chapter nine
“It’s got a beat and you can dance to it.” Dick Clark (center, with microphone) and a jukebox jury on American Bandstand.
(Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)
From time to time, forces converge in such a way that amazing cultural collisions occur in the space of a single year. There will be tremors before the fact, and aftershocks later on, but the year itself seems like a fast train ride through an incredible landscape; 1957 was one of those years for American culture. The most cursory glide through the year’s high points will attest to this. In literature, John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road appeared (as did Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas), and copies of Allen Ginsberg’s debut collection, Howl and Other Poems, were seized from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the beginning of a landmark obscenity trial. On Broadway, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story made its debut. One can pick up just about any jazz album from 1957 and hear genius; Miles Davis alone released Bags’ Groove, Birth of the Cool, Cookin’, Walkin’, Relaxin’, Miles Ahead, and ’Round About Midnight. Thelonious Monk released Brilliant Corners and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, John Coltrane had Coltrane and Trane’s Blues,Charles Mingus released The Clown, and Sonny Rollins released A Night at the Village Vanguard, Saxophone Colossus, and Way Out West. Film and the fine arts also came up with masterpieces.
But popular music really blossomed. In just the first few months of the year, a slew of classic records appeared. The Johnny Burnette Rock and Roll Trio’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’,” Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Crazy Arms,” Warren Smith’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Ruby” and “Ubangi Stomp” (Lewis and Smith on Sun), Richard Berry and the Pharaohs’ “Louie Louie” (Billboard gave it a 70), Charlie Feathers’s “One Hand Loose,” Sonny Burgess’s “We Wanna Boogie” b/w “Red Headed Woman” (again, Burgess was on Sun), Buddy Holly’s “Modern Don Juan,” Johnny Horton’s “I’m Comin’ Home,” Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” (on Sun), Bobby Marchan’s “Chickee Wah-Wah,” Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’,” Bo Diddley’s “Hey, Bo Diddley” b/w “Mona,” and Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox” (on—you guessed it—Sun) were among them, and it’s worth noting that not a single one of those records made the pop charts and most didn’t even make any country or R&B charts except the regional ones.
That list shows some interesting trends, though. Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Warren Smith, Sonny Burgess, and Billy Lee Riley proved that post-Presley, things were really heating up at 706 Union Avenue. Memphis was the rockabilly epicenter, as demonstrated by the Rock and Roll Trio, comprised of Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, two brothers whose dislike for each other was as legendary as their capacity for alcohol, and master guitarist Paul Burleson, who stayed out of their way and played some of the most stinging electric guitar ever. They’d been working the Memphis clubs since 1951, developing their style, and watched Elvis’s progress with great interest.
Charlie Feathers, too, was from near Memphis in Mississippi, and, like Carl Perkins, had grown up with black people as friends and neighbors. Somehow he’d eluded Sam Phillips and wound up on King, which was absolutely unable to figure out what to do with him. Johnny Horton was more of a mainstream country artist, but young enough that he picked up on rockabilly, and “I’m Comin’ Home” was his most rocking side to date. Over on the R&B side, Bobby Marchan contributed to the tradition of New Orleans nonsense songs, but missed the gold ring this time around, as he would as lead singer of Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns’ 1957 “Just a Lonely Clown.” Radio had to choose between Muddy’s mojo and that of Ann Cole, which is probably why that classic slipped by. As for Richard Berry, Billboard liked the other side of the record, yet another recording of “You Are My Sunshine,” the country sing-along authored by the onetime governor of Louisiana, Jimmie Davis. Berry was just another Los Angeles R&B musician, singing with local vocal groups and picking up gigs where he could, including a stint with René Touzet’s Cuban American cha-cha group. Their “El Loco Cha Cha” was a catchy thing, and Berry pinched some ideas from it, most notably the rhythm and the chord progression, and wrote lyrics about a Jamaican man pining for a woman vaguely based on the classic “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).”
Berry’s mistake was in recording a cha-cha, not a calypso. Calypso was the fad in early 1957, even if the only calypso artist to hit the charts was Harry Belafonte, Elvis’s labelmate on RCA, who’d actually been born in Harlem, albeit to West Indian parents. He’d hit with “Jamaica Farewell” in late 1956, singing in light dialect, and 1957 would make him a star with “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” even though his record was competing with another version of the song by the Tarriers, an acoustic trio with banjoist Erik Darling and guitarist Alan Arkin, later best known as an actor. If someone were looking for a trend, they’d be better off looking at the Tarriers, but as of early 1957, people were so eager to see rock & roll off that they welcomed calypso as its successor. Unfortunately, Belafonte’s stay on the charts was short (at least as a singles artist; he sold albums for years) and both the bandwagon-hoppers and authentic calypso records released in the United States at the time failed to make any noise.
