Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As early as January 1955, disc jockeys in the country and western market were complaining that their artists were expending too much effort on trying to appeal to R&B fans. ‘Suddenly [in 1954]66 we were deluged with records by country music artists that were not country music,’ said Randy Blake, ‘gosh-awful, brazen attempts, at something these artists can’t do and never will be able to do.’ They were acting out of desperation, and the will to survive. A year later, the hillbilly singer Carl Perkins saw his debut hit, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, rise to the top of the American charts in three sales categories: Pop, Country and Western, and Rhythm and Blues. As Billboard noted: ‘The continued merging67 of the country & western, pop and rhythm & blues fields into one big “mongrel music” category is more evident than ever.’ Country singer Bill Haley had ignited this flame; then a young man ten years his junior threw gasoline on the fire.

  * * *

  fn1 His career faltered when it was revealed that – having lost his voice after excessive dieting – he had mimed to records when performing ‘live’ on CBS-TV’s Shower of Stars show.

  fn2 You could also make a case for Louis Jordan prefiguring the art of the rapper with late 1947’s ‘Look Out’. And check out the ska rhythm on Jordan’s ‘Salt Pork, West Virginia’. It would almost be possible to build the musical history of the next three decades out of his 1940s catalogue alone.

  fn3 Aware that jazz had altered beyond recognition since 1917, Down Beat magazine launched a competition in the early 1950s for readers to name the music’s modern incarnation. The winner? ‘Crewcut’; the polar opposite, one must suppose, to the stuffy ‘long-hairs’ of the classical world. Needless to say, nobody ever referred to ‘crewcut music’.

  fn4 The earliest British release of a white rock ’n’ roll song was a cover of ‘Crazy Man, Crazy’ by that veteran of Ted Heath’s band, Lita Roza. It’s worth hearing today as a demonstration that it is impossible for a record to swing if it’s sung by someone with her arms clamped rigidly to her sides.

  fn5 In Pittsburgh, a gentleman named Joe Bruno vowed to live in a tree until rock ’n’ roll had died out: ‘If we are going back51 to the days of chimps and apes, I might as well get in on the top floor and live like one.’ He proved to be a songwriter, frustrated because rock ’n’ roll was selling and his songs weren’t.

  1, 2

  WHEN 19-YEAR-OLD Elvis Presley issued his first single for Sun Records in August 1954, the label’s office manager Marion Keisker admitted: ‘The odd thing about it3 is that both sides seem to be equally popular on popular, race and folk record programmes. This boy has something that seems to appeal to everybody.’ The national Country and Western charts were the first to carry his name, followed nearly a year later by the Pop and Rhythm and Blues listings. His entry on the country best-sellers chart in 1955 was not a honky-tonk two-step or hillbilly ballad, but a cover of a black R&B tune on which Presley stuttered and hiccupped like one of the dancing frogs that his future manager Colonel Tom Parker used to tout as an exhibit around the country fairs.

  Presley wasn’t the first young white man to be heralded for crossing into the R&B bracket: a few weeks before his initial Sun session, a 19-year-old named Pat Boone had seen his own debut, ‘Loving You Madly’, covered for the pop market by Alan Dale, because Boone’s version was thought by disc jockeys to be only suitable for R&B stations. (Sixty years on, any blues influences on Boone’s single are difficult to trace, though his slightly later ‘Tra La La’ fits the bill.) But Presley’s Sun release combined a country tune (a hopped-up version of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass hit, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’) with a cover of Arthur Crudup’s late 1946 blues song, ‘That’s All Right’. The Monroe side broke first, but it was the Crudup cover that inspired Memphis teenagers to greet each other with Elvis’s scat vocal riff – just as jazz fans had done with Louis Armstrong’s ‘Heebie Jeebies’ twenty-five years earlier. ‘His style is both country4 and R&B, and he can appeal to pop’, said Billboard prophetically in November 1954.

  Bill Haley’s Comets moved like vaudeville troupers, echoing stage tricks they’d learned from swing bands – the saxophonist lying on the floor during solos, Haley and his guitarist nearly colliding in their gawky enthusiasm – while Haley was pudgy, balding and no one’s idea of a teen idol. Presley, by comparison, was lean, quiffed, and jerked himself around the stage like a backstreet stripper. Haley may have made his British fans feel as if nothing else mattered, but when Presley performed in front of girls in 1954 and 1955, there was only one agenda – sex, right now, hard, fast and dirty. No singer had ever gyrated his hips and pumped his groin like that in public before. If a black man had done the same in front of a mid-1950s white audience, he’d have been lynched. As far as many adults were concerned, Presley deserved a similar fate.

  Rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll – they already held the triple threat of noise, violence and (in the parlance of the times) Negro origins. With Elvis Presley, the trio became a quartet, and the fourth member was the most dangerous of all. Sexual desire had been implicit in the relationship between performers, black and white, and their audiences as far back as Rudy Vallee – and certainly when Sinatra was at the Paramount in 1942, even if it was disguised as an innocent romantic infatuation. The hints of sexual innuendo on 1930s jazz and blues records had become lurid declarations of lust by the 1940s and 50s. White parents wouldn’t have trusted their daughters with the likes of Louis Jordan or Wynonie Harris, certainly; but such an encounter existed only in the depths of their nightmares. Now here was a boy – from the wrong side of the tracks, to judge by his clothes and his deep-country voice – who might conceivably have rolled up outside their house, in a Cadillac convertible, to steal their innocent teenage virgin for a date and then delivered her home besmirched, violated, ruined (but with a secret smile on her face).fn1

  Nor was Presley alone. Between 1955 and 1957, a succession of ever more alien beings appeared on national TV networks and in mainstream Hollywood films, each one representing his own moral and musical assault on traditional values. First there was Bo Diddley, black and cropped and bespectacled and almost as rectangular as his guitar, thrashing out a rhythm that sounded like a voodoo ceremony. His version of its origins was suitably obscure: ‘I’d say it was a mixed-up5 rhythm: blues, and Latin American, and some hillbilly, a little spiritual, a little African, and a little West Indian calypso … and if I wanna start yodelling in the middle of it, I can do that too.’ He appeared during a rare R&B segment on Ed Sullivan’s top-rated TV variety show, where the producer instructed him to perform a cover of the sedate country hit ‘Sixteen Tons’, set up cue cards by the cameras so he couldn’t get it wrong, and instead watched in horror as Bo delivered his own theme tune. ‘Man, maybe that was6 “Sixteen Tons” on those cards,’ Diddley said afterwards, ‘but all I saw was “Bo Diddley”.’

  Chuck Berry was an ex-convict (future convict, too, as the subject of a long procession of spurious police busts in the late 1950s), as old as Haley, with a sly grin on his face which betokened evil intentions, and a line in lyric-writing which mixed beat poetry with schoolyard slang. He held his guitar like a phallus, tossed off solos as if he was shelling peanuts, and hit all of young America’s obsessions head-on – cars, consumerism, romance, teachers, parents, every kind of monkey business. Then – and we are still in 1955 – adult America had to face a semi-crippled black man sporting pancake face-paint, with a pompadour almost as tall as his body, and an unstoppable predilection for screaming and hollering what sounded, even to teenagers, like gibberish. But what gibberish: Little Richard was speaking in tongues to the congregation of rock ’n’ roll, his nonsense syllables and scenarios piling up into an alternative prayer book for the satanic hordes – tutti frutti all rootie, good golly miss molly, long tall sally she knows how to ball, ooo my soul, a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom. ‘How can I reject it7, when I can’t even understand it?’, said a censor for NBC-TV, on hearing Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ for the first ti
me. A reviewer in the New Musical Express was equally overcome: ‘His antics and appearance8 reminded me of an animated golliwog – and I don’t mean that in any way disparagingly.’fn2

  These men had gathered up all the imprecations and implications of the original black rock ’n’ roll, blended them into a hot gumbo, added some teenage spice (lust of adolescent girl, swagger of pubescent boy) and then aimed them at anyone who would listen. It’s doubtful that any of them imagined at the outset that their audience (or at least a sizeable portion of it) would be white; or, more pertinently, that it would be whites rather than their own race who would keep their music and their careers alive, greeting them as authentic folk heroes long after their appeal to the African-American R&B audience had dissipated.

