Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  All American music of the era was regarded indiscriminately by the Communist regimes as ‘jazz’ or ‘rock ’n’ roll’. But the USA was big enough to encompass a dozen different trends simultaneously – some emerging organically from within, others imposed by Tin Pan Alley and the publishers’ enclave of the Brill Building.fn14 A persistent motif throughout the mid-1950s was American folklore, from ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ in 1955 (a TV theme which inspired a rich trade in Davy Crockett hats and dolls) to ‘The Battle of New Orleans’ and ‘Tom Dooley’. The latter, by the Kingston Trio, helped to maintain a commercial revival in folk music which would survive into the mid-1960s, until it was smothered by more vivid contemporary material from writers such as Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton.fn15 The Kingston Trio were pursued by such imitators as the Brothers Four and the Limeliters, while Joan Baez and Odetta adopted a more reverent attitude towards traditional material. With America perceiving itself under constant threat at home and abroad, ballads about its past – mythical or otherwise – provided a reassuring sense of continuity.

  Another menace, the persistence of rock ’n’ roll, prompted the music business to act in concert. Decisions about popular taste could not be left to the vagaries of public opinion. A British pundit broke the news in February 1957: ‘Experts say the latest craze77 – despite Bill Haley – will last at most another year. The preparations are already being made to start off the new trend. In Britain, it will be “sweet” music: smooth, tranquil, something to dance cheek to cheek to. In America, the decision has been made to try West Indian Calypso beat … Already [vaudeville veteran] Sophie Tucker is presenting herself as “the Calypso Mamma”, and new records by Harry Belafonte will be given a big push.’ As an American trade paper confirmed, ‘all of a sudden the business78 is interested in songs with a calypso beat’, especially those facets of the business which were orchestrating the trend. Soon Harry Belafonte LPs, as yet unissued in Britain, were being sold under the counter in London stores. It was, said a London newspaper, ‘Calypsomania79’.

  Twenty years had passed since the earliest attempts to market calypso to audiences in Britain and America; and nearly forty since the style had first been recorded in Trinidad. But its origins could be traced beyond the Caribbean to the West African tradition of kaiso, a word of encouragement shouted by slaves who communicated in song while they laboured. In the twentieth century, it was carnival music in Trinidad, improvised in the streets or delivered by professional singers in large tents. Like rap, it depended on verbal dexterity rather than musical originality; it carried political unrest, subversive humour, bawdiness and proud nationalism into places conventional media could never reach. By 1939, Trinidad was staging national calypso contests. Several of the prime contenders for the prize, such as Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener, joined the flow of West Indians to Britain on the Windrush in 1948. Beginner delighted newsmen at the dockside by apparently ad-libbing ‘London is the Place for Me’, although he had written it before the trip. Thereafter calypso found its way into British culture via unexpected routes – translated into skiffle, when Johnny Duncan recorded the 1950 Trinidadian hit ‘Last Train to San Fernando’; cross-fertilised with jazz, as Britain’s small cabal of bop musicians found employment on such records as ‘Kitch’s Bebop Calypso’; even adopted by British satirists, when comedian Lance Percival delivered a calypso commentary on recent events in BBC TV’s That Was the Week That Was. (In Paris, meanwhile, a calypso variant had been introduced by Henri Salvador, from French Guiana, who was later persuaded to write some of the earliest French rock ’n’ roll songs – a sin for which he never forgave himself.)

  In Hollywood, there had been a spate of rock ’n’ roll exploitation films, almost all of which (The Girl Can’t Help It aside) revolved round a single plot, and offered the same moral: those rock ’n’ roll kids aren’t as bad as they seem. Calypso was next, with movies such as Calypso Heat Wave, Calypso Joe and Bop Girl Goes Calypso. The last of these starred ‘Route 66’ songwriter Bobby Troup as a psychology professor researching ‘Mass Hysteria, and What Makes It Tick’. To demonstrate his thesis, he persuades a female ‘bop’ singer (rock ’n’ roll, not jazz) to convert to the calypso craze. ‘Here we go again80’, wrote Barry Ulanov in Down Beat magazine. ‘Another fad, another fashion … carefully organised spontaneity … the next precisely plotted wave of popular music … yesterday’s rock ’n’ roll hollerers become today’s banana hoofers … It’s extraordinary that year after year, decade after decade, the beautifully polished machinery of manufactured spontaneous combustion can be set in motion in our popular culture without any protest.’ Ulanov concluded: ‘If a whole country can be such a pushover for a song and dance, what does that suggest about that same nation’s political susceptibilities?’

