘One mournful note34 from Johnnie’, a concert-goer reported, ‘and the audience shrieked in animal ecstasy.’

  Adding to his unique appeal, his voice was pitched so high that listeners approaching him blind assumed that he was a woman (and many thought him black, too). For anyone attuned to the leading popular singers of the moment, such as Perry Como and Doris Day, Ray sounded sloppy and uncontrolled. But that was what sold him so effectively: an eruption from the stifling conformity of post-war America, with its white-bread fear of Communism and its emotionally restrictive Christianity. His act was both contrived and utterly instinctive, while the confusion of his persona – was he a wounded baby or a surging lothario? – reflected his own hidden turmoil, briefly revealed when he was arrested for soliciting a policeman in the men’s room of a Detroit theatre. No wonder Johnnie Ray cried so easily, flung himself around as he sang, winced and contorted his face as if meeting the blows of an invisible foe. Like his pubescent fans, he was in the midst of a torment that he could not explain.

  British audiences were more reticent than their American counterparts: they were not quite ready to tear each other to pieces in the race for one of Johnnie’s discarded cigarette butts, as had happened outside the Paramount in New York. But on his frequent visits to the London Palladium in the early 1950s, he elicited screams which had rarely been equalled inside a West End theatre. ‘You can see what the girls like35,’ sniffed a reviewer from the Daily Express, ‘he looks amiable, even lovable, and is idiotically sincere. But he is a side-show freak rather than an entertainer.’ He was one of the artists Frank Sinatra had in mind when he complained, ‘Man, it’s worse than ever36. These trick songs are coming out of my ear.’ Maybe Sinatra was simply jealous, as the screaming spread. When Frankie Laine followed Ray into the Palladium, it was reported that in the cheap seats (the boxes and the balcony), ‘they were Frankie’s own37 – screaming, screeching, squealing, squawking, wailing, weeping, bawling’, until the thesaurus was exhausted. Many of the fans were wearing home-made sweaters into which they had knitted Laine’s name. ‘I’m worried over the effects of such singing of such songs on such youngsters’, the journalist concluded.

  Worse was to follow. At the end of 1953, Clyde McPhatter (himself one of the many ‘scream-age’ idols) led his R&B vocal group, the Drifters, through an overtly lascivious – indeed, downright sexual – song entitled ‘Such a Night’. Then Johnnie Ray tackled the same material. To demonstrate exactly how wild his night had been, he let out a succession of coos and moans that didn’t so much hint at sexual ecstasy as broadcast it. His orchestrations were still rooted in the variety tradition, but his voice signalled something very different: a recognition of teenage sexuality.fn7

  * * *

  fn1 As Metronome magazine reported in 1953, when Les Paul was unveiling a new solid-body electric guitar, he ‘doesn’t look upon it10 as merely a straight guitar with amplification, but instead as an entirely new and different instrument in appearance as well as performance’, a prophetic remark if ever there was one.

  fn2 One side effect of this policy was the 1949 release of Songs Without Words, which featured Paul Weston’s orchestra presenting completed tunes by some of the finest writers in the business, including Ray Noble and Johnny Mercer, but no lyrics. Customers were encouraged to buy the discs and write their own words.

  fn3 There was a brief experiment in the late 1950s with extra-long LPs, which played at 16 rpm, and could hold twice as much material as a 33 rpm disc – approximately the same as a compact disc twenty-five years later. This format made no commercial headway, but into the late 1960s it was standard practice for turntables to offer a choice of four speeds: 16 rpm, 33, 45 and 78.

  fn4 One exception: a 1954 TV murder mystery, Studio One, required a disc jockey to play snippets of ‘Let Me Go Lover’, by the unknown singer Joan Weber. Within two weeks, the single had sold 500,000 copies.

  fn5 As late as 1973, singer-composer Neil Sedaka was still adopting ‘blackface’ as part of his stage show.

  fn6 One of the few surviving Scopitone machines can be found in Jack White’s Third Man Records store in Nashville.

  fn7 At a London Palladium show issued as a best-selling album in 1954, Ray repeated the final section of the song again and again, as if to make sure that all of his fans would be fulfilled. In Elvis Presley’s hands seven years later, the same song became positively multi-orgasmic, the [male] Jordanaires answering his every groan.

