chapter twelve
Two faces of the new pop enjoy adult beverages: Jackie Wilson and Bobby Darin.
(Donaldson Collection/photo by PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
In the last weeks of 1959, Atlantic released a single by Ray Charles. “I’m Movin’ On” was a country tune, originally recorded by Hank Snow in 1950, but it wasn’t surprising that Charles would know it; early in his career he’d found himself stranded in Seattle, where the only musical work he could get was as a pianist with a country band, and besides, in those days there was no black radio to speak of, and plenty of black Southerners gathered to listen to the Grand Ole Opry when its broadcasts came on. But, whether intentionally or not, the record had a message: in 1960, Ray Charles would be moving on, to a new contract that Atlantic couldn’t—and wouldn’t—attempt to match, from ABC-Paramount. He was guaranteed $50,000 a year, the ability to pick his own material (and his own publishing firm for original and contracted material), and a 75–25 split with Paramount on royalties; only a record company that had a huge network and a major film studio behind it could afford to take a mere 25 percent. Atlantic had been outbid on Elvis, and now they’d been outbid on a star they’d brought to prominence through hard work and support during the hard times. Business was business, though. It was just that Atlantic would have to find a new star of Ray Charles’s magnitude—a tall order. For the moment, though, they still had great stuff by him in the can, and would leak it out bit by bit during the year.
Nor was Brother Ray the only star looking for greener pastures; virtually unnoticed in Billboard’s back pages on December 14 was a short review of a record titled “The Mashed Potatoes” by Nat Kendrick and the Swans. Kendrick, it transpired, was James Brown’s drummer, and James, touring incessantly while waiting for another hit, was becoming as well known for his instrumental numbers like “Night Train” as he was for his vocals. One night at the Palms of Hallandale, a major stop for the band in a Miami suburb, they watched as every single person on the dance floor did an odd dance, seemingly grinding out a cigarette on the floor with one foot while gyrating to the beat. During the break, a fan told them it was the mashed potato, the latest dance craze, and everyone in Florida was doing it. The band worked up an instrumental that you could do the mashed potato to, and James provided encouragement and verbal interjections and learned how to do the dance. As they headed back to Cincinnati to record, they saw other audiences doing it; it was a bona fide trend, and James and the Famous Flames were right on top of it. Syd Nathan, though, hated the number and refused to record it. Well, then, James had something up his sleeve: Henry Stone, a former big-band trumpeter turned Miami music-biz character who had almost signed James years ago and had (as was his wont) kept in touch, agreed to put it out on Dade, one of his many labels. Thus, “(Do the) Mashed Potato, Parts 1 and 2” came out under Kendrick’s name and shot up to #2 on the R&B chart and even troubled the lower reaches of the pop chart. Nathan was nothing if not consistent; a month or so later, Brown released another single under his own name, and King put its weight behind “I Know It’s True.” It wasn’t until public demand turned the record over that he had his next substantial hit, “I’ll Go Crazy.” Probably the only reason King got the right side of the follow-up, a searing version of the “5” Royales’ “Think,” was because they had a significant part of the publishing and the B side, “You’ve Got the Power,” featured Brown’s current female vocalist, Bea Ford, instead of him.
Sam Cooke, too, was getting itchy. His records for Keen were doing okay, and more than okay in black markets, but not nearly as well as he’d thought in the pop world. In some ways, he blamed Keen for not having the power to get his records out there, and he also blamed his management, the William Morris Agency. One thing the agency had done, though, was to put him in touch with RCA Records, and at the end of 1959, Sam was looking over a contract with them. They had a great idea for taking him pop: giving him Hugo & Luigi as producers. Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore were first cousins, and had a track record that included working for Mercury looking for R&B records for their white artists to cover, and they were co-running Roulette Records with Morris Levy when RCA offered them each a $100,000 salary and a lot of other perks. They engineered an amiable parting with Levy and went to work. Cooke was their first big client, and they were determined to cross him over. Their first effort with him, “Teenage Sonata,” a Jeff Barry song, overproduced and laden with a big orchestra, stalled at #50 on the pop charts, and suffered even more when Keen released a song Sam had written with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, “Wonderful World,” a far superior number that almost made it into the top ten. Hugo and Luigi tried again, with another Sam Cooke original, “Chain Gang,” where Sam sings lovingly to his girlfriend about how he spends all day breaking rocks, but yearns to be back with her. An odd choice, maybe, but it got to #2, and it looked like Sam, Hugo, and Luigi had hit on something.
Neither Ray Charles nor James Brown was bothering the pop charts, though. Instead, they looked like the triumph of the Nashville Sound, with Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” (written by the late J. P. Richardson), Marty Robbins’s Western narrative (and longest song to make the top ten so far) “El Paso,” Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” Conway Twitty’s “Lonely Blue Boy,” and Johnny Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck” all vying for the top slot, which was usually taken by Percy Faith’s string instrumental “Theme from a Summer Place.” Then there was Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel,” a maudlin tale of a teen couple out on a date when their car gets stuck on a railroad track. They leave the car to its fate, but the girl goes back for the boy’s ring just as the train hits the car. Since it sold like crazy, it was perceived as a trend, and soon there would be more death songs cropping up. But clearly Nashville was hitting the sweet spot between rock & roll and “good music,” so in mid-February, another film studio took a huge chance. Warner Bros. had been mostly issuing soundtracks from their films, and had only nodded in the direction of the top ten by signing a fading Bill Haley, who immediately recorded a version of the South African novelty tune “Skokiaan,” originally done by the Bulawesi Sweet Boys in 1954. In mid-February, Warners made the announcement Nashville had been waiting for ever since it became obvious that the Everly Brothers weren’t going to re-sign with Cadence Records once their contract was up: Warners signed them to an unprecedented deal, ten years at a guaranteed $75,000 per year. Their first record under the new deal, “Cathy’s Clown,” which they’d written, was just as good as the records that had established them, and sold better, too.
