chapter eleven
Berry Gordy Jr. in front of Hitsville, U.S.A. The action was in the basement studio.
(The Detroit News)
In January 1959, death entered the top ten. Actually, it had already been there with the condemned murderer Tom Dooley facing his last days on the charts, but another old murder came alive again in the hands of Lloyd Price, who’d moved over to ABC-Paramount from Specialty and was enjoying an enhanced production budget with female backup singers and an orchestra behind him. His first single for them was a reworking of a 1950 Imperial record by the mysterious New Orleans pianist Archibald, who got the song from who knows where and called it “Stack A-Lee.” Price renamed it “Stagger Lee” and wrung as much drama as he could in three minutes out of the murder of Billy Lyons in St. Louis over a gambling dispute, beginning with a haiku-like verse sung almost unaccompanied (“The night was cold, and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down”) that wasn’t in the original, and then picking up the tempo until by the end the backup singers were chanting, “Go Stagger Lee! Go Stagger Lee!”
Another bit of death making its way into the charts in January wasn’t quite as overt. Doré Records was a label run by Lew Bedell, whose other label, Era, featured acts like Gogi Grant who played the boîtes of Hollywood. Bedell had married into royalty—Dede Barrymore, a non-acting member of the dynasty that went back to the early days of the film business—and had money of his own. When his next-door neighbor’s son told him that there was a group at his school, Fairfax High, that didn’t sound like any other, he offered to audition them, and very soon thereafter a spooky teenager named Phillip Spector showed up with a demo he and three other kids had cut at Gold Star Studios, “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet.” Bedell loved it, but reminded Spector that there also had to be a B side, so the kid went home and wrote another, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and went back to Gold Star with it, minus one of the kids on the first song. Spector, Marshall Leib, and Annette Kleinbard sang with passion, if not complete accuracy, and Bedell put the record out, only to have Spector visit him every single day to see if there’d been any action. Months went by and finally Minneapolis reported some sales, and then Fargo, North Dakota, ordered fifteen thousand copies. The Teddy Bears, as they were known, were hot, and nobody knew the source of the lyric: the tombstone of Spector’s father, which bore the inscription “To know him was to love him.” The Teddy Bears managed to record enough material for an album, but Philip had already lost interest and was off on another tangent.
Some people might have wondered if all Los Angeles teenagers were shy and sang in muted voices like the Teddy Bears and another phenomenon who’d cropped up recently: Ritchie Valens’s “Donna” was a smash, heard by more kids than had heard his debut, “Come On, Let’s Go,” or the B side, a traditional Mexican song, “La Bamba.” Valens, whose real name was Richard Valenzuela, was a personable lad from East LA who’d been scooped up by would-be mogul Bob Keene, who saw great things in his future.
That future ended on February 3, 1959, along with that of two others. Valens had joined the Winter Dance Party, a revue that also included Dion and the Belmonts, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper (a DJ from Beaumont, Texas, named J. P. “Jape” Richardson, who did humorous recitations like his current hit “Chantilly Lace,” and wrote novelty songs for others), and Frankie Sardo. It was hardly an A-level tour, and although it was a good break for Ritchie and Dion and the others, Buddy—who was listed as Buddy Holly and the Crickets, although no Crickets were on board and he’d had to draft a country disc jockey he’d been producing, Waylon Jennings, to play bass—needed money badly, possibly because Norman Petty was withholding royalties, so he signed on. Further evidence of how second-rate the tour was could be found in the buses they were traveling in, whose heaters continually broke down in the frigid midwestern winter, and the venues they played, like the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, where they found themselves on February 2. When they got to the venue, Buddy called Maria Elena and told her that conditions on the tour were so bad that he expected someone to mutiny. Then he decided that he was going to take action; his clothes stank, and if he could get to Moorhead, the tour’s next stop, early enough, he could do some laundry, a little advance publicity for the show, and get some rest in a heated hotel room. He chartered a plane with the help of the local promoter to fly himself, Jennings, and his guitarist, Tommy Allsup, to Fargo, North Dakota, leaving after the show at 12:30 A.M. He was already without his drummer, Charlie Bunch, who was in a hospital bed minus a bunch of toes, which he’d lost to frostbite when their bus had broken down.
During the time leading up to the concert in Clear Lake, word spread that Buddy had found a plane to take him to the next stop, and suddenly everyone wanted to fly. There were only three passenger seats, so when J. P. Richardson approached Waylon Jennings about taking his place, Jennings, who, not having been outside of west Texas much, was actually enjoying the tour, readily agreed in exchange for using Richardson’s newly purchased sleeping bag on the bus. Tommy Allsup, though, was a harder sell when Ritchie Valens approached him about taking his seat, so they decided to flip a coin. Ritchie picked heads. It was heads. When the show was over, the three musicians headed out to the airstrip, where they met Roger Peterson, the twenty-one-year-old pilot, and Jerry Dwyer, owner of the charter service they’d booked with, who was helping prepare the aircraft for the trip. Peterson was a fully qualified pilot, and he’d been checking the weather, which was snowy and windy, but nothing he couldn’t handle. What he didn’t see, however, was two weather bulletins predicting low visibility due to developing snowstorms along the route. This would require flying with instruments—“by wire,” as pilots say—but Peterson had taken lessons in that. Dwyer’s service, however, wasn’t licensed for this sort of work, nor was Peterson familiar with the particular instrument configuration of the plane, which read altitude in the opposite way from the ones he’d trained on. Slightly after 1:00 the plane took off, and Dwyer sat in the tower watching the taillight in the night sky. At one point, the plane seemed to descend, but Dwyer dismissed it as an optical illusion due to the angle of the plane and its distance from him. Oddly, though, Peterson hadn’t filed a flight plan. Dwyer took to the radio, but there was no answer.