Leave it to that other Berry, Chuck, to make it perfectly clear. On January 21, he, Johnny Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist Hubert Sumlin, and the rhythm section of Willie Dixon and Fred Below went into Chess Studios and cut an instrumental (“Deep Feeling”), a Spanish-language novelty (“La Juanda”), and the teenage national anthem “School Day (Ring Ring Goes the Bell).” For a thirty-year-old man, Berry certainly understood the teenage psyche, and this tale of waiting all day in school, hating every minute of it when suddenly ring, ring goes the bell and you were released to head down to the burger joint with its jukebox and, as Chuck sang, rrrrrroll the coin right into the slot to achieve liberation from all that the day had handed you so far. “Hail! Hail! Rock and roll,” he sang. “Deliver me from the days of old.” It was that simple, and any teen with a nickel (jukeboxes cost five cents a play, six for a quarter) could do it. There it was: an instruction manual for being a teenager, a map to the territory you could claim, an affirmation that your culture existed alongside another one and was different from and in many ways superior to it. Coming onto the charts in April, “School Day” stayed there for a whopping twenty-six weeks, reaching #3 on the pop chart and #1 on the R&B chart. This would be Chuck Berry’s year, although Elvis and others would pass through it, too; the important point is that Berry’s succeeding records were all more successful on the pop charts than on the R&B charts. And there was more where that came from, too.
Buddy Holly, though, was going through some tough times. Decca had utterly failed to figure him out, and the two singles they’d released on him sank without a trace. To compound his problems, his manager, Hi Pockets Duncan, had quit radio and moved to Amarillo, where he opened a nightclub, the Clover Club. He got a call from Buddy saying that the band sure could use some work, so he closed the bar for a night and promoted Buddy’s appearance there as a teen dance, which did a lot better than expected, so it became a regular thing. Realizing that Decca wasn’t going to stay in the picture much longer, Buddy changed course; first, he assembled a new band, consisting of Jerry Allison on drums and Niki Sullivan on second guitar. Next, he started visiting Clovis, New Mexico, right across the state line and not a terribly long drive from Lubbock. Clovis was the home of Norman Petty, leader of the Norman Petty Trio, an instrumental combo featuring Norman on organ, his wife, Vi, on piano, and Jack Vaughan, a drummer. They played what might be termed cocktail music, but in 1954 had had a hit with a rendition of “Mood Indigo” that had sold well and made enough money for Petty to open a studio in his hometown, equipped with the latest gear. Needless to say, it became a magnet for west Texas musicians, and a band called the Rhythm Orchids had cut a record there late in 1956, which resulted in two hits and launched two careers: Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” and Jimmy Bowen’s “I’m Sticking with You,” which they sold to Roulette. They were both on the same 45, and they both did very well, which seemed auspicious for Buddy’s chances. Petty also had connections to Columbia Records’ Mitch Miller, who was the head of the pop music department there, and had signed the Petty Trio. Buddy went over to Clovis in January with the band and recorded a couple of numbers, including a version of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” and then returned at the end of February with two songs, one of which, “That’ll Be the Day,” he’d been working on for some time and had actually recorded in Nashville, and the other, “Looking for Someone to Love,” knocked out just before the trip so there would be a B side for the demo they intended to send to Decca in New York to see if they understood him any better than the Nashville office had.
There was a bit of a problem: Buddy had been told Decca wasn’t picking up his contract, but he also hadn’t been released from it, and it specified that he couldn’t re-record any of the material he’d done for them. Someone hit on the idea of crediting the demo to a group, so they began to search for a name. Over at Jerry Allison’s house there was an encyclopedia, so they had it open to the article on insects, maybe thinking about the Spiders, a vocal group from New Orleans that had had a minor hit recently. First they were going to call themselves the Grasshoppers, but nobody thought much of that. They scrutinized the color plates of bugs for more inspiration. Aha! The Beetles! But Jerry said, “Aw, that’s just a bug you want to step on,” so that was out. He suggested the Crickets: didn’t they make music by rubbing their legs together? By now everyone was tired of the game, so they all agreed on the Crickets, and played a few gigs under that name. Along the way they picked up a bassist, Joe B. Mauldin, who was still in high school but was a seasoned musician already. Now that the band was complete, they went back to Clovis on March 1 and recorded “Last Night,” one of Joe’s compositions, and a new song by Buddy, “Maybe Baby.” They sent the demos off, not to Decca, but to Roulette, hoping for the success the Buddy Knox / Jimmy Bowen tunes had had. Then they headed to Amarillo to audition for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts TV program. Godfrey turned them down. (He’d also turned down Elvis, who’d auditioned in 1955.) Then word came back from Roulette: not interested. Now Petty took charge and contacted Murray Deutsch, of Peer-Southern Music, a big music publishing firm. Deutsch flipped when he heard the record, and he got turned down by Atlantic, Columbia, and RCA. Finally, he went to Bob Thiele, who’d been put in charge of Coral, a Decca sub-label that had Lawrence Welk, the McGuire Sisters, and Thiele’s future wife, Teresa Brewer. Thiele didn’t answer right away: he had to get anything he released past the brass at Decca, and they hated the record. Thiele and Deutsch loved it, but Thiele couldn’t do anything. Finally, Deutsch prevailed on him to press up a thousand copies of “That’ll Be the Day” so he could exercise his rights as publisher. Then things got really confusing. Although Buddy’s first record had come out on Decca, the rest of the Nashville sessions were given to a subsidiary, Brunswick, which just sat on them. Now Buddy was on another Decca subsidiary, Coral, and in violation of his not-yet-expired contract with the main label. When the dust cleared, the new version of “That’ll Be the Day” came out on Brunswick in May, Buddy had relinquished all rights to the earlier recording, and Norman Petty’s Nor-Va-Jak Music had stepped in to make sure things ran smoothly from now on. Furthermore, there would be Buddy Holly records on Coral and Crickets records on Brunswick, all featuring the same musicians. But this wasn’t the problem it seemed, because when “That’ll Be the Day” came out that summer, it rocketed to the top of the charts and stayed there for twenty-two weeks.