Not that some people were paying much attention to singles. Absent a craze like rock & roll selling millions of singles, the record industry’s attention was all on albums. In 1957, a small New York label, Audio Fidelity, had released the first commercial stereophonic LP, although there were very few record players capable of handling it. This changed quickly; the high-fidelity craze had been building during the 1950s, with those who could afford it building or buying equipment capable of handling the higher frequency response of LPs, and buying classical, jazz, and soundtrack albums to play on their new systems. (This was also aided by the adoption of a single standard for playing back sound, the RIAA curve, a means of equalizing recorded material to de-emphasize lower frequencies and emphasize higher ones; ask your local hi-fi nut for details.) Stereo meant replacing the tone arm, amplifier, and preamplifier, and getting a matching speaker (or two new ones), which appealed to the largely affluent male gadget-freak hi-fi crowd. The thing was, as everyone noticed right off, stereo was better; the separation of the sounds resulted in more clarity and detail, and with the improvements in recording technology happening all the time, such labels as Mercury’s Living Presence Sound issued records that audiophiles treasure to this day.
Once the appeal of Audio Fidelity’s Formula One sound effects records and Enoch Light’s gimmicky Provocative Percussion albums and their imitators died off, there were still lots of albums to choose from with actual music on them, and the original cast recording of Sound of Musiclasted over five years atop the charts, in part due to its magnificent stereo recording. The songs on it were pervasive enough that John Coltrane, who’d signed to Atlantic in 1959, recorded it on October 21, 1960, and it became a hit for him, or as much of a hit as a serious jazz player could have. And Atlantic, following a long-established tradition, listed the brands of microphones used to record it and the lathe used to master it in a little box of technical information on the back of his My Favorite Things album, just as classical labels did; for that matter, they did the same for Ray Charles’s albums.
Manufacturers competed like crazy to come up with a home stereo system that didn’t involve expensive, complicated components yet delivered superior sound, and in another corner of the industry, companies like Ampex and Magnecord were noting that records scratched and wore out, and that the real pure sound was direct to tape, so record companies started looking into pre-recorded tape as another way to release music. A whole subset of discount labels emerged, selling knockoffs of popular music and inexpensive (and not always awful) classical albums by Eastern European orchestras, leased on the cheap. An industry survey of the previous year noted that LPs (over six million) had overtaken singles (under five million) in sales for the first time, and some acts were releasing albums and then picking the single from the material there instead of the time-honored practice of building an album around an already-successful single. And adult customers, it was noted, preferred albums to singles.
What was making everyone nervous, of course, was the payola hearings, which were preparing in separate hearings of the FCC and Orrin Hatch’s Senate oversight committee in Washington, but the first bomb the government dropped was, although not unexpected, not scheduled: Elvis Presley got out of the Army a little early, and suddenly things were different. Actually, it started getting interesting when Elvis began his trip from Germany back to the States. The Army put on one last press conference, a tightly scripted event at which Elvis was expected to speak. It didn’t quite go that way. A captain in the Women’s Air Corps who’d been assigned to Armed Forces Television to be part of the coverage of the event was waiting for things to happen, drinking coffee at the bar near a door. “Suddenly it flies open and in steps Elvis … I said, ‘Hi, hon.’” Hardly officer-like behavior, but then, this was Marion Keisker, who’d pretty much discovered him. “Marion!” said Elvis. “In Germany! And an officer! What do I do? Kiss you or salute you?” She replied, “In that order,” and hugged him. The public information officer was shocked and ordered her to leave. As Keisker remembered it later, “Finally, Elvis got free and he came over and he said, ‘Captain, you don’t understand. You wouldn’t even be having this thing today if it wasn’t for this lady.’ The captain said, ‘This WAC captain?’ Elvis said, ‘Well, it’s a long story, sir, but she wasn’t always a WAC captain.”
After the press conference, he got on a plane and flew to McGuire Air Force Base, where he posed for pictures as he deplaned and then went to yet another press conference, this one featuring Nancy Sinatra, who gave Elvis a box of dress shirts as a present from her dad, whose Timex Spectacular TV special he’d tape in a month at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The next day, March 5, Sergeant Presley went to Fort Dix, adjacent to McGuire, and got his mustering-out check, $109.54, for travel, clothing, and food. Colonel Parker was there and huffed and puffed until Elvis handed him the check, then they stepped into a limo and blasted off down the New Jersey Turnpike, with a caravan of media following down snow-packed roads—there’d been a blizzard—after telling the media that there’d be another press conference in New York the next day. The Colonel had no such thing in mind; they hid out with some of Elvis’s buddies in a Trenton hotel overnight, and the next day took a private railroad car to Washington, where they got on another private car attached to the back of the Tennessean, a regularly scheduled train, and headed to Memphis.
