Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  The sordid hipsters of America

  OR PERHAPS NOT. Indeed, it seemed that no one had informed Life magazine’s own editors, who two weeks previously had run an article about trendy young matador El Cordobés, accompanied by the headline ‘The Beatnik of the Bull Ring (“He wears his hair long, appears in jeans, speaks in slang. . .”)’. The word beatnik itself is a rare example of a slang term whose origin can be precisely dated and explained. The Beat Generation – deriving from the jazz musician’s slang word beat, meaning tired or exhausted – themselves had been floating around in various forms since the late 1940s; their name came to wider public attention with the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road in 1957. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Gilbert Millstein called it ‘the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat”, and indeed, the novel itself contained a passage which spoke of ‘the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining’. The following year, however, the spectre of the beatnik reared its much-publicised head, courtesy of a writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen, who, on 2 April 1958, sent the term out into the world via his column, deriving the latter part of his made-up word from the recently launched Russian space satellite, Sputnik. As he later told Chronicle journalist Jesse Hamlin, ‘To my amazement, it caught on immediately. The Examiner had a headline the following day about a beatnik murder. I ran into Kerouac that night at El Matador. He was mad. He said, “You’re putting us down and making us sound like jerks. I hate it. Stop using it.”’

  Perhaps Kerouac had a premonition of the way the next couple of years were to be played out in the media. In music, films, on television, in books and magazines, a veritable avalanche of bongo-tormenting, guitar-strumming, poetry-reciting beatniks invaded the popular consciousness. As far as the general public was concerned, this sudden outbreak of beardy-weirdies was mostly a subject for ridicule, tinged with a certain amount of jealousy on account of the numerous stories of jazz-themed orgies supposedly taking place in dark beatnik cellars. Jack Kerouac put out an LP himself in 1959, Poetry for the Beat Generation, reciting his words over a jazz piano backing, but it was a crowded market, and he found himself competing against up-tempo swingers like ‘Bongo Beating Beatnik’ by Joe Hall & the Corvettes (1959), ‘Beatnik Girl’ by the Bi-Tones (1960) or the hit instrumentar ‘Beatnik Fly’ by Johnny & the Hurricanes (1960). Closest to home was the satirical song ‘The Beat Generation’ (1959), by Bob McFadden and Dor. The latter name concealed real-life folk singer and beat poet Rod McKuen, and both of them lived long enough to see punk pioneer Richard Hell use their song as the inspiration for his era-defining single ‘Blank Generation’ (1975).

  Tomorrow Is Dragsville, Cats

  WITH A PREDICTABLE EYE for a sales opportunity, in 1959 Hollywood released a film brilliantly entitled The Beatniks, and another called, yes, you’ve guessed it, The Beat Generation, Reinforcing the jazz connection, publicity material for the latter included photos of ‘beatnik favourite Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong playing his famed trumpet in a “beatnik” hangout’, singing the title song of the film. Cream of the celluloid crop, however, was a 1958 film aimed squarely at the rocking fraternity, High School Confidential, whose opening title sequence featured none other than Jerry Lee Lewis belting out the song of the same name to an audience of real gone teens from the back of a flat-bed truck. Large sections of the film are conducted in hep slang, as the music-crazy school students fall prey to an ambitious teenage drug dealer, and are much given to sayings like ‘in the bread department I am nowhere’ (I’m broke) or ‘I’m looking to graze on some grass’ (I want to buy some marijuana). One of many highlights is a beatnik club scene in which Phillipa Fallon as a beat poetess recites a veritable dictionary’s-worth of hep phrases over a jazz backing (‘Tomorrow is dragsville, cats, tomorrow is a kingsize drag’). This fine performance, with lyrics written by Mel Welles, was released as a 45 rpm single by MGM records that year, backed by another excerpt from the film, in which John Drew Barrymore explains the story of Christopher Columbus entirely in hep-speak to a classroom of studs and gassers (boys and girls). Meanwhile, West Coast jazz fans could slip into a comfortable toga and relax to the righteous sounds of an LP entitled Romesville (1959), featuring Rafael ‘Googie’ René and a starry cast of players such as Earl Palmer and Plas Johnson laying down the beat on tunes such as ‘Caesar’s Pad’ and ‘Cool It At The Coliseum’ (sic). What further worlds could the jazz-crazy beatnik vibe now conquer?