Meanwhile, in Lubbock, the actual Crickets were sitting at Jerry Allison’s house having a discussion. Buddy had told them, “You ever want to get back with me, all you have to do is call,” and they decided that Norman Petty had dealt them a bad hand and they hadn’t gotten any work or made any records since Buddy and they had split. (It’s also not impossible that the ever-ambitious Maria Elena had something to do with this, as she had with Buddy studying at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg.) They called New York to find out where Buddy was, and then called Clear Lake only to find out that he was on his way to the airfield. They called the next night’s venue in Moorhead and left a message for him to call them.
Jerry Dwyer kept trying to contact the plane, and also radioed the Mason City and Fargo airports to see if they’d heard from it, with no luck. Finally, an alert for the missing plane went out, and as daylight returned, Dwyer lost his patience and climbed into another of his planes to follow the route he figured Peterson had taken. It didn’t take him long to spot the wreckage eight and a half miles from takeoff and the bodies strewn around it; Richardson had been thrown forty feet by the impact, and Buddy and Ritchie were twenty feet from the wreckage. Peterson’s body was still in the plane. The rest of the performers found out while checking into the hotel in Moorhead, Maria Elena found out from a business associate, Mrs. Holley from a gossipy neighbor. The rest of the country found out soon enough. In Moorhead, a contest was held to choose a local band to fill out the bill, which was won by the Shadows, fronted by Robert Velline, who called himself Bobby Vee. Frankie Avalon and Jimmy Clanton flew in to fill the other two slots on the tour. And the show went on.
Despite the words of a popular song written years later, this wasn’t “the day the music died,” but an unpleasant moment in an evolution that was already under way. The actual replacement of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper by Bobby Vee, Frankie Avalon, and Jimmy Clanton was also symbolic. Had they lived, Richardson would no doubt have continued an already thriving career as a country songwriter, Valens might have had a further career, especially if he could have freed himself of Bob Keene, who was still an amateur player despite having had a few hits with Sam Cooke, and Holly might have balanced the string-laced Gordon Jenkins pop productions Decca was saddling him with and future recordings with the Crickets, had they been able to come to terms. What did happen was that the Crickets continued to record, Norman Petty overdubbed some existing Holly recordings he had in the can using the Fireballs, an instrumental group he was producing, and Jack Hansen did other overdubs on stuff that had been recorded in New York. Death, as always, was a brilliant career move, and Petty continued to help Decca issue Buddy Holly recordings through 1969.
But more and more, “good music”–leaning performers were taking over white rock & roll. Even black music was softening up, with the Platters’ superb but square rendition of the old warhorse “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” leading the charts in January and February, and Clyde McPhatter’s “A Lover’s Question” and LaVern Baker’s “I Cried a Tear” close behind, polite but with teen appeal.
Some things remained the same while others were changing in the background. Elvis’s entry into the Army was satirized by one “Bill Parsons”’ record of “All-American Boy,” the story of a kid who, with the assistance of a man with a cigar, makes it big with his voice and guitar, only to be drafted in the last verse. (“Parsons,” it turned out, was the future country star Bobby Bare.) Vocal groups were still around, quietly breaking new ground; the Crests were a bi-racial quartet fronted by Johnny Maestro (Johnny Mastrangelo, no known relation to Carlo of the Belmonts), whose “Sixteen Candles” was the perfect mixture of Italian American nasality and vocal group soul, and the Flamingos, having left Chess (but not before playing Chess heir apparent Marshall Chess’s Bar Mitzvah in Chicago—they were Jewish, after all, and had met in a black synagogue) for George Goldner’s latest New York–based label, End, released their first echo-drenched masterpiece in “Lovers Never Say Good-Bye” early in the year. Two other white groups made the pop charts; the Bell Notes’ “I’ve Had It” was nasal and monotonous, but had something that sparked airplay, and, from Olympia, Washington, the Fleetwoods polished up the Teddy Bears’ hushed, winsome sound with “Come Softly to Me,” with its irresistible “dum dum, doobie dum dum” backing supporting Gretchen Christopher’s barely audible lead vocal. It was hypnotic. And the Coasters continued to disrupt the social order with help from Leiber and Stoller by telling the story of “Charlie Brown,” who wasn’t the round-headed kid of the Peanuts comics, but a dangerous class clown who smokes in the locker room and calls the English teacher “daddy-o.” The record made full use of the songwriters’ knowledge of teenagers, King Curtis’s sax, Bobby Nunn’s basso profundo (“Who me?”), and even trendy sped-up vocals (“Yeah, you”). The rock & roll spirit, at any rate, continued to peek out despite everything.