Life in the Army in Germany had been schizophrenic. The Colonel had gotten Vernon Presley and Elvis’s grandmother a house in Bad Nauheim, where he was stationed, and he spent as much time as he could there. He had a live-in German girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old half American, Elisabeth Stefaniak, whom he’d hired as his secretary, but there were other girls, too. Out training near the Czech border, he’d been introduced to miraculous pills that kept you full of energy and awake during maneuvers, and when he came home, he bought several quart-sized jars of them, distributing them to his friends. (They’d been invented by the Germans during World War II to keep flyers alert on bombing raids, and were called amphetamine.) The pills made Elvis weird; at one point Vernon and Elisabeth were in a serious car accident that destroyed Elvis’s Mercedes, and the first thing Elvis thought to ask was whether Vernon was putting the moves on Elisabeth. Some of his Memphis friends decided to leave; he was getting a bit hard to handle. Meanwhile, RCA was trying to get the Colonel to let Elvis record something—anything—in Germany so they’d have some records to keep his name out there. The Colonel seemed to feel that the very scarcity of product was a good thing; there was the Kid Creole soundtrack, and then another greatest hits album called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. That’d have to do while Elvis finished his service. A deal was signed for a film to come out immediately after Elvis left the Army, GI Blues, which was cleverly written around Elvis’s scenes, so that all he’d have to do would be to plug them in, and location shooting began for that in Germany, although the film would be finished in Hollywood.
And then Elvis got his own fourteen-year-old. Priscilla Beaulieu had just moved with her family from Bergstrom Air Force Base on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, to Wiesbaden, and before they moved, she and a girlfriend looked it up on a map and discovered how close it was to Bad Nauheim, where Elvis was stationed. The girls giggled about it. But then, not long after the Beaulieus had moved and gotten settled in, Priscilla was hanging out with some friends at the Eagle Club, a facility for soldiers’ families, when she noticed a guy staring at her, an older guy. He eventually came over and introduced himself as Currie Grant, the entertainment director of the Eagle Club, and asked if she were an Elvis Presley fan. She said she was, and he told her he and his wife visited Elvis often and asked if she’d like to come to dinner with them some evening. Captain Beaulieu was suspicious, but after meeting the Grants and inquiring about him with his commanding officer, he gave permission for a dinner, noting that she had to be back by 11:00, because the next day was a school day. Off they went, and when they arrived, Elvis said, “Well, what have we here?”
“Elvis,” Currie said, “this is Priscilla Beaulieu, the one I’ve been telling you about.”
“Hi,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Elvis Presley.”
At first there was light conversation, during which she had to admit she was only in ninth grade. He took it in stride, and showed her the house, introduced her to his grandmother, and finally sat down at the piano for an impromptu series of songs. Eventually, Grant said it was time to go—that 11:00 curfew—and Elvis begged for more time, but Grant insisted, because he didn’t want to get Captain Beaulieu angry. (Best-laid plans and all: dense fog on the Autobahn got them home at 2:00 A.M.) A couple of days later, Elvis asked her back, and Grant drove her to his house. After a while, Elvis told her he wanted to be alone with her—in his room. She didn’t think that was such a good idea, but he said, “I’ll treat you just like a sister,” and, when she finally agreed, that’s just what he did. They sat on his bed and talked and talked. Priscilla noted that there was a part of him that was like a little boy, insecure, frightened, and, most of all, afraid that the fans would desert him. But he kept his word and sent her home at the end of the evening. On the fourth date, he met Captain Beaulieu, who wanted to know right off what Elvis wanted from his daughter. “Well, sir, I happen to be very fond of her,” he told him. “I guess you might say I need someone to talk to.” Over the course of the conversation, the captain’s misgivings vanished. From then on, Elvis and Priscilla saw each other every night.
Elvis’s inner circle—including Elisabeth, with whom he continued to sleep—knew something radical had happened. There were still girls, but this one was special. Elvis plunged into new activities, beginning the study of karate, undergoing treatment with a South African dermatologist who offered to take care of Elvis’s acne scars and turned out to be a publicity-seeking quack, but mostly getting ready for March 1, when he’d be going back home. Packing was a pain—among other things, Elvis had more than two thousand records—and of course there was the last-minute Army paperwork, as well as business details for his return, the Sinatra special (he was getting $125,000 to appear and sing two songs, the most any television guest had ever been paid), and a new publishing contract for the songs he’d eventually record. At last, the day came. Priscilla went out to the airfield to see him off but was prevented by the security contingent from seeing him or talking to him. Then the press conference, the reunion with Marion Keisker, and then … he was back.
After that, things moved fast. There was the film to finish, friends to catch up with, and records to be made. The March 28 issue of Billboard had a double-page ad from RCA welcoming Elvis back, and reporting that his new single had already sold 1,275,077 copies. Really? He hadn’t even recorded it yet. He probably looked around at the competition, which included the Drifters’ new string-backed ballad “This Magic Moment”; some good hard-core blues from Jimmy Reed, “Baby What You Want Me to Do”; B. B. King’s latest, “Sweet Sixteen”; all that Nashville stuff; the Everlys’ new record; a brilliant ballad from Jackie Wilson (an Elvis favorite), “Doggin’ Around”; and, from Sam Phillips, Charlie Rich’s first hit, “Lonely Weekends,” described in the trade-magazine ads as “distinctively different,” which it certainly was. Rockabilly? Pretty much a thing of the past, but that kid out in Los Angeles, Eddie Cochran, had not only recorded some good stuff, but had mastered multitracking so that on records like “Somethin’ Else” and “Cut Across Shorty” he played most—or all—of the instruments himself. Carl Perkins’s career had fizzled out, Jerry Lee Lewis’s likewise, although both were popular touring acts, Perkins being part of Johnny Cash’s show. Wanda Jackson, unsure about rockabilly, was still doing it (her most famous record, “Let’s Have a Party,” would come out in June) when she wasn’t doing country. There were other rockabillies recording for tiny Southern labels, but they weren’t being heard nationally—Top Forty radio had taken care of that. Elvis had his work cut out for him, and first he had to tape his homecoming special with the man who’d once characterized rock & roll as “sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons … the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” Hmmm, “sideburned delinquent.” Wonder who that referred to? (Not Eddie Cochran, who’d died on April 17 when a car carrying him, Gene Vincent, and Cochran’s girlfriend, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, crashed in Cheltenham, England, when the driver, speeding to take them to Heathrow Airport, misjudged a hill.)
