Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Echoes of this unashamedly direct sound could be glimpsed in the otherwise snow-white landscape of mainstream popular music in the early 1950s. Repeated piano triplets supported rhythmic ballads; boogie-woogie motifs underpinned defiantly unswinging dance tunes (Kay Starr’s ‘Come-A-Long-A-Love’ from 1952 offering a vivid example). The overblown mock-religious sentiments of Frankie Laine’s 1953 hit ‘I Believe’ (which spent several months atop the British hit parade) could be traced back to the gospel-schooled passion of black balladeers; so too the extended, fluttering notes offered by everyone from Johnnie Ray to Dean Martin, which were gently suggestive of sexual anticipation. There were honking saxophones, basses throbbing four to the bar, even a pronounced backbeat on Bonnie Lou’s ‘Tennessee Wig Walk’ (1953). The Crew Cuts’ ‘Sh-Boom’ from 1954 has been labelled by chart historian Joel Whitburn as America’s ‘first #1 rock and roll song34’, even though it was nothing more incendiary than a barbershop vocal quartet crooning nonsense syllables. In its original form, as sung by black group the Chords (on the Cat label, naturally), it was altogether more propulsive – less a romantic singalong, a parent might have felt, than an invitation to steal hubcaps.

  It was the Chords rather than the Crew Cutsfn3 who inspired the musical satirist Stan Freberg to create his own version of ‘Sh-Boom’ – the first of a series of parodies which harpooned America’s changing music trends through the mid-1950s. ‘Now, this is a rhythm and blues number,’ Freberg’s barely articulate lead singer pronounced, ‘you gotta be careful, or someone is liable to understand what you’re singing about.’ With its unrelenting bass thump, snarling saxophone and frantic guitar solo, Freberg’s ‘Sh-Boom’ ironically became the first R&B, rock ’n’ roll or indeed cat-music entry in the British hit parade.

  It was not, however, the first record to become an anthem for the young Britons known originally as ‘mashers’, then as ‘creepers’ and eventually as ‘Teddy boys’ (and girls). ‘Mashers’ were, in the late nineteenth century, effete ladykillers. By 1954, the term had acquired an air of violence. ‘Creepers’, by comparison, was drawn directly from ‘The Creep’: a vaguely smouldering instrumental penned by saxophonist and bandleader Ken Mackintosh. It was accompanied by a simple dance step, the popularity of which cynical journalists ascribed to the prevalence of ‘youngsters who couldn’t cope35 with the usual ballroom dancing steps’. As for ‘Teddy boys’, that description arose from the youngsters’ revival of Edwardian fashions: narrow-sleeved jackets, turned-up cuffs, velvet trims, drainpipe trousers. ‘When Edwardian-style coats36 came out,’ recalled Teddy boy John Fox, ‘Flash! You could go out there and you could make it with the birds. If you had a car, say a Ford Consul or a Cresta, you could pull any bird you wanted. And you used to go on the dance floor and say, “Lend us your bones, doll.” For a jive, see. We used to go down to the Palais on a Saturday night and we’d sit in the corner and just watch them all, and everybody was having a ball.’

  Teddy boys were a working-class phenomenon. As sociologist Stanley Cohen explained, they were ‘the first group [of teenagers]37 whose style was self-created, although they were reacting not so much against “adults” but the little that was offered in the fifties: the café, the desolate town, the pop culture of the dance halls, Locarnos and Meccas aimed at the over-20s’. At their most menacing, the ‘Teds’ rampaged through town centres smashing windows, brandishing switchblade knives – and had the rhythms of rock ’n’ roll coursing through their veins. After the sinuous appeal of ‘The Creep’, and the comic novelty of Stan Freberg, more red-blooded stimulation was suddenly available at the end of 1954, in the unlikely and unexpected shape of a white rock ’n’ roll group: Bill Haley & His Comets.

  It’s all jazz, of course38. Just a question of beats to the bar. It’s the simplest form of music: a bit of Dixieland, four-bar rhythm and jazz.

  Bill Haley

  Viewed as a social39 phenomenon, the current craze for rock and roll material is one of the most terrifying things to have happened to popular music … the rock and roll technique, instrumentally and vocally, is the antithesis of all that jazz has been striving for over the years – in other words, good taste and musical integrity.