  The answer, perhaps not surprisingly, was revealed to primary-school-age readers of a 1960 edition of the Popeye comic called ‘Poopdeck Goes Beatnik’, in which the spinach-hungry sailor’s ninety-nine-year-old father, Poopdeck Pappy, opens a nightclub for the beards-and-beret set in the cellar of Popeye’s house, with signs in the garden reading ‘Pappy-O’s Pad Party’ and ‘Welcome All Kool Cats’, For a time, Pappy drives the hepcats wild in the basement by reciting nursery rhymes, which the assembled throng of blown minds take to be beat poetry (‘Li’l Bo Peep lorst her crazy sheep. . .’), but when his son evicts him, marches down the street brandishing placards which read ‘Me Son Is A Square’, ‘Popeye Don’t Dig It’ and ‘He’s Like Wasted’. It had taken just two short years from the invention of the name and Kerouac’s complaint that ‘you’re putting us down and making us sound like jerks’ to the whole scene being held up for ridicule to an audience of eight-year-olds – who were presumed to know already what a beatnik might be, or else the joke would have had no meaning.

  By this stage, a vast array of hip terms beloved of the jazz community had found their way, via popular music and then through many other forms of media, into all parts of the mainstream. As the sixties hove into view, a startling number of the words with which the supposed counterculture would identify itself were already so familiar to the unhip world that it is only a surprise that music’s avant-garde clung to them for as long as they did. Some of those words, old as they were, have nevertheless come to define the era, so that, for instance, the sound of the Mindbenders singing ‘Λ Groovy Kind Of Love’ (1966) seems like a quintessentially 1960s experience. Few of those hearing it on their radios that year, or since, were aware, not just of the word’s years of service as jazz terminology, but of its slang meaning in Victorian England, where it applied to someone stuck in a groove, or a rut – in short a square – defined thus in Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues (1890):

  GROOVY, Adj. – Settled in habit; limited in mind.

  NINE

  IT TAKES A RECORD

  COMPANY WITH MILLIONS

  TO PUSH US FORWARD

  Toppermost of the poppermost

  LISTENING TO POPULAR MUSIC RADIO STATIONS at almost any time over the past five decades, you could be forgiven for thinking that recording studios had only been invented circa 1960, because the music from any of the decades prior to that is so poorly represented. Anything earlier than the pop culture explosion which saw the emergence of Motown, Merseybeat, The Stones, Hendrix and James Brown has generally been presented in the media – and often regarded by the public – as ancient history, whereas the music of the 1960s era is still not sidelined in this way, despite now being half a century old. Hence a proportion of the slang which appears in those recordings also has a tendency to remain current, since each new generation is exposed to it. Many of those words were old even at the time, but what was new, however, was the sheer scale of the money to be made from riding the groovy bandwagon, to a place once sarcastically described by John Lennon as the toppermost of the poppermost.

  The potential scale of the revenue from all things fab and gear was not immediately apparent to everyone. Beatles manager Brian Epstein clearly had no idea of how much money could be made for the band from the wave of pop hysteria surrounding them, famously signing a merchandising deal which gave away an astonishing 90 per cent of the profits deriving from the avalanche of plastic guitars, badges, Beatle wigs and other spin-off
s that proceeded to sell in their millions. He, like most people in the music business, behaved as if none of this would last, but these days surviving members of certain 1960s bands are still touring stadiums, long accustomed to a country house and chauffeur-driven limousine lifestyle. They had the good fortune to arrive on the scene at precisely the moment when popular music and its language went thoroughly mainstream, and even the most staid parts of society began to pay lip-service to all things trendy and switched-on. The spread of the cult words of the new movement via radio, television, film and print media was fast and effective. To take just one example, when the Beach Boys sang about having good vibrations in 1966, it was simply a matter of time before a significant slice of the planet became aware of the phrase and its meaning.

  In the 1960s, words like groovy, mod, far out and swinging poured out of transistor radios and invaded numerous areas of everyday life, from adverts for cleaning powder to children’s shoes. There was serious money to be made – at least for some – and if you weren’t with it, you were probably already dead, man.