One thing was for certain: Elvis was one “sideburned delinquent” who didn’t need payola, not when he could sell a million and a quarter copies of an unrecorded record. But the rumble in Washington was getting louder because of the sensational subject matter picking up traction in the media, although surveys showed that most people considered payola a minor threat next to juvenile delinquency: in January, satirist and ad executive Stan Freberg issued a two-sided comedy routine, “The Old Payola Roll Blues,” which obviously wasn’t picked up by many radio stations. They were too busy quaking about the supposedly impending indictments. And then the inquiry had its first casualty: John Doerfer, one of the FCC commissioners, was shown to have accepted favors from a large broadcasting chain. Oops. Then they announced that they’d be formulating strict rules about radio stations accepting free records, which was ridiculous, some industry people felt: nobody was going to go out and buy a record they’d never heard of, and there were more coming out than anyone could listen to—or find in the stores. They also wore out and needed to be replaced. The FCC action was clearly intended to stop record companies providing many more copies than were needed so they could be resold, but few radio stations were doing that. And there was this: the FCC chairman, Frederick W. Ford, sent a memo to Congressman Tip O’Neill, who’d fulminated that the youth of America had to be protected from “a type of sensuous music unfit for impressionable minds,” noting that the FCC had no information “which would enable it to determine with any degree of certainty” that a relationship existed between the popularity of rock & roll and payola.
Not that there hadn’t been some dirt uncovered: on May 2, Dick Clark began his testimony in Philadelphia, a testimony one congressman characterized as “evasive at best.” Clark controlled 162 copyrights, as well as recording, publishing, and pressing interests. He said that Jamie Records, a label he’d invested $150 in back in 1957 before it even got started, did pay payola, but he himself had never accepted any. Anyway, he’d sold his interest in 1959 for $31,575, because who knew how long this thing would last, and there was an opportunity to make a good return on that $150. The more they came after him, the cooler he acted. He knew nothing of his partner Tony Mammarella’s payola activities, even though they’d worked inches apart at facing desks with only one telephone between them, while producing American Bandstand. Mammarella had quit the job rather than divest himself of the various connections he’d made. The congressmen asked Clark if he had been able to write his own anti-payola affidavit for ABC because he’d made the network $12 million, while another DJ (read: Alan Freed) had only brought in $250,000 and had had to sign a far harsher affidavit, which had caused ABC to fire him. He denied it, saying he’d sign any affidavit they put in front of him. In a second day of testimony, he explained to the congressmen that he’d taken opportunities to make money when they were offered to him, that he was just following the “rules of the game” by taking them. Sure, payola existed, but he didn’t consider giving money, as opposed to accepting it, to be payola, and he hadn’t accepted any. And he swore under oath that he had divested himself of all the interests he’d had before he signed the affidavit. Satisfied, Oren Harris, head of the congressional investigating committee, told him he was “an attractive and successful young man” who knew that what he’d done was wrong, but that he was “a product of that system, not responsible for it. You took advantage of a unique opportunity to control too many elements in the popular music field through exposure of records to a vast teen-age audience.” And that was that.
In the room next door, Alan Freed, whose television show had also been on ABC, was sweating out a tough line of questioning, stating that he’d been told to “lean heavily” on ABC-Paramount records and play his live shows only in Paramount theaters. (Clark ridiculed this in his testimony.) He made the allegation about Clark writing his own affidavit and said that the network had a “dual policy” that allowed Clark to divest himself of his possibly tainted links. The next week Freed announced that he was going to work at KDAY in Los Angeles, a station that had made a big deal about not playing rock & roll, but where he would be playing only rhythm and blues. The week after that, indictments came down: Freed, Mel Leeds (a former DJ who’d become program director at KDAY), and Tommy “Dr. Jive” Smalls, Harold Jackson, and Jack Walker of WLIB, “The Voice of Harlem.” Freed was indicted on twenty-six counts and was alleged to have accepted bribes of $30,650 from seven record companies in 1958–1959. And the hits kept on coming; producers Hugo & Luigi, country label Starday, and Specialty’s Art Rupe were served, and complaints were lodged soon after against Sue, Fiesta, Scepter, Rank, Old Town, and Peacock—all, it should be noted, small, independent, largely black labels. Rupe, caught between an increase in the payola he alleged American Bandstand was asking for and the summons from Washington, called Sonny Bono into his office and said, “I know this is a big disappointment for you, and I’m really, really sorry, but I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t stand it; I’m getting out of this business. It’s so crooked I can’t stand it anymore.” And with that, one of the great rhythm and blues and gospel labels ceased to exist as a living presence, although Rupe kept the company alive in suspended animation, to revive it decades later with a welcome flood of reissues. He was no fool; he then went into Los Angeles real estate and made far more than he ever would have done with a record label. As for Freed, he fought his payola case for years, exhausting his finances (no matter how they’d been obtained), wrecking his marriage, and drinking increasingly more. He died, a bitter and all-but-forgotten man, in 1965, aged forty-three. The death certificate said uremia because there is no recognized medical term for heartbreak.