Although Buddy Holly’s guitar playing could get wild at times, there was still something gentler and more melodic about his records that pointed at another approach to rock & roll, one that found favor in Nashville, where Archie Bleyer thought he’d discovered another talent that would sell records. Heaven knows he needed it. He’d started Cadence Records in hopes that Arthur Godfrey, his old boss, would sign to it, and then found he wouldn’t. He’d signed Steve Lawrence, a young crooner whose contract he’d bought from King, which had no idea what to do with him, and then the Chordettes, a female trio who’d appeared on Godfrey’s television show and had had some hits including a cover of the Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love.” (One of them was also Bleyer’s wife.) But he wasn’t really making waves until he approached two kids who’d grown up performing on their family’s radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa. Don and Phil Everly grew up in a musical family. Their father, Ike, was from Kentucky and learned a lot of the local ballads and songs while developing into a monster guitar player, a skill he shared with several other guitarists who came to learn from him, most notably Merle Travis. But Ike never seriously considered a musical career and subsisted on a number of other occupations, including barber. His sons grew up on the family show, introduced as “Little Donny and Baby Boy Phil,” and surviving recordings show that the close blend of their voices was with them from the start, no doubt influenced by the country brother-singing tradition started by the Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe Brothers, the Louvin Brothers, and the Delmore Brothers. Once the boys were out of high school, Ike moved the family closer to Nashville, and eventually Chet Atkins, who ran RCA’s Nashville studio and was a friend of Ike’s, invited them to try a record. He got them a deal with Columbia, for which they recorded one flop, and placed a song with Patsy Cline (“Thou Shalt Not Steal”), but they didn’t really take off until Atkins introduced them to Wesley Rose at Acuff-Rose Music, a major force in Nashville music publishing. Rose signed them as writers and mentioned them to Archie Bleyer when he asked if Rose knew any talent he could record. Bleyer signed them in February 1957, and, perhaps wary of recording an original tune, put them onto Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, a married couple who’d become Nashville’s first professional songwriters—they just wrote and never performed. Boudleaux was eager for the assignment—Ike Everly was his barber—and so he and Felice handed them “Bye Bye Love,” an up-tempo number that showed off their voices (and had been rejected by thirty other acts) and suddenly Archie wasn’t worried anymore; it just missed the #1 slot and stayed on the charts for twenty-seven weeks. It also had an Everlys original on the B side, “I Wonder If I Care as Much,” that showed that any worries about their songwriting were unwarranted.
Patsy Cline, to whom the boys had sold that song, was another Nashville face going pop. Born Virginia Hensley, she’d been around a while, recording standard (and substandard) country fare for Four Star, a minor label affiliated with Decca, and making occasional appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, but it wasn’t until she signed to Decca itself and recorded at Bradley’s Barn that she began to see success. Owen Bradley saw that she had a strong, smoky voice without a hint of twang, as well as the ability to phrase like a jazz singer, so he just dispensed with the country trimmings entirely (much to the delight of some of his studio musicians, who frequently jammed with black musicians on the other side of town after hours) and went for a straightforward pop sound on “Walkin’ After Midnight,” her first record, and found that it sold well in both the pop and country markets. It would take a few more years for Cline’s career to really take off, but the mere fact of her existence in the Nashville machine pointed to a new way of doing things in an increasingly sclerotic scene. Bradley didn’t stop there, either: Decca had signed an eleven-year-old vocalist in 1956 named Brenda Lee who likewise didn’t take off until Owen Bradley took over her production, which showed that even if he hadn’t gotten Buddy Holly, he had ideas that would at the very least modernize country music and make those much-needed crossovers (a country “hit” generally only sold several thousand copies) more frequent. Brenda Lee was a belter, Patsy Cline more nuanced, the Everlys more country but teenage. Nashville was changing.
But the year’s top country-to–rock & roll crossover was Jerry Lee Lewis. Sam Phillips knew he had something with this wild youngster with a seemingly unlimited number of songs in his repertoire, but he was damned if he could figure out just what it was. He’d used him on a bunch of sessions but wasn’t quite sure what to do with him as a solo artist, and Jerry Lee wasn’t helping. For one thing, he’d always been a musical sponge, even back in his childhood in Ferriday, Louisiana, when he and his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart would hang out behind a local club they were too young to get into and absorb the various blues singers who played there. Eventually, he convinced his parents to buy him a piano, and learned to play some of this, as well as the music he heard in church.
When it came time for him to make a follow-up to “Crazy Arms,” Sam selected an amusing song Jack Clement had written, “It’ll Be Me,” about a guy so insecure that he’s stalking his girlfriend in a bunch of unlikely places, which Lewis was trying to get right one day in February on a session. At one point the band took a break and someone mentioned a song Jerry Lee used to do when he backed up a guy named Johnny Littlejohn, an obscure Big Maybelle tune from 1953 that Roy Hall, Webb Pierce’s piano player, had recorded. Jerry Lee thought for a moment, trying to remember how it went, got it, and then started attacking the piano like a madman, banging out a boogie and yelling out an invitation to a party in a barn where there was a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on. It was a needed diversion to “It’ll Be Me,” and after it was over they got back to work. But Sam thought there was something to the song, even if he couldn’t claim publishing on it, and a couple of days later, he assembled a slightly different band, including Jerry Lee’s regular drummer, Jimmy van Eaton, and they tried “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” again. Two minutes and a few seconds later, they were done, and they put it out in March, whereupon it began its steady ascent to the upper reaches of the pop, R&B, and country charts. All of this proved something to Sam, too; he’d noticed the flood of wannabe Presleys and had been talking with Jack Clement, “saying that I wanted to get off this guitar scene and show that it could be done with other instruments,” as he said later. Well, here he was, the guy who could do it. Of course, so could Little Richard, but not like this, not that he was worried about Jerry Lee Lewis. He was too busy blazing through up-tempo songs with girls’ names: “Lucille,” “Jenny, Jenny,” and “Miss Ann,” slowing down only for “Lucille”’s B side, “Send Me Some Lovin’,” which showed that he could do a down-tempo gospel groove with the best of them.