But there was a generational change happening in blues. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf had already charted their last singles, although they’d put out new ones for some time, and Little Walter would in October. A new generation of Chicago bluesmen was coming up on the West Side instead of the South Side. Fiery left-hander Otis Rush had had a hit with “All Your Love,” and names like Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells were drawing younger crowds to Chicago’s clubs. A new generation of Memphis blues talent, too, was emerging, with Bobby “Blue” Bland blasting onto the scene in 1957 with “Further On Up the Road” and then putting out one great record after another and hitting the road, often with Junior Parker, who had signed with Don Robey’s Duke label after Don Robey lured him away from Sun.
Ray Charles had sat 1958 out as a vocalist, for the most part, as Ahmet Ertegun’s brother, Nesuhi, head of Atlantic’s well-regarded jazz department, took him into the studio with selected players and recorded a couple of excellent instrumental albums with the Modern Jazz Quartet’s vibraphonist Milt Jackson and Charles’s own saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman. Ray then headed to the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival for a knockout set, recorded by Atlantic and released late in the year as Ray Charles at Newport, mostly instrumental until the end of the set when Raelette Margie Hendrix steps out during “(Night Time Is) The Right Time” to belt the word “Bay-bay” over and over, building incredible tension and helping cement this album’s reputation as one of the greatest live sets ever recorded. Charles lost no time recording a single version of it, which climbed the pop and soul charts, signaling his return as a pop artist. And return he had; on February 18, 1959, he and his band went into Atlantic Recording Studios and made history again. Ray had a Wurlitzer electric piano he used on the road, and although jazz fans decried its dead, metallic sound, he was nonetheless able to use it to drive a revival service on a tune he’d made up on the road that was more or less a rhythm exercise with boilerplate lyrics (“See the girl with the red dress on” and the like) interspersed with call-and-response moans with the Raelettes. The thing, titled “What’d I Say,” came in at over five minutes, but everybody who heard it knew it was a hit, and it had a convenient place to splice it in the middle, so Atlantic rushed it out as part one and part two on the 45. The only other song he recorded at that session was “Tell the Truth,” by Lowman Pauling of the “5” Royales. With the help of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke and a few others, a new kind of black popular music was being born.
And with the help of the “5” Royales, too; although unless you were a fan, got lucky listening to a late-night radio broadcast, or managed to catch them live, you’d never know it. Was King trying to kill this act? Were they incompetent? Underfunded? Probably all three, it appears now. The Royales had recorded the original of “Tell the Truth” in April 1958, and it had been released as the B side to “Double or Nothing,” a slow burner with solid vocal work. But the real insult came in September, when King relegated the group’s top live showcase to the B side of their next single, “Don’t Let It Be in Vain,” another slow gospelly number. There’s some debate about what the actual title of this number was, but they’d been doing it for some time, stretching it out to over twenty minutes at times and letting Pauling go nuts with his guitar, and after seeing it at a show in his hometown of Memphis, a teenage guitarist named Steve Cropper went home, took the belt off his jeans, and used it to extend his guitar strap in imitation of Lowman’s low-slung Les Paul strap. The song came out under the incomprehensible title “The Slummer the Slum,” and yet the group seems to be singing “the stompety-stomp,” which makes sense with the preceding words (“I can do”). Nobody bought it, nobody played it. The “5” Royales continued to release superb records throughout 1959, but in 1960 their contract was over, and they and King parted company, no doubt with sighs of relief on both sides.
The gospelly lead singing that Ray Charles, Johnny and Eugene Tanner of the “5” Royales, and Sam Cooke (who was still finding his way in the pop world while putting out hits for Keen) had introduced was catching on, but it didn’t have a name just yet. More new talents were doing it, though; in 1958 a group from Chicago, the Impressions, had a smash with “For Your Precious Love” with lead singer Jerry Butler pouring out his plea with emotion and precision, and in 1959, Mercury introduced Brook Benton, a silky-voiced veteran of the Camden Jubilee Singers who followed Sam Cooke’s lead and went pop, scoring a #1 R&B hit and top-ten pop hit with “It’s Just a Matter of Time.” The word for this sort of music wouldn’t fully emerge before the end of the year, when the Cannonball Adderley Quintet recorded a live album in a San Francisco jazz club that included a twelve-minute workout called “That There.” Jazz was progressing nicely, and was popular, but some of its practitioners felt that it was becoming too abstract, including Adderley, a rotund, extroverted alto saxophonist. “That There” not only showed off Adderley’s band, but it was also danceable, and, while adhering to blues changes, had a groove that helped propel sales of The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco higher than any of his previous efforts. When the jazz press asked what he called this new approach, he told them it was soul. And, in fact, Atlantic had already used the word in the titles of the 1958 Ray Charles-Milt Jackson albums Soul Brothers and Soul Meeting. It was a term that was beginning to circulate in black communities.