The only thing yet to be worked out was Rule 317, where the FCC required that stations announce where they’d gotten any free records, presumably with a bit at the top of the hour: “In the next hour, we’ll be playing records from ABC-Paramount, Atlantic, Top Rank, MGM…” This was clearly unworkable, so the stations petitioned for some kind of relief, and, well after the hearings had vanished into history, they got it. In December, Billboard ran a headline: DEEJAYS TAB PAYOLA PROBE AS BOOTLESS POLITICAL FOOTBALL: JOCKS FEEL FEDERAL INQUIRY HURT INDUSTRY, BUT CHANGED VERY LITTLE. Inside, the magazine ran a sanctimonious editorial disagreeing with the article that said, “The rug needed to be lifted,” but in the end, the DJs were right.
The end of the hearings was also the beginning of summer, when teenagers were cut loose and able to have fun, and this summer, dire as it was in most respects, shows some interesting things happening. In the July 11 issue of Billboard, a record showed unusual action, breaking in high in the charts and moving upward with alarming speed. “Walk, Don’t Run” was an instrumental by a bunch of guys from Washington State, the Ventures, all but the drummer playing solid-body electric guitars. The melody was simple enough, and the lead line used a feature of some guitars, a bar—which, when depressed, would lower the tone of all the strings simultaneously—the so-called whammy bar.
Guitar instrumentals were nothing new, although apparently they were a big thing in the Northwest, because the Ventures had been preceded by the Wailers, from Tacoma, who’d scored minor instrumental hits with “Tall Cool One” and “Mau-Mau” in 1959, and a drummer from Caldwell, Idaho, who was really named Paul Revere, whose first record, “Beatnik Stix,” based on “Chopsticks,” went nowhere but produced a minor hit at the end of the year with “Like, Long Hair,” based on a piece by Rachmaninoff. There were a bunch of them all of a sudden; Duane Eddy had been cranking them out, and the Ventures were competing with his “Because They’re Young.” There was also the Fendermen, on Soma, a tiny independent label out of Minneapolis, whose “Mule Skinner Blues” was a wild rave-up of guitars and whooping, and later in the year the California band the Revels would release “Church Key.” The important thing here was that the Ventures and the Fendermen and most of the rest were playing what should properly be called electronic guitars. With a solid body, they had no hollow interior to cause feedback or other distortion to the string’s vibration, and thus they could be played louder. These instruments had been around for a while—Buddy Holly famously played a Fender Stratocaster, as did Carl Perkins—but they weren’t very versatile in a jazz combo or backing band context. They were also cheap; if you didn’t insist on a Fender, there were lots of other makes that could be had almost as inexpensively as a gut-string acoustic guitar, and sales were on the rise. Similarly, the solid-body bass that Fender had developed wasn’t very popular with most musicians. True, an early model had made an appearance on “5” Royales records as far back as 1957, and jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery’s band, the Mastertones, had one played by his brother Monk (Wes had a semi-hollow-body guitar), but it was scorned by most working bassists. The only customers for solid-body instruments besides teenagers seemed to be West Coast country musicians, and they were still a local phenomenon.
The payola hearings weren’t the only court case in rock & roll, though. Chuck Berry’s Mann Act bust that made the headlines hadn’t been his first. That had occurred in 1958 with a young Frenchwoman, Joan Mathis, where Berry had essentially been busted for being a well-dressed black guy in a fancy car with a white woman. They’d decided against prosecution, but warned him not to let it happen again. Now that it had, he was charged with two more crimes, stemming from two trips with Mathis. Berry had been busted and convicted of a felony in 1944, when he and two of his teenage friends had gone on an armed robbery and car theft spree. Having that on his record sixteen years later meant that his three charges now saw him facing twenty years in prison and $17,000 in fines.
When the trial finally began on February 29, they faced Judge George H. Moore, whose record was somewhat mixed. He’d ruled for desegregating St. Louis’s public housing in 1955, but had also refused, some years earlier, to speak at St. Louis University’s law school because “they had that nigra out there,” referring to the student who’d desegregated the school, Theodore McMillan. That was the Moore who was sitting at Chuck Berry’s trial. As Janice Escalanti began to testify, Moore repeatedly asked her, when a new character in her story was introduced, “Is he a white man or a Negro?” Naturally, the jury hearing this was all white, and Moore must have realized he was playing to any racial prejudice among them. Berry’s lawyer, Merle Silverstein, now had another job: not only did he have to get his client off three Mann Act charges, he had to get race off the jury’s mind. But again and again, the judge pushed the racial issue; he had Escalanti describe the luxurious house she’d been put up in, and kept hammering her to tell the race of every person in her somewhat confused story. As for Berry, he was evasive and unconvincing, offering up numerous reasons for wanting to take Escalanti back to St. Louis with him, including that he wanted “so very much” to learn Spanish to keep up with the new trend of foreign-language songs. Despite the previous testimony by Escalanti and the bellhop at the hotel where they stayed, he claimed never to have had sex with her, even once. He argued about minor points: when, at one point, he was asked if a hotel registration card was in his handwriting, he pointed out that the writing in question was printing, not handwriting. He disputed testimony about what Escalanti was wearing when the bellhop saw her on his bed. In short, he didn’t make any friends in the courtroom, and Silverstein, who was pretty unhappy with his client’s behavior, wound up attempting to have a mistrial declared. Unsurprisingly, the movement was denied. The jury was empanelled, and in two hours and thirty-five minutes, they found Charles Edward Berry guilty of violating the Mann Act. He was led to the municipal jail to await sentencing.