  Once Elvis Presley had left Sun Records, with its limited span across the South, and signed to RCA, with its national clout, he was ready to trump Haley and all the black princes of rock ’n’ roll. Journalists compared him to Johnnie Ray (‘with cowboy boots11’) until it was clear that his popularity and potency outstripped all his predecessors. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was the record that gift-wrapped his sexuality for a global audience. Swathed in echo, it slowed his natural exuberance to an eerie crawl, which was both more threatening – and more erotic – than the frenetic rockers which followed. It suggested nothing less than a slow grind in a back alley; his young fans may not have been able to imagine the scenario, but they could imagine how it would feel.fn3 A paper in Minneapolis called him a ‘young bump and grind12 artist’, and noted that his fans didn’t seem to care that when they were screaming for him, they couldn’t hear him sing. ‘If the future is important13 [for him]’, a disc jockey commented, ‘Elvis will have to drop the “hootchy-kootchy” gyrations, or end up as “Pelvis” Presley in circus sideshows and burlesque.’ After he performed in Jacksonville, Florida, preachers held special services, as if to exorcise the town, while concerned teenagers prayed that his soul would overcome his ‘spiritual degeneracy’. ‘If he did that in the street14’, said an Oakland policeman after a Presley show, ‘we’d arrest him.’

  Not all white rock ’n’ rollers were so threatening. A New York psychologist attempted to find an erotic message in Carl Perkins’s breakthrough hit: ‘I think that there is some15 sexual component in this, that the blue suede shoes represent something that has not been tried yet by the adolescent.’ But Perkins’s backwoods style and prematurely adult demeanour (by late 1956 he already carried the burden of the alcoholism that would blight his life for the next decade) diminished his threat to the status quo. Much more alarming was the leather-clad, clearly troubled Gene Vincent, a survivor of the Korean War and a life-threatening motorcycle crash. On his tension-fuelled hit, ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, Vincent (said the Daily Mirror) ‘sounds as if his mouth16 is stuffed with lettuce’, though the pent-up violence and ill-disguised sexual rapaciousness of his music suggested he’d been fed on raw steak. Most devilish of all the rock ’n’ rollers (to this day) was Jerry Lee Lewis, who’d been thrown out of Bible college for setting hymns to a boogie-woogie beat, had been married three times but only divorced once, had a bride who was several years below the age of consent in many countries and most American states, wore a grin of preternatural self-satisfaction, and didn’t so much suggest sexual conquest as slap it on top of his piano and then wiggle it in the face of his audience.

  All these acts were available to American audiences on package tours or at Alan Freed spectaculars. In 1955, almost all the acts on rock ’n’ roll shows were black. Through 1956, an occasional white act infiltrated the R&B vocal groups, crooners and rhythm specialists, but most of Presley’s peers followed his course through country and western packages or on variety bills. By 1957, some rock bills were entirely white; others included a token black man or two, usually Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, but were now being headlined by one of the white pretenders who were emerging from every label and city in America. As a music expert from a Russian cultural magazine commented, the nation was now awash with ‘a vulgar, unmelodic17 cacophony of sounds accompanied by crazy, chaotic drum playing. The soloist merely yells disconnected sounds into the microphone.’

  Similar reactions were reported from adults who strayed across the US radio dial and tuned in to one of the frequencies offering the nation’s hottest new format: the Top 40. Around 1949, radio station KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska had been one of the first outlets to impose playlists on its presenters. The aim was maximum listenership: by avoiding records which weren’t already popular, KOWH lowered the risk that someone might be confronted by an unfamiliar tune, and go elsewhere for their entertainment. In 1955, the station changed hands, and the new owners fine-tuned its philosophy. All day, every day, with few exceptions, KOWH would play nothing but the Top 40 records in Omaha, as determined by a mixture of local sales and persuasive marketing from record company pluggers. Within a year, their innovation was being imitated across North America. The contents of the Top 40 might vary from city to city,fn4 but the formula remained unchanged. Record producer Mitch Miller complained that pop radio had sold out to ‘bobby-soxers and baby sitters18’, but the ratings spoke more persuasively. For every adult who turned the dial in disgust, two teenagers tuned in, happy to know that they would hear nothing but the hottest, hippest records of the moment. As one commentator reflected, stations were now ‘at the mercy of the taste19 of the populace’; a dictatorship of the commercial, which removed maverick, taste-forming DJs such as Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips from the equation. Rock ’n’ roll had found its perfect radio format – at the expense of the men who had first brought it to national attention.

  I don’t like [Presley’s] work20 and neither will, I feel, the vast majority of our listening public.

  British bandleader Jack Payne, 1956

  It is deplorable21. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the Negro’s revenge.