Another milestone in the coming of soul was a strange revival of an old act. Early in 1959, George Treadwell, manager of the Drifters, had fired everyone in the group and hired a new batch of Drifters, a vocal group formerly known as the Five Crowns. The old group hadn’t had a hit since Clyde McPhatter had left, but Treadwell figured the brand still had some miles left on it, so he informed Atlantic that the Drifters were ready to do a session. Atlantic put Leiber and Stoller on the case as producers, and Treadwell handed them a song that he had half credit on, “There Goes My Baby.” The arrangement was based on a Brazilian rhythm that was popular at the time called the baion, so it looked ready to go until they got to the studio. It just failed to gel. A tympani was out of tune. Mike Stoller had a framework for an arrangement, and a guy named Stan Applebaum was filling it in. As Leiber remembered later, “Stanley wrote something that sounded like some Caucasian takeoff and we had this Latin thing going on this out-of-tune tympani and the Drifters were singing something in another key, but the total effect, there was something magnetic about it … We took the playbacks to Atlantic one afternoon to play them for Ahmet and Jerry … and we were saying ‘Oh, there’s nothing salvageable about this’ and then we played this one side and Mike said ‘There’s something fascinating about it. You know, it’s a fucking mess, but there’s something very magnetic about it.’” Wexler proclaimed his disdain, but Ertegun thought it should be released. He was right; although it sounded like nothing anybody had ever done, the lead singer, Ben E. King, sold the song with his passionate delivery, and then, in the middle, there was a weird instrumental break featuring strings! Nobody had ever used strings on a rhythm and blues record before, so no wonder Leiber was so afraid; they’d spent a lot of money on this track, and it came out sounding sideways, due to the odd modal framework Applebaum had cast the string interlude in. “I’d be listening to the radio sometimes and hear it,” he said, “and I was convinced it sounded like two stations playing one thing.” But the radio was playing it, wasn’t it?
In Detroit, the new sound was cropping up in the clubs, and Berry Gordy was tired of writing hits and misses for other people. He’d assembled a bunch of like-minded souls around him—mostly would-be performers, but also his sister Anna, his wife, Raynoma, and songwriters Bill “Smokey” Robinson of the Miracles and Roquel “Billy” Davis. He still needed money, and after the flop of his 3-D Record Mart his family’s Ber-Berry Co-op Savings Fund was reluctant to loan him any more money. He needed $800, he figured, and, after refining his plans and running the numbers, he finally presented them with a framework they’d accept. He began by setting up a music publishing company, Jobete Music, to administer the songs that he’d release on the label he envisioned heading eventually, and in December 1958, he went into United Sound, the best studio in Detroit, with a twenty-year-old singer named Marv Johnson, and a band consisting of Thomas “Beans” Bowles on flute and saxophone, Eddie Willis and Joe Messina on guitars, James Jamerson on bass, and Benny Benjamin on drums and cut “Come to Me” b/w “Whisper.” He then pressed it up and released it on his new label, Tamla, as Tamla 101, in late January 1959. The record took off so fast locally that Gordy realized he couldn’t yet keep up with the potential demand, so he leased it to United Artists, which got it to #5 on the R&B charts and #30 on the pop charts. (Johnson stayed on United Artists, and Gordy produced most of his records, including his bestselling one, “You Got What It Takes,” in 1960.) Gordy took the money and put it back in the company, going back into the studio with a kid he’d used to demo songs he and Tyran Carlo had written for Jackie Wilson, Eddie Holland. Again, he had to lease Tamla 102 to United Artists, but it wasn’t a hit. Gordy soldiered on; driving down West Grand Boulevard with his friend Mable John (older sister of Little Willie John, and a member of the Raelettes), he saw a house for sale. Since Gordy had no license, she was driving, and suddenly Gordy said, “Stop!”
“We stop and get out,” she wrote later. “He walks up the stairs, peers in the window. ‘That’s it.’ ‘What’s “it?”’ I ask. ‘Headquarters.’ ‘For what?’ ‘The operation. The music publishing company. The label. The studio. It’s all going to happen here. Can you see it?’” Gordy seemed to be able to see things others couldn’t, so she assured him that if he could see it, that was good enough. He bought it and put up a sign: “Hitsville U.S.A.”
It only took him a few more months and a few more records to begin to make that sign make sense. The third Tamla release was by a guy from Mississippi named Barrett Strong, a friend of Jackie Wilson’s who was singing in a gospel group with his three sisters when Wilson came over one day and heard him playing the piano and singing and noted that a friend of his had just started a label and had written hits for him in the past. Soon afterward, he brought Gordy to meet Strong, and in April, Strong had a single out on Tamla, “Let’s Rock” b/w “Do the Very Best You Can,” recorded in somebody’s basement. It flopped, but Strong was impressed with Gordy’s level of organization; he’d even run an ad on a local radio station saying that his new company was looking for songwriters, musicians, and performers. The same month “Let’s Rock” came out, Tamla released “Solid Sender” by Chico Leverett, another local singer, but restricted distribution to Detroit. In June came “It,” a novelty by “Ron & Bill,” who were Miracles Ronnie White and Bill “Smokey” Robinson, which didn’t do much even when Gordy leased it to Chess’s Argo subsidiary. Next up was “Going to the Hop,” by the Satintones, a vocal group that included Chico Leverett. The flip side was “Motor City,” and Leverett remembers Gordy offering $100 to anyone who could come up with a name for a new label he envisioned. He suggested Motor City Records, but Gordy held on to his money.