Moore showed no sympathy. “[Y]ou are not a very wholesome citizen,” he told Berry, “and there is nothing about your situation to arouse much sympathy … You came into this courtroom with a flimsy story, and I can’t believe that anybody that sat in this courtroom and heard your testimony believed you when you talked about trying to reform her. You took her on this trip for the purpose of trying to reform her and get her out of a career in prostitution, and then used her for your own vile purposes.” He then imposed the maximum penalty: five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. He also refused bail. “I would not turn this man loose to go out and prey on a lot of ignorant Indian girls and colored girls, and white girls, if any. That man would be out committing offenses while his case is on appeal, if this court is any judge … I have never sentenced a more vicious character than that kind, I don’t believe … society is well off with him incarcerated.” Silverstein was aghast. “If I don’t get this case reheard,” he said at the time, “I’m going to jump out the window.” By filing to appeal Moore’s sentence, he automatically overturned Moore’s denial of bail. Chuck Berry, free for a while, zipped up to Chicago and over two days recorded nineteen sides. He returned on May 30, because one of the Mathis-related arrests, which also had a weapons charge—a loaded gun having been found in the car when the highway patrol had stopped them—was going to be tried before a different judge. Mathis denied nothing, said she’d been in love with Berry, the jury found nothing immoral about the reasons for their crossing state lines, and the charges were dismissed.
Not that it was over, though; on October 30, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that “what has given us concern … [is] the attitude, conduct and remarks of the trial judge,” and added that “a trial judge who, in the presence of the jury, makes remarks reflecting upon a defendant’s race or from which an implication can be drawn that racial considerations may have some bearing on the issue of guilt or innocence has rendered the trial unfair.” However, they ruled that because of the evidence against him, he wasn’t entitled to an acquittal, but a new trial.
With rock & roll being in such disrepute, between payola and Chuck Berry’s woes, novelty records and “good music” by young artists on Philadelphia-based labels looked like they were going to be the soundtrack for a lot of teenagers. Someone named Bryan Hyland had released the tale of the “Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and it got played over and over. Ray Peterson contributed the latest death song, “Tell Laura I Love Her,” sung by a boy dying in a flaming race-car wreck. It was banned in England when it was released there in August. But not all the teen pop singers were awful; the Everly Brothers continued their string of hits, and the guy they’d enticed away from Sun with a deal with Acuff-Rose publishing put out his first song on the publishers’ new label, Monument. “Only the Lonely” was identifiably by Roy Orbison, the same guy who’d sung “Ooby Dooby,” but oh, the difference in the emotional content! Projecting the persona of the lonely, confused teenager who can only hope for redemption through a new love, Orbison scaled the heights of his vocal range in the bridge, backed with a socko orchestral punch, ending on a high note from which he gracefully fell to finish off the chorus. Teenagers across America (and, later, England) felt a jolt of recognition—he understands!—in the song, and Orbison and his producers knew they were onto something. Now, mused Monument’s president, Fred Foster, if they could do something about his looks. Orbison was nearly blind, and his close-set eyes were jarring. The cover of his first album, Lonely and Blue, showed him alone in his car at a drive-in burger joint. It would be hard to put him on television looking like that. Then Foster had an inspiration: “Give him sunglasses.” A star was born. (Or, somewhat more prosaically, one night Orbison had left his regular glasses on an airplane and only had his prescription sunglasses when he was ready to go onstage, and he wore them instead—and Foster insisted he continue to do so.)
Other stars were, too, as we can tell in retrospect. A half-page ad in Billboard featured one of them, although he wasn’t a performer. “From out of the Midwest,” the ad copy read, “comes a new label destined to take its place among the leaders in the industry. TAMLA, prexied by one of the young, driving geniuses of the music business today.” Berry Gordy, Tamla’s “prexy,” smiled out of the photo, and the ad mentioned the latest release by the label’s flagship group, the Miracles, “Way Over There.” He’d released their previous single, “Bad Girl,” on a label he’d named Motown, but once again had to give it up to a larger company, Chess, within weeks because it was selling so well and he still didn’t have the resources to ride out a hit. He was ready this time, and “Way Over There” was a gospel-flavored workout inspired by a date the Miracles had played with the Isley Brothers. But the young, driving genius made a mistake; unhappy with the unadorned backup, he took the tapes into United Sound and dubbed on strings, withdrew the original record, and put out the new version. They both had the same serial number, and everyone was confused. It broke the record’s momentum and, no doubt, taught Gordy a lesson. (Also, when Billboard reported his next couple of releases, it listed them as being on “Talma.” Another lesson: pay your advertising bills on time.)