With Richard screaming and whooping his way up and down the charts, you would have thought that Art Rupe would have welcomed a crooner with a proven ability to melt girls’ hearts, not try to punish him. Sam Cooke had been singing with the veteran group the Soul Stirrers since late 1950, when he was only nineteen. Not only did he have a wonderful clear tenor, but in the Soul Stirrers, he frequently duetted with Paul Foster, who had a gritty shout that played well off Sam’s smoother style. This gave a spurt to their record sales, and the Soul Stirrers’ discs outsold all of Specialty’s other gospel groups at the time. And as good as their records were, one can only get so much of an idea what they were like in person, when troops of teenage girls—a rarity in the gospel world, where the average female audience member was older—would show up to swoon. Fortunately, Specialty recorded a gospel program at the Shrine Auditorium in LA on July 22, 1955, and the CD reissue of it, pretty much the whole show in real time without overdubs, devotes nearly twenty minutes to the Soul Stirrers’ three numbers, so that we can hear Cooke and Foster really getting into it, and driving the women nuts. But Cooke was thirsting for more, so with the encouragement of a growing number of people, including the Pilgrim Travelers’ J. W. Alexander, he began to explore, timidly at first, the idea of crossing the line to pop. One of Cooke’s showstoppers with the Soul Stirrers was a song called “Wonderful,” and he talked to Bumps Blackwell about converting it into a secular song. Finally, in December, Bumps took Sam to New Orleans and booked a session with Cosimo Matassa for the twelfth. They cut four songs, but only released two of them: “Lovable” was a straightforward remake of “Wonderful” with different lyrics, and “Forever,” on the B side, was a tune brought to the session by saxophonist Alvin “Red” Tyler. Hoping to head off any angry Soul Stirrers fans, the record came out as by “Dale Cooke” and promptly stiffed. Part of this was because the secret of “Dale”’s actual identity spread like crazy in the gospel world, and there was growing anger. Part of it was because Sam was getting lectured by other gospel performers about the uncertainty of the pop world and the sure thing he had going in gospel. Part of it was because “Dale” wasn’t out there promoting the record. And part of it was because Art Rupe wasn’t convinced it was a very good record and was becoming more and more sure that he didn’t want Sam striking out on his own. He was also having his doubts about Bumps Blackwell, having discovered that the musical education he professed to have was something he’d invented to get a job. Paying for another pop session for Sam Cooke didn’t sound like a very good idea.
But, having crossed the Rubicon into pop, Sam saw his options narrowing. He’d sent Bumps a tape of him playing several songs he wanted to record, accompanying himself on the guitar, and Bumps took it to Rupe, noting that if they didn’t try another session on Sam they’d lose him to someone else. The Soul Stirrers, for their part, saw Sam acting up; he was writing most of their songs at this point and chafing at the six-way split of the money coming in, although that was how most gospel groups did it, and the Soul Stirrers were no exception. Sam simply wanted more of the money, and the group was unmovable about that. They also sent Rupe a telegram asking him not to release any more Dale Cooke records, because they felt “Lovable” had cut into their sales. Torn, Sam had a conversation with the man he was beginning to see as a mentor, J. W. Alexander. J. W. had a clear, unsentimental vision that would stay with him for years to come, and he realized that the Soul Stirrers were fighting against cultural forces that were bigger than they were, that their and, indeed, the Pilgrim Travelers’ days were numbered. Over dinner after a program both groups had appeared on, Sam dropped his star mask and asked J. W., somewhat timorously, if he thought he could make it as a secular singer. J. W. told him he’d have to forget the Dale Cooke persona and be himself, Sam, but yes, of course, he could make it. So on May 28, 1957, Sam got a ride from a friend to the Chicago airport and got on a plane to Los Angeles. He hadn’t even bothered to tell the Soul Stirrers he was quitting, but he had.