Gordy probably didn’t like the name, but it’s also possible he didn’t have the hundred bucks; he’d paid to press and distribute a lot of records in a short time, and the only money anybody’d seen was for “Come to Me,” and that money went to United Artists, who understandably took a cut. Gordy was sitting at a piano at Hitsville one day, and the receptionist, Janie Bradford, a high school student who worked there after school, noted that “he had this riff going. We stood there and kept writing and throwing out lyrics and improving on the melody and the whole thing came together.” “We” included Barrett Strong, and a couple of white high school students who heard the racket coming out of the house walked into the situation toting a bass and a guitar. “Just walked up and asked if they could be on the session,” Strong remembered later. “Never saw them again in my life.” Nor have they ever been identified. They sat down with Benny Benjamin on drums, Brian Holland on tambourine, and Strong on piano in the brand-new Hitsville studio, and when they were done, Tamla’s first smash had been born. Write what you know, they say, and Gordy and Bradford (he gave her co-writing credit) sure did; “Money (That’s What I Want)” was an instant smash in August, so much so that in order to make the jump to national success, Gordy had to license the record to his sister’s Chess-distributed label, Anna, in early 1960. But it sold and sold and sold, and money: that’s what they got.
Not everyone who was getting into the music business around this time knew as much about what they were doing as Berry Gordy did, of course. A lot of people were leaving the Sun Records ambit in Memphis, among them Jud Phillips, who started Judd Records; a former studio musician there, Eddie Bond, who started Stomper Time Records; Scotty Moore, out of a job even before Elvis went into the Army, who became a partner in Fernwood Records; Buddy Cunningham, who’d cut a couple of country records for Sam, who opened Cover Records; and Bill Justis and Jack Clement, both of whom Sam fired in March 1959, who started Play Me Records and Summer Records, respectively. Meanwhile, Sam broke ground on a new Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison. Another former Sun artist, Ray Harris, joined with a couple of instrumentalists who’d played on Sun records, Quinton Claunch and Bill Cantrell, to launch Hi Records, with investment money from record store owner Joe Cuoghi and a few silent partners, and started putting out instrumental records by another Elvis alumnus, Bill Black.
Then there was Jim Stewart. Stewart was a banker, an established figure in Memphis, but he also had an avocation that he just loved: he played country fiddle. Both he and his sister, Estelle Stewart Axton—who also worked in a bank—loved music, and she was a rock & roll fan who sought out the latest tunes. Her co-workers were amazed at her ability to pick the hits, and soon she was running down to the local wholesaler and buying records to re-sell to them at work for a profit. Jim entered the other end of the process. He had a barber, Marshall Ellis, who cut his hair regularly, and also wrote and recorded country songs, one of which had been picked up by country star Hank Locklin and, because Ellis had copyrighted it, made him a pile of cash. So Jim ran the numbers, started a publishing company, and went into partnership in a record company he called Satellite, after Sputnik, with some other people, including a disc jockey named Fred Byler. They hung some drapes in a garage and cut Byler singing a couple of tunes, including one of Jim’s. It flopped rather spectacularly, but Jim was hooked. Next, he recorded a local guy doing a rockabilly number, which, people who have heard it say, was really good, but although Ellis had schooled him in publishing, he knew nothing about distribution. Then Ellis moved and took his tape recorder with him, but Jim’s new barber had a daughter who he thought had talent—plus, he had a storage building out in Brunswick, Tennessee, about twenty miles away, which he’d let Jim use to open a recording studio. Jim moved his operations to Brunswick, and Estelle, caught up in the fever of the new enterprise, convinced her husband to let her mortgage their house to get $2,500 to buy an Ampex 350 professional console tape recorder for Satellite to use. Then, out of nowhere, came the Veltones, five black guys singing harmony with an unissued single for Sun in their past and a pretty good song, “Fool in Love,” ready to go. How they found their way to Brunswick is a good question, although it could have been that Estelle’s son, Charles “Packy” Axton, had run into them while carousing in the black bars he liked to frequent, or else Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman, who had been on the road with Sun rockabilly Billy Lee Riley as a guitarist before signing on as an engineer at the fledgling label, and who had half credit on “Fool in Love,” urged them to go to Brunswick. However they got there, the Veltones cut “Fool in Love,” and Jim released it as Satellite 100 in September. Before too long, Mercury Records came calling and picked it up for distribution, and although it didn’t light any fires, it made Satellite a few hundred bucks. Ellis was right!