  2

  1

  POST-WAR AMERICA was terrified of Communism, and the belief that it was making insidious inroads into the nation’s everyday life. The AFM – happy to withdraw its labour while the US was at war – rallied to the flag in peacetime. It issued strident statements of loyalty to democracy ‘in the struggle for worldwide domination3 by Communism’. The Soviet government responded with criticisms of America’s popular music, which ‘hypnotises one with the dead cold4 mechanics of its rhythm and the poverty of its melody … which poisons the artistic taste of our youth and helps plant an ugly example of bourgeois modernistic dance forms’. (Meanwhile, an Associated Press reporter in Moscow discovered a keen cabal of jazz fans at the heart of the Russian Empire: ‘They even know about rebop5.’) The Communist takeover of China in 1949 illustrated vividly what America feared. ‘The Communist authorities6 look upon dancing as frivolous and unnecessary’, a jazz magazine noted, adding that the former cabaret centre of Shanghai was now entirely free of foreign entertainment attractions.

  Everyone in the American music business agreed that its wares represented the best of their nation: its freedom, its democracy, its openness to competition and consumerism. But there was a common assumption that the beacon of US popular music was jazz, and that jazz had entered a steep decline which owed nothing to Communist interference. ‘Jazz is dead7,’ said pianist Teddy Wilson, ‘you can’t make people listen to it anymore.’ Nat King Cole concurred: ‘Jazz is pretty dead8 commercially.’ ‘Something new in music9 is needed,’ concluded George Hoefer in Down Beat, ‘something akin to the excitement aroused by discovering an Armstrong, a Bix, the Ellington cohesion of sound, the electric shock of the rhythmic power of Basie’, and so he went on, each name from the past reinforcing the poverty of the present.

  For a wider audience, the record business provided vocal personalities who might become teen idols, or who could provide mellifluous wallpaper for adult homes; or big bands with their horns muted and drums brushed rather than beaten. The decade between 1945 and 1955 spawned some of the most perfectly produced popular music of all time, especially at the studio in Hollywood’s Capitol Records Tower, where sonic clarity and instrumental precision became trademarks of impeccable quality. Mario Lanzafn1 imported operatic drama into pop as a statement of manhood, echoed by the likes of Al Martino and his British equivalent, David Whitfield. Dean Martin toyed with sensuality beneath his mock-Italian mannerisms. Doris Day emerged as the most strident and confident female voice yet heard on record, whether she was sassing her way through ‘The Deadwood Stage’ or declaring her ‘Secret Love’. Still, there was an air of safety and sobriety about this entertainment which made it acceptable for all the family, and thereby removed it from a sense of ownership by any generation or racial group.

  Yet there was a radical change afoot in America, beneath the gaze of its majority white population. As historian Russell Sanjek recounted, during the decade after 1942 ‘the income of the average black10 family tripled, while that of a white fam
ily had doubled. In New York, the city with the sixth-largest black population, one-third of the residents of its leading black ghetto – Harlem – left to settle in other parts of the city, and high-priced staples and luxury items were purchased by blacks in greater quantities than by any comparable population group in the city.’ There was still racial segregation, and the economic trends didn’t redress the financial imbalance between whites and blacks in America. Twenty-five years after giving the world jazz, however, the black community was ready to make another weighty cultural contribution to the nation.

  Jazz had spread rapidly from black musicians to white, from the clubs of New Orleans to the plush hotels of Manhattan and London. What’s surprising in retrospect about the musical revolution of the late 1940s is that despite national media which could transmit the latest novelties from coast to coast, white America simply did not notice what was happening in its midst. As jazz faded from prominence, black America produced a substitute which would literally change the world. But not yet: rock ’n’ roll music would exist for almost a decade before its impact was registered outside the African-American community. Only then would it emerge, as if newly born, in the mainstream of popular culture: slightly stale, yet ripe for exploitation.