In LA, Bumps had been busy. His days at Specialty were numbered, and Rupe had flat-out handed him all of Sam’s unreleased material in preparation for figuring out a way to pay him off and cut him loose. Bumps put the word out that he was looking for another company who could use his talents, and found a startup that had promise. Keen Records was an investment for a Greek American manufacturer of airplane parts named John Siamas, who entrusted its running to a young clarinet player, Bob Keene. Keene heard that Bumps was looking, but, more importantly, he had Sam Cooke in tow, so he set up a meeting with Bumps and J. W. Alexander to start working out the details. Meanwhile, Sam was getting to know a Los Angeles that gospel singers knew little about, hanging out with a couple of young men who introduced him to a still-vital Central Avenue and hanging out at Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the famous twenty-four-hour record store that had DJs spinning live on the radio in its window and was presided over by John Dolphin, the rotund, black, cigar-chomping owner. (It was the store where a lot of LA’s white teenagers bought their R&B records, and Dolphin knew his store wasn’t anywhere near Hollywood, but blacks weren’t allowed in Hollywood, and he figured he’d make his own entertainment capital, and thus called his record label Recorded in Hollywood.) Sam cut a few more tunes for Bumps and then, on September 7, his first record on Keen, “Summertime” b/w “You Send Me,” came out—masters that Rupe had given Bumps. It took off almost immediately once radio figured out that the supposed B side was the hit, and, because it was selling even better than his previous timid venture into secular music, it faced a wave of scorn from the gospel world. But it was a great start for Keen—and Keene—and Bumps began whispering in the ears of other gospel performers on Specialty that Rupe wasn’t in such great shape and if they were thinking of crossing over, they might find a home at the new label.
Spiritual crisis was all around, it seemed. Jerry Lee Lewis’s decision to head to Memphis to audition for Sun had been occasioned by his having been booted out of Bible college in east Texas after boogying up a hymn during worship services, and his decision to go secular was still not sitting well with him when the time came to record a follow-up to “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” On October 8, he sat down with a couple of songs that had been sent to Sun for him by Otis Blackwell, a black songwriter and sometime performer who’d written “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel” for Elvis. “Great Balls of Fire” was the obvious choice, and Jerry Lee and the band were rehearsing it when suddenly the star balked. Fortunately, Jack Clement was prone to leaving the tape running during sessions, and he caught the discussion that followed. Alcohol was almost certainly involved, and all of a sudden the image of great balls of fire seized Jerry Lee’s imagination and he refused to go any further. Sam came into the studio to try to talk sense to him, but the notion that he’d been recording “worldly music,” as he put it, had paralyzed him and nothing Sam could say would budge him—not that Sam’s argument was much more coherent than Jerry Lee’s, although the tone of his voice shows a man trying to quell a panic-stricken young man. The tape ends with Jerry Lee saying, “Man, I got the devil in me! If I didn’t have, I’d be a Christian!” It’s not recorded how Sam turned things around, but fortunately for rock & roll, he did. How fortunate it was for Jerry Lee is hard to say; these demons were to follow him for quite some time.
And then there was Little Richard, who was under increasing pressure from former R&B saxophonist Joe Lutcher, who’d had a conversion experience and was now evangelizing pop musicians, to renounce his worldly ways. In October, when Russia launched the Sputnik satellite and made headlines, Richard and his band were on tour in Australia, and Richard believed he’d either seen the satellite from his plane, or, as he claimed, “it looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet over our heads. It shook my mind.” Shook it so badly, in fact, that he decided that night to quit show business. The next day at a press conference, he announced, “If you want to live for the Lord, you can’t rock and roll, too. God doesn’t like it.” His saxophone player, Clifford Burks, joshed Richard about it as they took the ferry across Sydney Harbour, and Richard, to show his sincerity, took a ring valued at $8,000 and threw it into the water. They canceled the tour that day, stranding the other acts on the package, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and Alis Lesley (the “female Elvis”), and flew home to lawsuits and harsh words from Art Rupe, but Richard checked into a Bible college and refused to talk. Not everyone had the freedom Elvis had, to sing spirituals with the Jordanaires, a group not unlike the Stamps Quartet he idolized, and release them alongside his pop records. In fact, in April, he released two EPs, Just for You, with ballads, and (There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me), the title track of which had reached #25 on the pop charts.
Another group that had renounced gospel, the “5” Royales, were beginning to regret their decision to, if not go secular, at least sign with King Records. Since 1954, they’d been recording one great record after another, all with no result whatever. Whether a novelty like “Monkey Hips and Rice” or “Mohawk Squaw” or up-tempo rockers like “Women About to Make Me Go Crazy,” “Right Around the Corner,” or “Come On and Save Me” or soulful harmony numbers like “When You Walked Through the Door,” or “Get Something Out of It”—all records that have the capacity to astonish even today—there was no response from radio, although certainly some of them appeared on jukeboxes throughout the South, where they were still touring relentlessly. It’s a good thing King didn’t drop them, and maybe someone decided that a change of studio might be indicated, because all of the above were recorded in New York with Mickey Baker, one of the great guitarists of the era, playing on them. But the Royales already had one of the great guitarists of the era in the group: their triple-threat guitarist / songwriter / bass singer Lowman “Pete” Pauling, so when they gave him a free hand on a session at King Studios in Cincinnati on February 28, great things happened—they recorded “Tears of Joy,” a ballad, which was a top-ten R&B hit for them, and one of the most gospelly things they’d recorded yet, “Think.” Featuring group handclaps and the biting, incisive sound of Pauling’s Gibson Les Paul guitar weaving in and out of the vocal arrangement, it was a workout that took a few seconds to sort out all the motion, after which the listener would presumably join in the fun. It was a top-ten R&B song and got as far as #66 on the pop charts and probably saved the “5” Royales’ career. Now they were playing everywhere, including the Apollo Theater in New York, touring with the big package shows. Six months later, with “Think” still all over the place, they went back in and did it again, cutting four more songs, one of which would become a classic—but not, unfortunately, for them. “Messin’ Up” was an up-tempo dance number of no great consequence, but its B side, “Say It,” has Johnny Tanner’s pleading, soulful lead vocal duetting with some of the most savage guitar playing Pauling ever recorded, on the edge of overdriving the amp. Nothing. But the next one, “Dedicated to the One I Love,” would live on as a hit … by the Shirelles and, even later, the Mamas and the Papas. Its B side, “Don’t Be Ashamed,” was clearly a gospel remake, again with Lowman’s guitar in full force. Incredible as it may seem, this record never saw the charts, although presumably it got some airplay. But in 1957, it was just another lost classic.