It was the black charts where the action was, though; country was as sclerotic as pop. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were still at it, and their “Finger Poppin’ Time” was a lot of fun, and James Brown re-made the “5” Royales’ “Think” and turned it into a hit. In mid-July, a record that out-shouted James Brown came out of nowhere—well, New York via Mississippi—to break into the R&B top ten; “A Fool in Love” was listed as being by Ike and Tina Turner, although Ike was mostly the facilitator to his latest wife, the former Anna Mae Bullock, from Nutbush, Mississippi, who had showed up in his life after he’d relocated to St. Louis. She became a huge fan of the music the Kings of Rhythm played in the clubs there and started singing with them, eventually singing backup (as “Little Ann”) on one of their records. When Ike reconfigured his band and signed with black label owner Juggy Murray’s Sue label, he abandoned blues for a new sound based around his new wife. On “A Fool for Love,” she strutted and shouted and growled and produced unearthly sounds as the three female backup singers, the Ikettes, reminded her that she was a fool, she was only in love, to which she howled and shrieked, whether in agony or ecstasy was unclear. It eventually caught on with the pop charts, landing in the mid-twenties, and the concept of this record and Bryan Hyland’s sharing space on America’s airwaves is indicative enough of a revolution that was just beginning.
Of course, what’s summer vacation without a new dance to do, and in Philadelphia, Ernest Jenkins, a teenager famous for his impressions of other performers, had one: “the Toot.” Jenkins had changed his name to Chubby Checker, because his producer thought he looked like Fats Domino, and he’d already had a minor hit with “The Class,” in which he imitated everyone from Fats to the Chipmunks, but he still wasn’t making it. Heaven knows how one did the Toot, but Checker’s producer had a brainstorm: that Hank Ballard B side from last year. Were black kids still doing the twist? They were? Let’s re-record that! Of course, the request for copyright hit King, and someone took the hint and re-released Ballard’s version; the race was on. In late July, a Billboard ad said that Checker’s record was “already 200,000.” King plugged on. The next week, Chubby broke into the pop charts at #49; Ballard was right on his tail at #53. The next week, Chubby was at #11, Hank at #95. Then Ballard rallied; he was at #61, although it looked like the race was going to Chubby, who was at #8. But there was more than a horse race going on here; the twist was actually happening. Chubby Checker knocked Elvis out of the top slot, and his fellow Philadelphian Fabian released something called “Kissin’ and Twistin’.” Santo and Johnny had another instrumental, “Twistin’ Bells,” Danny and the Juniors chimed in with “Twistin’ U.S.A.,” and someone named Bruce Coefield tried some fusion with the “Cha Cha Twist.” It hadn’t even started, though.
Whether it was because the twist was old hat to black teenagers or they were hearing more good stuff than other teens, it was clear from the music on black-oriented (and, by this time, even black-owned) labels that a major change was in the air. Some of it was the kind of slow-dance music that is so essential to summer dancers; in fact, one of the summer’s greatest records was the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Written by a long-standing songwriting partnership, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, its chorus was more poignant than the teens who loved it knew: “But don’t forget who’s taking you home and in whose arms you’re going to be / Oh, darling, save the last dance for me.” Pomus was actually the pseudonym of Jerome Felder, a white Jewish man from the Bronx who had had polio as a child and used crutches. Initially, inspired by Big Joe Turner, he was a blues singer who performed to appreciative audiences in Harlem, but standing and singing on crutches was exhausting, so he turned to writing lyrics for others. He still loved black music, though, and several times a week he’d hit the clubs in the company of his wife, who loved to dance. He’d let her, but there was no question that they went home together, and eventually this turned into a hit song.
Other midtempo hits included Shirley & Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll,” Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay,” Jo Jones’s “You Talk Too Much,” Jerry Butler’s “He Will Break Your Heart,” and Hank Ballard and the Midniters’ “Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go.” (Ballard, despite losing the twist horse race to Chubby Checker, wound up doing very well this summer, with not only it and this record, but also “Finger Poppin’ Time” on the charts at once.) But the ballad sweepstakes was conclusively won by Ray Charles’s second single for ABC-Paramount, an ancient number by Hoagy Carmichael, “Georgia on My Mind,” where, over a sparse arrangement, Charles’s gospel-drenched voice does indeed convey how much he missed the state, and even convinced others that they missed it, too, even if they’d never been there.
In Detroit, Berry Gordy was finally gathering enough capital to start putting out records regularly. His first new signing was Mable John, Little Willie John’s younger sister. She was the first act he signed to undergo a thorough training program, although she still had the job as his chauffeur; Gordy never learned to drive. Her first record for the label, “Who Wouldn’t Love a Man Like That?” didn’t go anywhere, but it was good and she was patient. Next up was Mary Wells, a teenage songwriter who asked Gordy to pass on a song she’d written, “Bye Bye Baby,” to Jackie Wilson. Gordy told her he had his own company now and asked her and her mother to drop by the next day and show him what she had. He liked it enough to put her through twenty-two takes, winding up with what would eventually become a top-ten R&B hit and a moderate pop hit, his first breakthrough, although it was followed up shortly by the Miracles’ first record for Gordy.
“Shop Around” was originally written for Barrett Strong, but Gordy wanted to keep it on his label (Anna was still taking Strong’s records, although Gordy released them locally first), and issued it as the B side of “Who’s Lovin’ You.” A few weeks after that record came out, Gordy called Smokey Robinson at 2:00 A.M. and told him to round up the group. Gordy couldn’t sleep, because he’d had a great idea: record “Shop Around” at a faster tempo. An hour later, everyone had convened at the studio except the piano player, so Gordy sat down at the piano, and in short order a new version was completed. Everyone was amazed—it was better! So much so that it charged up the R&B chart and, not long after, the pop chart. In the end the statistics were plain: #1 R&B, #2 pop, over one million copies sold. Hitsville U.S.A. was on the map.