And what was Sam Phillips doing, anyway? He’d put some of the Presley money into his radio station, KSHE, with the all-female announcers, put some more of it into a friend’s scheme, a hotel franchise called Holiday Inn, and of course there was the plush new headquarters he was building. The studio there wouldn’t be ready until October, but Sam had great hopes for two new artists he’d found. Carl Mann was a fresh-faced sixteen-year-old from Jackson, Mississippi, who’d had some experience on the road and decent guitar skills and a strong tenor voice to apply them to, and Sam saw his potential immediately. There’d be a gimmick, too, and one that’d be good for Phillips International: pop standards, but rocked up. His first release was a version of the silky Nat King Cole number “Mona Lisa,” and although rocking it up was a gimmick, it was a gimmick that worked. In person, teens went for him. It looked like Sam had found something new. The other artist he was hoping would hit was another matter entirely. Charlie Rich was a bit of a greaser and a bit of a drunk, but his ability to sell a tune in the bars where he worked night after night, playing piano and singing standards and jazz tunes, was amazing. He wrote, too, in partnership with his wife, Margaret Ann, and had a pretty good parcel of original material. He, too, was signed to Phillips International, although Sam was waiting for the right moment—and the right song—to spring him on the public. But according to people who worked there, something had gone out of the Sun / Phillips International operation, something greater than the talents on both sides of the microphone that they’d lost. Sam still believed in Jerry Lee Lewis, but after Marion Keisker had left, he got way more interested in building and buying and selling radio stations than ever.
Summer had become a testing ground for trends; teenagers were out of school, many of them had jobs that they could work for longer hours than when they were in school, and, hence, had more disposable income, some of which they spent on records. But the kind of records they were buying was changing. Chuck Berry, for instance, was still making good records for the most part (we’ll pass over his Italian-dialect flop “Anthony Boy”) and while his first release for 1959, “Almost Grown,” was a good teenage protest song and went to #3 on the R&B charts, it stalled at #32 on the pop charts, where its B side “Little Queenie” died at #80. His patriotic follow-up, “Back in the U.S.A.,” which celebrated returning home after touring the world, got to #16 R&B and #37 pop. And a song that is regarded as a masterpiece, “Memphis, Tennessee,” a superbly crafted tale of a man attempting to return a missed phone call that Berry only reveals in the last verse is not from a distant girlfriend, but from his six-year-old daughter, who is living with his estranged wife, a song that has been covered hundreds of times, never charted at all. Instead, the early summer saw Johnny Horton semi-mining the folk fad with a historical song written by Jimmy Driftwood, “The Battle of New Orleans,” the exotica of Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village” with its jungle sounds, Lloyd Price with another big production, “Personality,” and a weird version of an early Leiber and Stoller hit for Little Willie Littlefield, “K. C. Loving,” recast by an eccentric one-man band, Wilbert Harrison, as “Kansas City.” Oh, and “good music” by Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Carl Dobkins Jr., and the Browns.
Some of this was due to the spread of the Top Forty format among high-wattage stations with strong signals and conservative programmers, but some of it was due to the fact that a generational change was in the air; a disc jockey named Art Laboe broadcast his show live from Scrivner’s Drive-In in Los Angeles over KPOP, and took live requests from the customers. He noticed that they often asked for older records rather than contemporary hits, and that certain older records, which had only been mild hits, were requested more than others. It didn’t take Laboe long to figure out a way to make money out of this, and he drew up a list of the twelve most popular songs he’d been playing, then approached their record companies and offered to lease them for a given amount of time for use on an LP. This was a very attractive proposition; Dootsie Williams, for instance, had let his Dootone label languish and was existing on party records by the likes of Redd Foxx on his Laff label. He’d lost Dootone’s main asset, the Penguins, to Mercury years back, but held on to the master (and the publishing rights) for “Earth Angel,” their only hit, and one on Laboe’s list. He took Laboe’s modest lease payment, which, however much it was, was more than “Earth Angel” had earned in ages, and he’d make royalties if Laboe’s project worked. Soon, Laboe had his dozen tracks and released his record, calling it Oldies but Goodies. It went to #2 on the album charts, and stayed on that chart for 183 weeks. For those of you who can’t do the math in your heads, that’s three and a half years, and it was later joined by seven annual siblings. It didn’t hurt that Laboe gave his label an honest name, Original Sound, so that buyers knew they weren’t getting copycat recordings, and in some cases, Oldies but Goodies would reignite interest in the oldie, causing it to chart again—as happened with “Earth Angel,” actually, in 1959. Radio stations also realized this was enough of a trend to start featuring an “oldie of the week,” or just adding occasional spins of an old hit to the playlist for a while. It was sure more humane than subjecting the DJ to another three minutes of Fabian.