Part of the problem, of course, wasn’t a problem at all; rock & roll, rhythm and blues, and country music were all minority-interest genres, although rock & roll’s willingness to include the other two meant it was bigger than they were. Plus, trade magazines editorialized that any black record company that didn’t give at least passing thought to the growing white teen market was shooting itself in the foot. That was only partially true. B. B. King was still having hits, Jimmy Reed was doing very well indeed, Chess was still releasing blues, Chuck Berry notwithstanding (and had a minor hit with Muddy Waters’s guitarist Jimmy Rogers on “Walking By Myself”), and Don Robey was promoting a new generation of blues artists from Memphis on his Duke label. Johnny Ace belonged to the ages, but he’d lured Junior Parker away from Sam Phillips (whose interest in blues faded as soon as the rockabillies happened) and scored the first of many hits with “The Next Time You See Me,” and had picked up another of Johnny Ace’s circle, a young man named Bobby “Blue” Bland, who sang in a smooth voice that he occasionally interrupted with an odd growling sound, and whose “Farther Up the Road” introduced him to audiences outside his hometown for the first time.
The main obstacle—or non-obstacle—was that all media was regional. Network television and radio wasn’t about to treat rock & roll as anything but a fad, occasional appearances by stars on shows like Ed Sullivan’s or Steve Allen’s notwithstanding. Billboard and the other trades still carried regional charts, knowing that something that was a hit in Detroit or Memphis or Chicago or Atlanta might go nationwide, but might also generate a lot of heat and then fade, never making that next step. Or perhaps it would spread to another couple of cities in the region—Chicago to Detroit and Cleveland, for instance—but never make the leap to the two cities that mattered to the mass media, New York and Los Angeles. But regionalism also meant that an explosion of talent could be tolerated by the pop ecosystem; the majority of the acts just couldn’t get past a glass ceiling of popularity. This situation would soon change, but slowly. Two things helped it along: television and a new approach to radio.
Television, as noted, wasn’t paying much attention to rock & roll. As sets got more affordable, more people bought them, and the viewing audience just exploded. Besides variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s, there was a boom in half-hour situation comedies, family-oriented tales of mild misadventure, all heartwarmingly resolved at the end. One of the big ones was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, featuring Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and their two sons, David and Ricky. Ozzie Nelson had been a successful “sweet” bandleader, his wife, Harriet, had been his female vocalist, and they were very familiar with how Hollywood worked, so when Ozzie suggested a show based on his family to network radio, based on some sketches he’d done on Red Skelton’s radio show, they went for it. The boys were played by actors for the first several years, but by 1952, when the show moved to ABC television, they played themselves. Ozzie wrote the scripts, the opening credits showed their actual house, not far from the western end of Hollywood Boulevard, and they had a hit on their hands. But when Ricky turned sixteen in 1956, he had a request: Ricky liked rock & roll, and badgered his father to let him make a rock & roll record. Ozzie, thinking it was a good idea if the kid would play it on the show, agreed, and pulled some strings in the music world to make it happen. A one-off deal with the jazz label Verve was set up, with a band assembled by (and featuring) Barney Kessel, the jazz guitarist who was doing A&R for Verve. They settled on a cover of Fats Domino’s recent hit “I’m Walking” for the A side and something called “A Teenager’s Romance” for the flip and put it out. Of course, Ozzie quickly worked up a scene where Ricky played his record on the show, and the record took off the next day, a double-sided hit that was #1 in a number of regional markets, and in the top ten nationally. Lew Chudd woke up to the fact that a song by one of his artists was making noise and asked Ozzie if Ricky would like to sign a deal with him, and soon enough, Ricky was signed to Imperial, their first teen star. For the show, Ricky used the same band he’d be using on the Imperial records, which included James Burton, a guitarist a year younger than Ricky who’d been playing with a guy named Dale Hawkins and who’d created an irresistible guitar riff for Hawkins’s big hit “Susie Q,” which hit the airwaves at about the same time as Ricky’s second record, “Be Bop Baby.” Teenagers now tuned in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the chance (increasingly likely) that Ricky would finish the show by playing a song with his band.
But that was just one performer, one show, once a week. ABC-TV’s answer to the summer slump in ratings added more performers: an Alan Freed TV show, hosted by the charismatic radio star. This worked so well that in August, they added a daily show they’d picked up from their affiliate in Philadelphia, WFIL, to their national feed. Dubbed American Bandstand, it was hosted by a guy who looked like a teenager, but wasn’t (he was twenty-seven at the time), Dick Clark. Clark had been in radio since he’d actually been a teenager, which was partially what made the show, which aired in the dead zone from 3:00 to 4:30 daily, a hit; the formula was to play records and have a carefully screened bunch of kids on to dance to them. Every day, a performer or two would come on to lip-synch to their latest hit, and there would be interaction with the dancers in the form of interviews (mentioning the high schools they went to, of course), and a jukebox jury of kids rating new releases and spawning the cliché “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. I’ll give it a 9.” Clark also did a top-ten countdown each week, which, like the rest of the show, purported to be national, and, once ABC started to broadcast it from coast to coast, actually was.