  Even Harry Belafonte, the putative leader of the calypso wave, was sceptical: ‘Calypso is going to become81 a caricature of itself once the fast-buck guys hop on the bandwagon.’ Already a noted performer in several Hollywood ‘issue’ movies, the half-Jamaican, half-Martiniquan club singer explored what would now be called ‘world music’. ‘Elvis was interpreting82 one kind of black music – rhythm and blues’, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘while I found my inspiration in black folk songs, spirituals and calypso, and also in African music.’ His 1956 LP Calypso spent seven months at the top of the American charts, and included two songs that became instant pop standards: ‘Jamaica Farewell’ and ‘Day-O’ (alias the ‘Banana Boat Song’). Belafonte vetoed the record company’s original artwork: ‘The first mock-ups I saw83 had me with a big bunch of bananas superimposed on my head. I looked like Carmen Miranda in drag, only in bare feet, with a big toothy grin, as if I were saying, “Come to dee islands!”’ His subsequent releases touched upon a variety of American and Caribbean folk traditions, leading one British critic to describe him as ‘the greatest musical sensation84 of the century’. Belafonte would offer Bob Dylan early exposure in the recording studio, and become an enduring symbol of the civil-rights struggle.

  Those singers who did not follow Belafonte into calypso attempted to turn rock ’n’ roll rhythms to their own devices, often to engaging effect, as with Guy Mitchell’s ‘Crazy With Love’ and Andy Williams’s ‘Baby Doll’. Williams also tried (at 29) to masquerade as a teenage pop idol, though he was undercut by 26-year-old film star Tab Hunter with the lighter-than-air country tune ‘Young Love’. The authentic article arrived in February 1957 in the shape of 17-year-old Tommy Sands, the first in a long succession of clean-cut, unthreatening young Americans who could muster a jog-trot if required but were more comfortable with a romantic ballad. His successors ranged from Rebel Without a Cause actor Sal Mineo, who simply couldn’t sing, to Ricky Nelson, whose cover of Fats Domino’s ‘I’m Walkin’’ revealed an intuitive feel for rock ’n’ roll which would ensure him a lengthy career. As if to acknowledge these younger contenders, Elvis Presley softened his style to match them, restraining both his sexuality and his guitarists on ‘All Shook Up’. When he returned with the razor-edged ‘Jailhouse Rock’, it sounded positively menacing alongside the jauntiness of Frankie Avalon and Paul Anka.

  In a singles market now focused on teenagers and their younger siblings, little shots of adrenaline were available in every imaginable flavour. During 1958, nobody knew what would sell, and novelty was all, much of it apparently pulled straight from the pages of Mad magazine – speeded-up vocals on ‘Witch Doctor’ and ‘Purple People Eater’ (and a Joe South song in which the two monsters met); horror rock (‘Dinner With Drac’); street-corner hoodlum harmonies (‘At the Hop’); biker fantasies (‘Bad Motorcycle’); Latin instrumentals (‘Tequila’); rock ’n’ roll phone calls (‘Chantilly Lace’) and parental lectures (‘Yakety Yak’); rock ’n’ roll mythology (‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘All American Boy’); raw sexuality (‘Fever’, ‘I Got Stung’); and guidebooks for teenage etiquette in which sex was definitely taboo (the ultra-conservative ‘Teen Commandments’, No. 4 insisting: ‘At the first moment, turn aw
ay from unclean thinking’). The Everly Brothers charted the turmoil of teen romance, from the trembling seduction of ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’ to the curfew-busting ‘Wake Up Little Susie’. The Chordettes even brokered the first stirrings of feminism, on ‘A Girl’s Work is Never Done’. And amidst all this teenage mayhem, there was 42-year-old Frank Sinatra, like a dad who had forgotten he was hosting his daughter’s party and had invited the boys around for a hand of poker.