A significant part of the audience for Oldies but Goodies was older consumers in their twenties or late teens, who were susceptible to nostalgia and more likely to have the cash for an LP purchase, but that was also the audience for the growing folk movement, and that movement prompted George Wein, who’d been putting on the Newport Jazz Festival since 1954, to try an experiment. He’d already stretched things by presenting Ray Charles in 1958, resulting in a great album, and that same year he’d also booked blues singer Big Maybelle and Chuck Berry, the latter of whom scandalized many jazz fans—including Wein, who’d never seen Berry’s famous duckwalk. For 1959, Wein decided that a full-fledged folk festival might work, and got a friend and fellow nightclub impresario from Chicago, Albert Grossman, to help him pick a bill for the weekend. They picked fifteen acts for each night, headlined by Pete Seeger. The first night was largely commercial folksingers, albeit not pop-commercial, among them Odetta, John Jacob Niles, and the Clancy Brothers, and the second night was another fifteen-act show headlined by the Kingston Trio, with Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Jean Ritchie, Bob Gibson, and the Reverend Gary Davis, a ragtime guitar-playing preacher from South Carolina living in Harlem, being big attractions. But if that Sunday is remembered for anything, it’s for Gibson bringing onstage a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl who’d been making waves on the Boston folk scene to sing a duet with him. By the time they’d finished “Virgin Mary Had One Child,” the name Joan Baez had gone out to a few thousand more people. The daughter of a nuclear scientist currently teaching in Boston, she’d already appeared on a compilation album for a Boston folksinger named Ted Alevizos, Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square, which also featured one Bill Wood, but the record was impossible to find—and, more crucial to the folk music media, impossible to find in New York. Shortly after Newport, she signed with Vanguard, a label that had released a little folk music (and a lot of classical music) and had also recorded that first Newport Folk Festival.
But the non-Madras-wearing crowd was busy being teenagers, and seeking out the best music they could so they could dance to it. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, always dependable, found a dance craze that black teens had been doing for a while, and wrote a song around it, but the other side of the record sold better and got more airplay. The B side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” also sold some, but “The Twist,” as it was called, would have to wait a while. Elsewhere on King, James Brown made a surprising return from a few years of fairly awful records, and, like “Please Please Please,” this one was a plea to “Try Me.”
Summer 1959 may have been a hot one, judging from the number of slow records that made the charts then. “Sleepwalk,” a steel guitar instrumental by two Italian Canadian kids, Santo and Johnny, was one of the slowest records ever, and Sammy Turner’s odd reading of “Lavender Blue” also wound up in the upper reaches of the chart, its producer an uncredited Phillip Spector, whose mother had noted his facility with language and sent him to New York to study to become an interpreter at the United Nations. He dutifully went to school, but also applied and was accepted to another “school,” Leiber and Stoller’s office, where they noted his talent and let him play around under their watchful eyes. Young Phillip no doubt perked up his ears at the summer’s vocal group masterpiece. “I Only Have Eyes for You,” like the Platters’ version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” earlier in the year, was a remake of a standard, done on a production shoestring for George Goldner’s End Records, and was the record the Flamingos had been fated to make since they began. Awash in echo, it had an almost orchestral richness, largely using nothing but the group’s voices. A soaring wordless falsetto line punctuated the song, as did the group chanting “do-bop sh-bop” under the verse, languidly sung by Nate Nelson. Goldner believed in this standards-done-vocal-group-style so much that he had the group record an entire album, Flamingo Serenade, that marks a separation line between the classic vocal group sound of the 1950s and the new sound that was about to emerge, a fitting milestone for the end of the decade.
It wasn’t rock & roll’s greatest summer by a long shot, but there were forces gathering that would have liked to see it be the last. In March, Chuck Berry had opened a nightclub in St. Louis, Club Bandstand. It made a point of stressing that it was open to all, and its manager, Francine Gilliam, was a statuesque blonde. The initial publicity from both black and white St. Louisans was strongly positive, and it looked like it would be a success. Meanwhile, its owner was on the road raising money to keep it alive, and in August, he played a gig at a high school fraternity dance in Meridian, Mississippi, which turned into trouble when a white girl kissed him a little too long in the autograph crush after the show. In the hubbub afterward, Berry was taken to jail, allegedly for his protection, and the $750 he’d been paid for the show was taken as a fine for his incitement to riot. Much worse was around the corner.
On December 1, Chuck and his band were spending the afternoon in Juarez, Mexico, before playing a show in El Paso that evening. They went into a bar called the Savoy and met a man remembered only as Venchi, who, hearing that they wanted to see the town, introduced them to a young woman, Janice Escalanti. Janice knew her way around, all right; she’d just gotten out of jail in El Paso for public drunkenness, her third arrest, the other two being for vagrancy and prostitution. At the moment, besides drinking, what she was doing was avoiding school; she was fourteen years old. But she hit it off with the group, and at the end of the afternoon, they returned to El Paso, where she confessed to Chuck that much as she’d like to see the show, she was broke. Well, fine—artists often sold pictures to be autographed after their shows, so he offered her the job and a cut of the profits. He then drove her to another bar, where they waited for a friend of hers to show up to let her into her apartment to change clothes. He asked her right off how old she was, and she told him she was twenty-one, of course, and he asked her what she did for a living. She admitted she’d been doing freelance prostitution but wanted to stop. Berry thought it over and told her he’d wanted to hire a hat-check girl at Club Bandstand; would she be interested? She’d be far from El Paso and the world she’d known. She could turn over a new leaf. She readily agreed and joined the band for the rest of the tour, finishing up in St. Louis, where Chuck introduced her to Francine Gilliam, who’d show her the ropes.