  Come rock and roll me over

  ONCE THE FIRST WAVE OF ROCK’N’ROLL broke through onto hit parades and radios around the world in the mid-1950s, its largely teenage fan base was exposed to a considerable amount of music-related slang. Sometimes it was simply a case of the title, such as when Detroit pop crooner Guy Mitchell’s single ‘Rock-A-Billy’ reached the No. 1 spot in Britain in May 1957, which would have been the first time that many UK music fans had encountered the word. Guy was essentially a middle-of-the-road entertainer, rather than a rocking wild-man, yet on this disc he used hip phrases like blow my fuse and go man go – the latter having gained international attention when Carl Perkins wrote and sang the original version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ (1956). By contrast, although Carl’s 45 was a pure-bred slice of Memphis rockabilly, most people in England would have simply called it rock’n’roll at the time.

  People had been singing about rocking and rolling in blues, jazz and then R&B records since the 1920s, generally as a slightly less X-rated way of referring to the time-honoured business of horizontal athletics. For several centuries prior to that, sailors had used the expression rock and roll to denote the action of a ship at sea – although it is also possible to read an earthier meaning into the words of the traditional shanty ‘Johnny Boker’, first quoted in the nautical memoir On Board the ‘Rocket’, by Captain Robert C. Adams (1879):

  Oh, do, my Johnny Boker,

  Come rock and roll me over,

  Do, my Johnny Boker, do.

  Back on dry land, in 1936 the Yorkshire Post gave notice of the following event, designed to raise money for Leeds Royal Infirmary:

  January 29 – ‘Rock and Roll,’ a revue presented by British Legion Women’s Section (Otley Branch), Mechanics’ Hall, Otley, 7.30 pm.

  At first sight, this seems remarkably advanced, but it appeared just as American vocal harmony trio the Boswell Sisters were enjoying a huge hit on both sides of the pond with a song called ‘Rock and Roll’ (recorded October 1934), which was mentioned in a 1935 Daily Express poll as one of the ten favourite popular songs among their readers, so the women of the Legion very likely named their revue after it. However, as the lyrics make clear, the rocking and rolling in question is once again the movement of a ship, and the Boswell Sisters promoted it with an appearance in the feature film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round (1934), a gangster tale set on an ocean liner, seated in a model rowing boat, and dressed in sailor suits.

  Dig that ocean motion

  IN BRITAIN, THE PHRASE ROCK AND ROLL as a term for describing the motion of the sea continued to occur every so often in newspaper reports of the 1940s and early 1950s, and as late as 1953 could be found in a report of two men who had so refreshed themselves at the bar in Victoria Station that they missed their train to Carshalton and woke up on the boat train instead, when ‘a steady rock and roll told [them] that something was wrong’. A year later, however, the phrase had a totally different meaning as far as the UK press and public were concerned, largely thanks to Bill Haley and His Comets. They first entered the UK charts in December 1954 with ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’, which had first been cut a few months earlier by legendary Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner. Turner’s original was full of double-entendre slang, some of which was toned down in the Haley version, but the band still left in the part in which the singer’s one-eyed cat (penis) was attracted by a nearby seafood store (vagina), which apparently escaped the attention of radio-station censors. Even so, it was clear from both recordings that this was a song about male–female relationships, whereas the subject of the first tune to use the title, Al Bernard’s entirely different ‘Shake Rattle & Roll’, released back in 1919, was gambling, and the shaking, rattling and rolling of a pair of dice.

  It was Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’, following close behind ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’ into the UK hit parade, which really put the slang word rock into worldwide parlance as a musical term. The song stayed only two weeks in the British charts, peaking at number seventeen, but then made a triumphant return ten months later after being used as the title music to the film Blackboard Jungle (1955), when it went all the way to number one. Fired with enthusiasm, the Daily Mirror immediately cast around for the next dance sensation, The Fish, which they judged ‘zany enough to start a craze’ in British dance halls – ‘As one musician said in awe when he watched the rocking-and-rolling throng below him: “Brother, dig that ocean motion!”’