  Melody Maker, May 1956

  Even before ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ carried the gospel of rock ’n’ roll around the world, Bill Haley’s songs were filled with hints of salvation. ‘It’s the Real Rock Drive and they play it in a real gone way’; ‘man, that music’s gone’; ‘a band with a solid beat’; ‘that music fractures me’; ‘we’re gonna ROCK!’

  With the Four Aces of Western Swing, the Saddlemen, and finally the Comets, Bill Haley had played country dance halls and bars where the patrons wanted to fill their brief hours of leisure with dancing, drinking and sexual conquest. Like the blues, the hillbilly music of the late 1940s was overrun with boogie-woogie, from the Delmore Brothers’ ‘Freight Train Boogie’ to Arthur Smith’s ‘Guitar Boogie’. In the city or the backwoods, people with country roots accepted the boogie beat as easily as the two-step and the waltz. On his early records, Bill Haley offered up a stew of all those rhythms, and was not beyond adding some Latin spice to the pot. ‘I was doing country and western40 on a little radio station,’ he recalled in 1974, ‘and before my programme there was a show called Judge’s Rhythm Court which was just negro blues … Because I’d be listening in the studio to the programme, I used to sing some of the blues tunes to country and western. I could see no reason why a country and western group couldn’t be doing that sort of music – even though it was very segregated. I started doing those kinds of songs in clubs, and they were accepted tremendously. I knew right away what I had, because nobody else had it and people were going crazy.’

  Haley capitalised on his discovery in June 1951, when he went further than any white musicians had ever been, at least in a recording studio. Within five weeks of Jackie Brenston’s ‘Rocket 88’ bursting on to the Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart, Bill Haley and his Saddlemen had tackled this prototype blend of automotive passion and (black) rock ’n’ roll – losing the song’s erotic edge, it’s true, but retaining enough propulsion to suggest that they didn’t regard it as a novelty. A month later, Haley concocted his own recipe for rock ’n’ roll: the ‘Green Tree Boogie’, with a slap-bass solo and stop-start breaks to heighten the tension. By April 1952, his Saddlemen were delving deeper into the black rock ’n’ roll canon, reviving Johnny Preston’s three-year-old regional hit ‘Rock the Joint’, juvenile-delinquent imagery and all. Danny Cedrone contributed a finger-shredding guitar solo, which with its repeated climaxes and staccato notes supplied the raw sexuality missing from Haley’s recalcitrant vocals.

  These illicit journeys across the border came to a head in early 1953, when Haley’s renamed Comets tackled ‘Crazy Man, Crazy’. ‘Go, go, go, everybody’, screamed the chorus; to ram it home, producer Dave Miller hired a vocal combo to sound like teenage hoodlums. When that still wasn’t rowdy enough, he and his staff joined in. (On the flipside, another Haley composition, ‘What’cha Gonna Do’, opened with the ‘one for the money’ routine which Carl Perkins would borrow for his 1956 rock anthem, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.) This was a national hit, considered so ethnic that (as so many black R&B songs would be over the next few years) it was immediately ‘covered’ by a more established white act for mainstream consumption. The fact that Haley’s original outsold Ralph Marterie’s sterling reconstruction proved that public tastes were changing more rapidly than the industry could imagine.fn4 But Haley’s record company were careful not to alarm anyone. The Comets were promoted not as a rock ’n’ roll band, but as ‘The greatest Dance Band41 ever on wax’, as if they had Paul Whiteman or Glenn Miller in their sights.

  With ‘Rock A-Beatin’ Boogie’, Haley introduced white America to the wagon cry ‘rock, rock, rock … roll, roll, roll’, and maybe that’s where Alan Freed found the slogan for his crusade. By the end of 1953, the Comets were an R&B band, in the same way tha
t the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had stated their claim to jazz: they loved the music, and they couldn’t disguise the thrill of being allowed to perform it.