  There were two men who could have pulled off that embarrassment with style, because even in their 20s they were plotting how to translate teen appeal into a career. Bobby Darin started out as a novelty rock ’n’ roller, one of the host who annoyed Jerry Lee Lewis so much: ‘All they played was them Bobbys85 – Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin. If your name was Bobby, you were in with a sporting chance.’ (Not making illegal wedding vows with your 13-year-old cousin helped, of course.) He seemed no more substantial than Fabian, a 15-year-old who – like the hero of Stan Freberg’s ‘The Old Payola Roll Blues’ – was signed for his looks and scored several hits without being able to sing a note. Time magazine called Fabian ‘the tuneless terror86’. But, as Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun recalled, Bobby Darin ‘was a person87 with great ambition and endless vision. He could see no limit to his potential. He wanted to be a bit of everything. He wanted to be a rock and roller, he wanted to be a pop singer in the mode of Sinatra and Dean Martin, he wanted to be a folk singer.’ From ‘Splish Splash’ and ‘Plain Jane’ he switched to ‘Mack the Knife’, swinging as hard as Sinatra – and taking the teenagers with him. ‘Nearly everything I do88 is part of a master plan to make me the most important entertainer in the world’, he revealed. He moved swiftly from rock ’n’ roll package tours to wearing a tuxedo in Las Vegas, where Jerry Lewis told him: ‘Do you realise you89’re alone in your generation? Sammy, Dean and I are all ten years ahead of you. Unless you destroy yourself, no one else can touch you.’ He suggested a future in which swing and standards might be the final destination for every first-rank rock ’n’ roller; and had Elvis Presley followed suit, and spent the 1960s with the Cole Porter songbook rather than his inane film soundtracks, Darin might have seemed like a pioneer rather than a maverick.

  In Britain, the nearest equivalent to Darin was Anthony Newley – less convincing as an Elvis or a Sinatra, but (like Darin) a first-rate actor with (unlike Darin) a touch of comic genius, a schooling in music hall and the ability to write West End musicals and enduring standards. His early records oozed personality and cockney humour, satirising the very medium he was exploiting. By 1962 he was arguably the world’s most versatile pop performer, with the potential to reassemble the all-ages audience of his youth, which had been shattered into distinct adult and teenage fragments. But in a field increasingly dominated by the mercurial demands of the young, that was a dream even Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra couldn’t hope to fulfil.

  * * *

  fn1 What these parents wouldn’t have realised was that Presley’s heartfelt ambition before his rise to fame was to join a gospel quartet. Not that even they were immune to suggestions of immorality: his favourites were the Statesmen, whose bass singer, ‘Big Chief’ Wetherington, wiggled and shook himself in a frankly profane manner while delivering songs of salvation.

  fn2 Little Richard provided the theme song for the brilliant rock ’n’ roll movie satire The Girl Can’t Help It in 1956. Princess Margaret went incognito with friends to a screening at the Carlton Cinema in London’s Haymarket. ‘Her enthusiasm was so keen9’, Fleet Street reported joyously, ‘that a quarter of the way through the film she took off her shoes and waved her stockinged feet in the air.’ The British public must have been relieved to learn that her cousin, 19-year-old Princess Alexandra, ‘has stood well aloof10 from the more eccentric parties being given by the “rock ’n’ roll set”’.

  fn3 As proof that it was not the song, the tempo or the echo that sold the record, but Presley’s animal magnetism, compare his recording with the cover by the man who became known as ‘the Japanese Elvis Presley’, Kazuya Kosaka.

  fn4 St Louis was often furthest removed from national tastes. When Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was No. 1 on the East and West coasts in 1965, it didn’t make the St Louis Top 40. By contrast, Bob Kuban’s ‘The Cheater’ reached the summit of the city’s chart in 1966, a full month before it appeared on the national Hot 100 listing.

  fn5 Another correspondent watched teenage girls dancing on the 1957 pop show 6.5 Special, and wrote: ‘I feel thoroughly disgusted37 to think that the powers that be give time to exhibitions such as these. I cannot imagine that any decent-minded girl would permit herself to be pulled around in such a way.’

  fn6 Young women with no surname were in vogue across Europe: Germany’s hottest teen stars of the late 1950s included Conny (15 at the time of her first hit), 12-year-old Gabriele and 9-year-old Brigitte, dubbed ‘Die Kleine’ like ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder. France boasted Sheila; Spain had Gelu; Italy’s favourite was Mina; and Denmark offered Gitte. But the most potent female star of the era was allowed two names: Rita Pavone, from Italy, the local equivalent to America’s Brenda Lee.