The importance of American Bandstand to the summer of 1957 can’t be overestimated. For the record industry, it was the first national exposure for their product; getting a record on Bandstand was tantamount to breaking it nationwide immediately instead of waiting for the regionals to report it. For the kids, though, it was a window to a teen paradise. Here were teenagers wearing teenage fashions, doing dances most teens had never seen (the first to break out was a sedate line dance, the stroll, which you could do to Chuck Willis’s current hit, “C.C. Rider,” for instance), being treated like their ideas were worth listening to when Clark interviewed them about their lives and schoolwork. Not only did the show make stars out of performers, it also made stars out of its regulars, who may not have been on every day (there were frequent casting calls at Philadelphia high schools) but were often enough to attract fan letters. True, it wasn’t all as idyllic as it seemed (or was it? Firsthand reports from regulars detail make-out sessions and outright sex in the cloakroom and reefer smoking on the building’s roof), and Dick Clark was busily making a little showbiz empire, with a few music-publishing companies, an investment in a record-pressing plant and a distributor, and very close relationships with some of Philadelphia’s many record labels.
And Bandstand spawned imitators; rare was the urban center that didn’t soon have a local jock doing the same thing, only with local teens and local talent, and in Newark, there was what amounted to a black Bandstand under the aegis of Doug “Jocko” Henderson. Jocko was on 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. on WDAS in Philadelphia, and then got on the train for New York, where he did it again from 10:00 P.M. to midnight on WOV. Henderson has never gotten the credit he deserves for turning teens on to current black hits and dances, not to mention the torrent of jive talk he spouted, which had white jocks trying to figure out enough of it so they could do it themselves. Jocko’s Rocket Ship Show was, for teens in the New York area (those who could get it on their TV sets; the signal wasn’t the greatest, even in Manhattan), a hipper alternative to Dick Clark and his crew.
Radio, however, remained the top means of getting news out about a record, although it was hopelessly regional. This was about to change; early in the year, Todd Stortz, a guy who owned a chain of radio stations in the Midwest, was sitting in a bar with his station manager, having what must have been more than a few drinks. Over the course of the session, they noticed that although there were a couple hundred selections on the jukebox, most customers played the same few over and over; Stortz estimated it was about forty records. But something else was going on, too; at the end of the night, the waitresses took some of their tip money and fed it to the jukebox to play as they cleaned and closed the place—and even though they’d heard the records all night long, they chose the same ones. Stortz got to work and introduced what he called the Top Forty formula on KOWH in Omaha. The equation for figuring out the mix was a trade secret, but must have included reports from jukebox operators and record stores, as well as the Billboard or Cash Box charts. Whatever it was, it worked, and pretty soon Stortz’s other stations started leading the markets in their cities. In Fort Worth, Gordon McLendon, another businessman with multiple stations, came up with his own formula and tried it on his stations, and again, it worked. Oh, some DJs quit, of course, angry that they couldn’t make their own programming decisions—and, no doubt, angry that the money some record companies were paying some of them to play records was now going elsewhere—but this was a lot more efficient for management than the anarchy that had prevailed up to then, and a godsend for record companies. If the Stortz or McLendon chains (or, ideally, both) went on one of your records, you were made; your record got added to dozens of stations at once, instead of piecemeal. Even better, you didn’t have to worry whether the record was “good” or not; mathematics took care of that! The higher the ratings, the more money the chains made, and the more money they made, the more stations they could buy, soon either expanding out of the regional market they’d dominated or franchising the formula to other chains. Furthermore, with the decline of network radio as a source for broadcast drama and comedy shows, a role that was being completely taken over by television, this gave independent stations playing nothing but music and news (including local sports) a huge leg up in profitability. Radio was still big business, thanks to the Top Forty.
The summer of 1957 saw the first flowering of rock & roll as a national phenomenon, although it was still controversial. It was the summer of Elvis’s “All Shook Up” and “(I Want to Be) Your Teddy Bear” and Little Richard’s “Jenny, Jenny” and “Keep a-Knockin’,” that old New Orleans whorehouse favorite, the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up, Little Susie” (both written by the Bryants), of the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day,” and Chuck Berry’s “School Day.” It was Fats Domino doing “I’m Walkin’” and “Blue Monday” (which he’d taken from Imperial’s no-luck New Orleans guitarist Smiley Lewis), Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” and Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns’ “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu,” just in case anyone thought New Orleans didn’t still have its mojo. Larry Williams celebrated “Bony Moronie” and “Short Fat Fannie,” LaVern Baker raved about “Jim Dandy,” and the Bobbettes harmonized about “Mr. Lee,” a teacher they had a crush on. For those oh-so-crucial slow dances, the Platters offered “I’m Sorry” and “My Dream,” Lee Andrews and the Hearts told of “Long Lonely Nights,” the Tune Weavers wished a “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” and the Five Satins told of each step drawing closer “To the Aisle.” When teens weren’t slow dancing or doing the stroll, the Del-Vikings suggested the “Cool Shake” and Andre Williams the “Bacon Fat.” Actually, that last one was probably a put-on, since Williams concedes that some do it like this and some do it like that, and, as his under-the-counter word-of-mouth hit “Jail Bait” proved, he wasn’t too serious about anything.