  By the late spring of 1954, Bill Haley & His Comets were signed to a major national label, with a producer (Milt Gabler) who admitted of his protégé: ‘He didn’t have a good voice42, but he had a feel for what he was doing.’ Faced with converting a novelty rock ’n’ roll tune into something that would trump Haley’s recent sides and still sell, Gabler insisted that the Comets needed some instrumental hooks, and hummed a few to the band: ‘I just used all the tired old riffs I’d known all my life from R&B records.’ On the label of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, Decca described the song like any other dance-band tune: ‘FOXTROT. Vocal chorus by Bill Haley.’ A studio drummer doubled the backbeat on the snare drum, and Gabler asked Danny Cedrone to reprise his exhibitionist guitar solo from ‘Rock the Joint’. But the record was, by Decca’s standards, a flop. Two months later, the Comets tackled a proven hit, in the frankly obscene (and definitively sexist) black rock ’n’ roll of Joe Turner’s ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. Haley dropped the most blatantly erotic verse – though not the ‘one-eyed cat’ lines which registered white pop’s first overt reference to a penis – and doubled the backbeat. Suddenly the Comets were national stars.

  What added notoriety to their fame was Blackboard Jungle, a movie in which jiving teens equated to juvenile delinquents. The director, Richard Brooks, elected to run Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ over the opening credits, at full volume. ‘When Blackboard Jungle43 opened,’ Milt Gabler recalled, ‘and you heard the slap of the bass and the drums and the bite of that guitar, it just knocked the kids right out of their chairs.’ As James Miller described, ‘for most people it was the loudest44 music they had ever heard … A crude but effective symbolism was put into play: the louder the sound, the more strongly it would connote power, aggression, violence.’ ‘It’s the vilest picture45 I’ve seen in 26 years’, said the Memphis city censor, Lloyd Binford. ‘The teenagers start off bad. I thought they would reform and we would have to pass it, but they were just as bad in the end.’ The film set box-office records, and sent ‘Rock Around the Clock’ towards a total of more than 20 million sales around the world. So stimulating was the song that it even sparked disorder at the Ivy League college of Princeton. ‘Lively strains of the disk46 first emanated from one of the student dormitories’, it was reported. ‘Other phonographs joined in, making a mad medley which led to chanting and stamping by the staid Princetonians. About midnight they gathered on the campus, set fire to a can of trash, and paraded through the streets until an assistant dean dampened their hilarity by pointing out the advantages of a more sedate mode of life.’

  In Britain, everything happened more slowly, but reached the same conclusion. On its original release, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was described by the magazine Jazz Journal as ‘two jump blues sides47 by a relatively unknown coloured group in the style of Louis Jordan, and obviously slanted at the R&B market … The band plays in modern Harlem swing style.’ Then jazz aficionados discovered that Haley and his group were white. In the Daily Mirror, Patrick Doncaster said that ‘Bill Haley and his Comets48 are rated by the experts as not really the real thing when it comes to Rhythm and Blues. But they rock and roll the sales into millions.’ In 1956, when ‘Rock Around the Clock’ became the title song of Haley’s first film, the Comets sent Teddy boys and other errant teens wild in Britain’s cinemas, jiving in the aisles and taking razor blades to their seats. The problem, said the Daily Express, was the ‘primitive, hotted-up jazz49 music by Bill Haley’s Comets’, which had even led fans to sing and dance through the streets of Twickenham. As the film travelled north, so did the hysteria, to the point that the teenage John Lennon was disappointed when nobody in Liverpool tore up the seats. He should have been in Manchester, where members of the audience turned the cinema’s fire hoses on each other and on the manager, before spilling out on to the street singing Haley refrains.

  There followed a month of the media-induced furore at which Britain has always been expert. Numerous cities banned screenings of Rock Around the Clock, while Queen Elizabeth II (herself now 30 years old) asked for a print of the film to be sent to Buckingham Palace. Her younger sister Princess Margaret demanded that the Royal Marines Band, serenading her on the royal yacht Britannia, should improvise a version of Haley’s theme song. His music was also played to six chimpanzees at a Liverpool circus: ‘They just looked around50 and scratched.’fn5 Newspaper columnist Eve Perrick reasoned that if rock ’n’ roll caused the same problems as alcohol, its sale should likewise be restricted. The Bishop of Woolwich called for Haley’s movie to be withdrawn. The BBC broadcast a TV show in which Victorian songs were rearranged with a rock ’n’ roll beat. At the height of the Suez crisis, the Conservative MP Major Tufton Beamish said in the House of Commons: ‘The Opposition52, in my opinion, should be thoroughly ashamed of its “rock ’n’ roll” behaviour.’ A reader’s letter to the New Musical Express demanded to know: ‘Why is it that a rhythm-crazed53 maniac can pick up an electric guitar and play tripe, which is now given the name rock ’n’ roll?’ The secretary of the Musicians’ Union, Harry Francis, commented: ‘The British public doesn’t want54 rock ’n’ roll – only a few silly kids do.’ And they were under malign influence, it seemed: at the Pentecostal Church in Nottingham, the pastor asked two teenagers to jive during a service while the organist played a ‘rocked-up’ version of the hymn ‘Lion of Judah’. This was offered as demonstrable proof that ‘Rock ’n’ roll is a revival55 of devil dancing, the same sort of thing that is done in black-magic ritual.’