  The Daily Mail reviews rock ’n’ roll, September 1956

  In 1960, one of Decca’s representatives in London let slip a trade secret: ‘We certainly do our best22 to discourage our top American artists from singing in public over here. What happens is this: while British singers build up their prestige on the stage, the Americans start so big – they have been built up into such fabulous characters – that when they come over here and appear in the flesh it’s a big disillusion. The fans see they’re only human beings after all.’

  American rock ’n’ rollers, black and white, were indeed an almost mythical species in the Britain of 1956. Their fans had no opportunity to see the likes of Bill Haley or Bo Diddley in person; nor were they witness to the controversial early television appearances by Elvis Presley. Their conception of rock ’n’ roll was based on records, publicity hype, and the staged cameo performances visible in films such as Rock Around the Clock and Presley’s debut, Love Me Tender. But on Boxing Day that year, American idol Pat Boone arrived in the UK. He had been the second rock ’n’ roller, after Haley, to reach the British charts, though his cover of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ (unlike his earlier US hit with ‘Two Hearts’) had offered only a vague facsimile of the original, as if glimpsed through frosted glass. It was Boone’s misfortune to be required to tackle two of Little Richard’s most chaotic anthems, and his ‘Long Tall Sally’ suggested that his notion of fun extended no further than snoozing in a rocking chair. ‘It just sounded so raw23’, he recalled, ‘that it was like asking me to jump into the middle of a Zulu dance.’ Boone was, by contrast, an expert balladeer, more controlled than Crosby, more relaxed than Bennett or Sinatra, and he has been unfairly pilloried for his crimes against rock ’n’ roll when he was merely attempting to translate raw exuberance into genteel family entertainment.

  In Britain, he took the stage in ‘a light sports jacket24 and dark grey pants’, his white shoes the only diversion from his college-boy persona. But his repertoire, howe
ver restrained his delivery, was pure rock, borrowing from Haley and Presley as well as his own catalogue, as if he realised that he was being asked to fulfil a nation’s need for their presence as well as his. He mimicked none of Presley’s movements, however, allowing himself nothing more dramatic than a wave of his right arm (though only from the elbow). ‘You don’t have to do all that25 gyrating around’, he explained. ‘The kids will scream anyway.’ The New Musical Express declared that ‘His boyish freshness26 is a tremendous asset, and healthy advertisement for rock ’n’ roll’, although many fans would have preferred something less salubrious.

  They expected to get their chance when Bill Haley & His Comets arrived on these shores in February 1957. The Daily Mirror elected to cover his tour with the gravitas reserved for a royal visit, journalist Noel Whitcomb flying to New York so he could accompany Haley to Southampton by ocean liner. (Whitcomb’s expert knowledge was revealed as he recounted ‘the day when Bill27 accidentally plonked his guitar instead of plunking – and that compulsive backbeat of rock and roll was born’.) A train was hired to carry Haley, a British rock band and several hundred fans up to Waterloo, where the Mirror pronounced his tumultuous arrival ‘Fantabulous28’, and the competing Daily Express focused on ‘faces turned upwards29, crumpled in fear by now, the ecstasy gone … faces bewildered like faces in the panic scenes of Russian films; children tossed like jetsam in the swaying human tide’.

  A similar dichotomy was evident the following day. In the Mirror, Patrick Doncaster sounded transfigured: ‘They clowned, they fooled30, they gagged. The first burst of rock music blasted the place. Amplifiers on the stage emphasised each throbbing note. It hit you, bounced off the roof, and hit you again … It was a mood that had never hit a British stage before.’ If that was the stuff of every rock ’n’ roll fan’s fantasies, the Express heard only ‘weak wisecracks31 and scatterbrained gimmicks’. Then ‘the curtain came down to a storm of boos’, because the Comets had been on stage for only thirty minutes. Haley shared their frustration, and revealed that he ‘would like to do a two-hour32 rock ’n’ roll show – but it would just be physically impossible’. Only supreme physical fitness allowed him to play for as long as half an hour, based on a diet of ‘eight hours’ sleep each night AND good food AND a clean life’. Another reviewer offered the kindly note that ‘Bill looks and sounds exactly33 like the homespun fellow whom his fans have pictured in their minds’, while his performance was ‘as wholesome and forthright as a Billy Cotton Band Show’. This was not the spirit that had inspired seat-slashing and public revelry the previous year. Neither did the one-man percussive bedrock of the Comets resemble the reinforced thrust of their records. The reality of rock ’n’ roll – not for the last time – did not resemble its fantasy.