It was a great year for Leiber and Stoller: Atlantic signed them to an A&R and production deal that enabled them to put together the Coasters and move to New York. Right out of the box, a group specializing in cleverly written comic songs about being a teenager was fated to succeed, and “Searchin’” and “Young Blood” started a run of hits that wouldn’t abate for years, every one of them written by the dynamic duo. Not only that, but practically before they had time to unpack, Jerry and Mike were asked by Colonel Tom Parker to provide songs for Elvis’s upcoming film (his third, after Love Me Tender and Loving You), Jailhouse Rock. Elvis was making films fast, but he loved the work, loved living in Hollywood with a circle of his friends who were laughingly referred to as the Memphis Mafia (and who would have acted like a real one had anyone tried to hurt him), and was even getting good reviews for Loving You. Certainly it was better than the quickie movies being made: Rock Around the Clock, which exposed way too much of Bill Haley and essentially sealed his doom as a teen favorite, Don’t Knock the Rock, which had another memorable moment from Little Richard and too much of Bill Haley and the Treniers, Mister Rock and Roll, starring Alan Freed in the story of how he discovered rock & roll (really!), with contributions from Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon, Clyde McPhatter, and Lionel Hampton, and the simultaneously fascinating and horrifying Rock Baby-Rock It. This last was the result of a Dallas wrestling promoter, J. G. Tiger, putting together a rock & roll package tour with some local talent, most notably Johnny Carroll, an Elvis wannabe signed to Decca. Apparently the tour ran out of money, and Tiger had the brilliant idea of taking the talent and doing a quickie movie around them while he still had them to hand. With luck, the film would make enough money to pay everyone off, so a script about a bunch of kids who held rock & roll parties at their clubhouse, which is suddenly menaced by bad guys who want to buy the property, was conjured up. The bad guys were played by Tiger’s wrestlers, and the acting is only as good as you needed to be a semi-pro wrestler in Dallas in 1957. The good guys were the kids, many of whom were the musicians; besides Carroll, there were the Five Stars, a singing group, aging Sun blues pianist Rosco Gordon (whose gimmick was a dancing chicken atop his piano), Preacher Smith and the Deacons, who sounded a bit like Fats Domino, and the Belew Twins. None of these people made even a dent in the national charts (although Carroll would be one of the Texas rockabillies rediscovered by a later generation), so the film is a slice of life in a healthy local rock & roll scene in a city that is also the center of a regional country scene, and the home of a radio program, the Big D Jamboree, that mixed both of them in its weekly broadcast from Tiger’s wrestling arena. More films were promised for the fall, led by Jailhouse Rock, which was actually pretty good and with a knockout score (the title tune immediately shot to #1, and the scene where Elvis sings the title tune is a proto–rock video), and Jamboree, a Warner Bros. production that was essentially a package tour on film, with Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, Charlie Gracie, the Four Coins, Carl Perkins, Frankie Avalon, Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords (yes, Frankie Lymon’s younger brother), Slim Whitman, Connie Francis, and the Count Basie Orchestra featuring Joe Williams. The film was also arranged so that local DJs could cut scenes to be inserted, and Dick Clark, Jocko Henderson, and various other American, Canadian, British, and German jocks did them.
In Memphis, Sam Phillips, having abandoned blues and begun assembling a stable of rockabillies, started a new label, Phillips International (PI), to concentrate on pop music, stuff with less of a twang. Its logo had the words “New York—Memphis—Hollywood,” which was maybe wishful thinking, and it launched in September with records by Buddy Blake, Hayden Thompson, Barbara Pittman, Johnny Carroll (whom he poached from Decca), and Bill Justis. The motive behind PI was just a little bit cynical; Sam knew the Dutch label Philips was going to enter the U.S. market eventually, and he planned to have a similarly named label up and running by that time so they’d have to buy him out. He told Johnny Carroll that he’d release all five singles at the same time, and whichever of the artists sold, he’d write them a longer-term contract. That was a bet he didn’t exactly win: of the five records, Bill Justis’s “Raunchy” took off, an instrumental that was instantly catchy and wound up as a #1 pop record—Sun’s biggest triumph since Elvis. Justis was already employed by Sam as his studio bandleader, so in a way he already had a contract. But the real surprise came just after PI launched: Marion Keisker, who’d been at Sam’s side since 1950 when they were both on the same radio station, suddenly quit to join the Air Force. She and Sam had had a big fight, and she’d just walked out. When Elvis came by at Christmas, he realized that things had changed at Sun, and one of those was that Ms. Keisker was no longer there. Another thing—although they wouldn’t find this out for another couple of weeks—is that Carl Perkins, having not had a hit in ages, was about to sign with Columbia. That’s okay, there was still Jerry Lee.
The year ended on a very high note; in May, Chuck Berry had gone into Chess Studios with pianist Lafayette Leake and a rhythm section of Willie Dixon and Fred Below and cut another session, which included a couple of obscure tunes (“Oh Baby Doll,” “How You’ve Changed”), one of his trickier lyrics (“13 Question Method”), and the anthem teenage America had been waiting for. “Rock and Roll Music” was, even more than “School Day,” a celebration of the music’s central place in teen life, a declaration of independence, and a performance like Berry had never before given, with guitar pyrotechnics supporting a great lyric. He made it perfectly clear: he had nothing against other types of music, provided they were well played, but “It’s gotta be rock and roll music / If you wanna dance with me.” And what teenager in his or her right mind could disagree?