  Fans who were arrested for antisocial offences or criminal damage after viewing Bill Haley’s film had a different explanation. ‘That rhythm is terrific56’, said Tony Scullion. ‘We didn’t try to keep in our seats. I don’t think I could have done, anyway. When they got to “See You Later Alligator”, I just signalled the boys and we went out in the aisles. After that, I didn’t hear much of the music. We were jiving and stomping – even when they cut the film. Friday night it’s going to be just the same story all over again. I don’t care – it’s worth it for that rhythm.’ Another fan, Kenneth Gear, added: ‘This music is different57 from anything I ever heard before. There’s nobody sends me like Bill Haley – except for Elvis Presley. There must have been four or five hundred of us in the street. I’ve never felt so excited in my life. This rhythm is exciting and lively. It makes me feel as though nothing else mattered.’ This was transcendence: the power of music to carry people out of the everyday into a realm where consequences were irrelevant, and everything existed in the moment.

  Britain was not alone in its uproar. In America, too, the term ‘rock ’n’ roll’ could ignite trouble without provocation. But there, unlike Britain a year later, this music was still considered to be black in origin. When Variety magazine described it as ‘the most destructive force58 in the country … a lewd, lascivious and larcenous influence on youth’, they were making not just a musical and social point, but a racial one, albeit in disguise. This was all part of what Down Beat magazine called ‘a high-pressure crusade59 against R&B’. Rock ’n’ roll dances were banned in Connecticut in April 1955. ‘Teen-agers virtually work60 themselves into a frenzy to the beat of the fast swing music’, a police chief explained. ‘The Big Beat has arrived’, Alan Freed responded. Psychiatrists duelled over the origin of the rock ’n’ roll riots. One said that they were ‘symptomatic of something61 wrong with the kids’ home environment, rather than due to any evil in rock & roll’. Another called rock ’n’ roll ‘a communicable disease62 … cannibalistic and tribalistic … it appeals to the adolescent insecurity and drives teenagers to do outlandish things’. He would have felt at home with the North Alabama Citzens’ Council, which had led the assault on Nat King Cole in Birmingham (and would shortly change its name to the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy). It described rock ’n’ roll as being part of a plot initiated by
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ‘to undermine the morals63 of the youth of our nation’ by ‘pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro’. This music was ‘sexualistic, unmoralistic, and the best way to bring young people of both races together’.

  That was exactly what was happening to rock ’n’ roll music itself. It had become sufficiently broad, and multiracial, for Alan Freed to book the white pop singer Tony Bennett as headliner for his August 1955 Rock & Roll show in Brooklyn (although Bennett was unable to appear, and a black singer took his place). A few weeks later, the first cash-in movie was released, entitled Rock ’n’ Roll Revue. It was a cheaply shot compilation of studio performances by an entirely black cast of R&B and jazz performers, ranging from Joe Turner to Nat King Cole, and Ruth Brown to Duke Ellington. A very similar cast was promised for the hasty follow-up, Rhythm and Blues Revue. If the two descriptions appeared to be interchangeable, then clarification was on hand in February 1956, when a pundit noted that rock had an air of respectability about it which R&B couldn’t muster: why else would there be a Rock ’n’ Roll Ice revue in New York? ‘There’s even a rock and roll64 type of cigarette commercial’, he concluded. ‘This one plugs Pall Mall cigarettes with a beat which bespeaks the sponsor’s understanding of the idiom.’ By June, an industry observer noted that ‘the real, full-time R&B65 record companies have displayed an inclination to go back to R&B-type material. Can this mean that rock and roll, the adulterated product, is being surrendered to the country and pop performers?’