  fn7 In 1961, France had suffered its own rock ’n’ roll riots. ‘Fans ripped out47 over 2,000 seats,’ one reporter noted as Vince Taylor played the Palais des Sports, ‘wrenched water pipes from the wall and fought among themselves.’

  fn8 Other folklorists spent the decade documenting the ‘authentic’ local music of the African continent, discovering to their chagrin that where a community had been exposed to a wind-up gramophone, native singers were as likely to offer them a Jimmie Rodgers tune or an operatic aria as anything that had been passed down from their forefathers.

  fn9 Those who found Weedon’s Guide beyond them could opt for the Dial-A-Chord, a plastic device which required no more musical skill than the ability to flick a plastic wheel. Historians might like to compare Play in a Day with Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), which was also published in response to the enthusiasm for amateur music-making, although the instrument of choice in the late sixteenth century was the lute, not the guitar.

  fn10 Time magazine suggested that ‘a decade of simple-minded62 children’s records has conditioned today’s teen-agers to their infatuation with equally simple-minded rock ’n’ roll’.

  fn11 The explosion of noise which opens his second guitar solo on Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’ is perhaps the definitive expression of rock ’n’ roll. Moore admitted that he was never able to reproduce it.

  fn12 There was also a range of Elvis Presley lipsticks on sale, with a choice of colours: Cruel Red, Tender Pink and of course Hound Dog Orange.

  fn13 The cockney comedian Tommy Trinder capitalised on the furore when he opened a church fete in Southend a few days after Lewis had left the country. ‘Sorry we couldn’t get Jerry70 Lee Lewis to open the fete,’ he wisecracked, ‘but unfortunately his wife is teething.’

  fn14 The Brill Building is at 1619 Broadway, Manhattan; in fact, many of the era’s hit songwriters, such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin, were housed across the street at the Aldon office in 1650 Broadway.

  fn15 This fad had its equivalent in West Germany, where the first LP to sell 100,000 copies was a collection of sailors’ ballads by the mellow-voiced pop star Freddy Quinn. He had earlier tried to masquerade as a Mexican in a vain attempt to secure stardom in the US.

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  ON 17 OCTOBER 1961, more than 30,000 Algerians and other North Africans gathered in Paris to protest against a police curfew which had been imposed upon their ethnic grouping. The demonstration was part of the National Liberation Front’s campaign to free Algeria from French colonial rule. The French authorities responded with a ferocity which ensured that this would be remembered as one of the grimmest days in the nation’s modern history. 10,000 people were arrested and detained before they could join the march; as many again were dispersed by riot police. But several th
ousand marched through central Paris by the River Seine – to be met with baton charges and live ammunition. As many as 200 Algerians are believed to have died that day, of bullet wounds or drowning, after being forced into the river.

  Approximately 6,000 prisoners were held in the Palais des Sports arena, where many were randomly taken to the dressing rooms to be beaten and tortured with electric batons. But after three days, prisoners and interrogators had to move elsewhere, so that Ray Charles could begin a week of appearances in the venue. Charles was, according to his record company, a genius, with an uncanny ability to channel the emotions of his audience into his music. ‘The same match that burns3 you burns me’, he explained. ‘The things I write and sing about concern the average Joe and his general problems.’ It’s not clear whether he ever learned what atrocities had occurred in his concert hall; or whether the febrile atmosphere captured on a live album that week was coloured by the echoes of brutality and anguish. There were protests by students after several of his shows – not because police had murdered and tortured peaceful demonstrators, but because Ray Charles had dared to insert ballads into a repertoire which they had hoped would contain nothing but rock ’n’ roll.

  Ray Charles was widely seen as the international representative of a musical movement which had assumed ideological proportions: a cultural shift that combined rhythm and blues music with the crusade for equality and civil rights. ‘There is in the music4 a new racial pride,’ said the African-American magazine Ebony in 1961, ‘a celebration of ties to Africa and a defiant embrace of the honky-tonk, the house-rent party and people who say “dis here” and “dat here” – an embrace, in short, of all that middle-class America condemns. Martin Luther King Jr is in the new music too, and Little Rock’, where troops had been required to assist nine black students as they enrolled at the city’s Central High School in 1957. The name of this politically charged, culturally radical music? Soul.