  By July 1956, even the journalists at The Times deigned to notice the new phenomenon, and, with an air reminiscent of a BBC film crew making a documentary deep in the rain-forest, informed their readers that Bill Haley’s new film, Rock Around the Clock, ‘extols the virtues of “rock an’ roll”’, and portrays ‘American youth finding fulfilment in what seems to be a mingling of primitive dance and ritual’. By mid-September, the same paper was reporting that the film had been banned in ‘Birmingham, Belfast, Bristol, Liverpool, Carlisle, Bradford, Blackburn, Preston, Blackpool, Bootle, Brighton, Gateshead and South Shields’, suggesting that your chances of viewing it were severely diminished if you happened to live anywhere beginning with the letter B. They did have one enlightened message from the Oldham watch committee, who decided against a ban while nevertheless displaying the uncanny clairvoyance common to censors through the ages: ‘There is nothing wrong with the film. Although we have not seen it, we know all about it.’

  A different article in The Times that month put the blame for any problems associated with rock’n’roll mostly upon the new singing phenomenon, Elvis Presley, under the decidedly non-judgemental headline ‘US Scenes Recall “Jungle Bird House At The Zoo”’, However, their unnamed correspondent reporting from America seemed keen to assure readers that it would all be over by Christmas:

  But mercifully it is generally felt to be a passing fad like all the others, though many young people would no doubt like to lay their hands on the commentator who wrote in the Denver Post that ‘this hoody-doopy, oop-shoop, ootie-ootie, boom-boom-de-addy boom, scoobledy Goobley dump is trash’.

  Clearly, it was not just the sound, but the actual language of rock’n’roll that was getting up certain people’s noses.

  Gigging at the nuthouse

  IN 1957, ELVIS HAD A SMASH HIT with the single ‘All Shook Up’, one of twelve of his songs which reached the UK top thirty that year. The expression used in the title was hardly new – for instance, a character in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Captains Courageous (1897) utters the phrase ‘well, you was shook up and silly’ (although whether he was also acting wild as a bug the author does not record). However, the Presley song made enough of an impact that distinguished New York Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury chose to call his fine 1958 book-length study of American juvenile delinquency and gang culture The Shook-Up Generation. Based, as the publisher’s blurb explained, ‘on personal observation and talks with the youngsters in the candy stores, on the street corners, i
n the rock’n’roll hangouts where they spend a great part of their lives’, it featured a glossary of current slang terms, including the following:

  BOP To fight

  COOL IT! Take it easy!

  DIG IT! Get this!

  FISH An erotic dance similar to the burlesque house grind

  GIG A party

  PUNK OUT Display cowardice

  Jazz musicians had been calling their one-night engagements gigs for several decades by this stage. When Humphrey Lyttelton published his 1957 autobiography I Play as I Please – The Memoirs of an Old Etonian Trumpeter, he explained the term for the benefit of his less hep readers, while recalling his early live appearances at a club in Chelsea called The Nuthouse: ‘The “g” is hard as in “gag” . . . this is the slang expression for a single, one-night engagement as a member of a scratch band’.

  As slang, gig was old indeed. It appears in the Canting Crew dictionary of 1699, where it could be either a nose, or ‘a woman’s privities’. By the time of John Camden Hotten’s A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant & Vulgar Words (1859), a gig was simply listed as ‘fun, frolic, a spree’, which could also conceivably be had at a musical gathering of some kind, and is not far away at all from Salisbury’s New York street gang meaning of 1958. Where the juvenile delinquents and the jazz musicians of that decade would have parted company, of course, would be over the use of the word bop, and as for punk out, well, it was almost another two decades before punk would be in.

  Some 1950s slang has lasted the course, whereas other phrases failed to stay current. For example, in December 1954 Elvis stood in Sun Studio in Memphis and introduced the song ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’ with a few words to his fellow musicians, Scotty and Bill, suggesting they should all ‘get real, real gone for a change’. At the time, in that place, this was ultra-hip language. Fast-forward to 1978, and disco act Boney M could be found in charts around the world singing about deceased Russian ‘love machine’ Grigori Rasputin, declaring him a cat, who, apparently, really was gone, by which time such slang was roughly twenty years behind the times. Cool was still cool (daddy), but gone had long since, well, gone.