Right off, Francine asked her for her Social Security card and birth certificate, and Janice didn’t have either, but she definitely didn’t look her age, so Francine was fooled, too. Still, her work habits left a lot to be desired; she’d wander around the club talking to patrons, leaving the hat-check station empty. Francine put her on the door instead, and again, she’d just wander off and leave the cashbox unattended. On December 17, Chuck had had enough, and went to the house where she was staying and told her she was fired, and that she was to pack her stuff and get ready to head back to El Paso. At the bus station, he gave her a one-way ticket and some money and left. In the time before the bus left, she got to talking to a guy who took her to a bar, and before long she was back at the Club Bandstand, where she hung out, talking to folks. Berry, seeing her there, blew up and had her taken to a hotel to sober up. The next day, he told her he’d give her the ticket and the money, but he’d have to watch her get on the bus. This apparently didn’t sit well with her, so she sat tight, tried to call Berry on the phone, but couldn’t get past Francine. She then started hooking again, trying to figure out what to do next. She didn’t want to go back to El Paso and her old life, and she didn’t want to go back to high school. For some reason she called the police in Yuma, Arizona, who were puzzled about the call, but urged her to stay where she was and wait for the St. Louis police. They showed up shortly afterward and arrested and questioned her, and then two detectives took her to Club Bandstand where, in the early minutes of December 22, they arrested Chuck Berry as he left the stage after his last set and arrested him for violation of the Mann Act: transporting a minor across state lines for the purposes of prostitution, a federal crime.
Oh, and speaking of federal crimes, there was a brand-new one about to be invented, if anyone could figure out how to word the law making it illegal: payola. In November, the chairman of the FCC had casually mentioned that radio stations taking payola might be in danger of losing their licenses. This was an interesting problem; as long as anyone could remember, promotion men visiting radio stations had done things to thank DJs—some of America’s most underpaid entertainers, stars like Alan Freed and Bill Randle notwithstanding. These poor guys were happy to receive a pair of socks, one promotion man remembered, let alone a bottle of whiskey or maybe ten bucks. Of course, for someone like Freed, you could cut them in on the publishing for a hit song, as Chess had done with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” but that was another thing entirely. One of the basic tenets of the increasing focus on payola in radio was that left on their own, teenagers would never buy the garbage the stations were playing and would go for “good music” instead. This shows how out of touch the lawmakers were; anyone who’s been a parent knows that it’s impossible to make teenagers do something they don’t want to do. You could play a record for days on end, and if the kids didn’t like it, they wouldn’t buy it. But the crusade against communism was waning, and crusaders needed to find something else to do.
The question was, which among the manifold evils of the record companies should be tackled first? An editorial in the November 23 issue of Billboard suggested going after the time-honored “free goods” policy of providing a certain number of free records for every much larger quantity ordered by a store, as well as “the corruption of the programming of honest jockeys by crooked or poorly prepared popularity charts, disseminated by certain radio stations and trade papers, on which positions are bought by record companies in return for cash or advertising.” The same issue had headlines like PAYOLA HULLABOO RAGES, over an article about lawmakers trying to figure out what to go after, and MORE READY TO MAKE LIKE CANARIES AS SCANDAL GROWS, in which a number of people were quoted, including a suburban Philadelphia distributor who’d gotten out of the business, who said that when it got to where he’d have to sell ten thousand records just to break even on the cost of “cash, checks, and household articles and baby items” he’d had to give DJs, he stopped handling pop music. He also said that stories of orgies with prostitutes for DJs were “probably” true. Meanwhile, the law was putting the squeeze on Tony Mammarella, the former producer of American Bandstand, and Dick Clark had been called to testify about some perceived business irregularities. In Cincinnati, Syd Nathan said he’d been blackmailed into providing payola, but knew very little about the details, except that he’d given the money for big East Coast markets to Henry Glover (a black A&R man) and had no idea “who got that loot.” Dot Records, home of Pat Boone, was willing to open its books to scrutiny, and WNEW-TV, which was airing Alan Freed’s show, said they were looking into allegations about “interlocking activities,” but weren’t going to pre-judge him. (ABC-TV, where Dick Clark’s shows were, didn’t pick up the phone when the reporter called.) Some record companies, reporting anonymously, the article said, were considering it a merry Christmas, indeed, since they’d stopped spending payola money for the time being. About the wildest things on the charts was “Reveille Rock,” an instrumental by Johnny and the Hurricanes, and Sandy Nelson’s “Teen Beat,” another instrumental, albeit a drum solo by one of the kids who’d witnessed John Dolphin’s murder. How bad was it? Also on the chart that week was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, for whose success it is doubtful payola played a part. As if that weren’t bad enough, Ross Bagdasarian announced that he’d set up thirty-two licensing agreements for Chipmunks-related merchandise. The pesky rodents were preparing for their second annual assault on the charts.