So, over in Chicago, Detroit’s eternal musical rival, was another black-owned label. Vee-Jay had started earlier than Berry’s enterprises, and locally had Chess to compete with for acts. But Chess was acting conservatively; the label was sticking to its old-time blues stars, with only young Etta James taking up the standard of the new black music. Vee-Jay often found itself as a home for people Chess didn’t want, and that’s how they got their biggest blues star, Jimmy Reed, who kept them afloat for many years. Ewart Abner, who ran the day-to-day business of recording and signing, was given a subsidiary label of his own, Abner, which had a hit in 1958 with a gospelish group, the Impressions, which featured a brilliant songwriter, Curtis Mayfield, and a soaring baritone lead singer, Jerry Butler. “For Your Precious Love” did well enough that Butler split with the group and signed a solo deal with Vee-Jay, which paid off in 1960 with the huge smash “He Will Break Your Heart.” By 1960, the label was doing well enough that it was signing jazz artists (some of them from Detroit) and taking on gospel acts like Sam Cooke’s old employers, the Soul Stirrers, who’d been dropped with Specialty’s demise.
In Memphis, it was clear that the guard was changing, too. Sam Phillips seemed to have lost all interest in Sun, despite having bought the property at 639 Madison and, over the first half of the year, investing $750,000 in building what was to become Sam Phillips’ Recording Service, an up-to-the-minute studio complex run day-to-day by Scotty Moore. But the gorgeous new facility that opened in September was just the main building of the company, which was building a satellite facility in Nashville in what had been Sonico Recordings, partially owned by a young producer, Billy Sherrill, who was retained as chief engineer when Sam took over. Sam also bought a record store, Select-O-Hits, which also served as a distributor for Sun, Phillips International, and other labels, and turned it over to his brother Tom and his wife to run. But except for pushing Charlie Rich, and occasional recording sessions that remained unreleased at the time on Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam was acting like a man with other things on his mind, which, with his all-female radio station chain, his buying and selling radio stations, a new girlfriend (although he stayed married to his wife and took a great interest in his two sons’ growth), and his investment in his friend’s hotel franchise, Holiday Inn, he was.
Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had finally decided that Jim’s recording studio way out in Brunswick was too far to go, and, looking around Memphis, found an old movie theater, the Capitol, for rent at the corner of College and McLemore, adjoining a middle-class black neighborhood. The rent was $100 a month, and Jim could move his recording equipment into the theater, which had great acoustics, while Estelle could set up a little record store, Satellite Records, in the lobby. It’s not like there was much recording activity going on in Brunswick; the studio was currently used by a band of white high school kids called the Royal Spades. Originally it was a guitar group, with Steve Cropper on guitar, his friend Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, Terry Jackson on drums, and Jerry Lee “Smoochy” Smith on keyboards, but they’d added on a horn section when Estelle’s tenor sax–playing son, Packy, asked if he could join and then casually dropped the information that his mother had a recording studio. Soon, Wayne Jackson and Don Nix filled out the horn section, and Estelle was driving them out to the studio every weekend. But once they’d rented the Capitol, it became the focus of everything; when the boys weren’t rehearsing, they were helping Jim and Estelle build out the interior, pulling out the old seats and putting down carpeting, hanging drapes, putting acoustic tile on the walls.
The neighborhood started taking notice of all the action taking place, and one day their postman, Robert Tally, who was also a songwriter and musician, told his friend Rufus Thomas that there was a new recording studio in town. Tally and a mortician friend of his with whom he wrote songs had done a couple of demo sessions there, despite the studio not being completely finished (Jim was cutting a few radio station jingles already), and had liked the results, as well as the modern equipment and the friendly white folks who ran the place. Rufus hadn’t had much of a recording career since he’d cut “Bear Cat” for Sun, but he’d kept recording, doing a couple of sides for Lester Bihari’s long-vanished Meteor label, and of course holding down his radio show on WDIA. So one day in August, Rufus and his daughter Carla, who was still in high school, got in the car and drove down to McLemore Avenue, and walked in the front door. By this time Estelle had the Satellite Records store up and running at the old candy counter, and she knew Rufus by reputation and because of his radio show. She called for Jim, who was surprised to see his visitors, because he’d met with Rufus promoting his Veltones record. Despite Rufus’s misgivings about white folks, he and Jim settled a deal to cut a single using Rufus’s piano-playing son and Robert Tally’s band, recording a song Rufus had written as a duet, “Cause I Love You.” It was soon decided to augment the band a little, so someone went to fetch a baritone sax player he knew, a high school kid named Booker T. Jones. Steve Cropper, who’d been manning the Satellite Records shop, came in to play guitar. Chips Moman ran the board, and then they dashed off a B side Rufus had been writing between takes. When the session was over, Booker T. had a chat with Moman and Cropper, letting them know he also played piano in case they needed him.
“Cause I Love You,” Satellite 102, took off locally, selling four or five thousand copies in a hurry—of course, Rufus was playing it on the radio—and this caught the eye of a guy named Buster Williams, who ran a distributor that handled, among other labels, Atlantic. He was under strict orders to notice when a record was taking off in Memphis and the surrounding region, and he told the Atlantic rep next time he came in about the record. It didn’t take long for Jim to get a call from Jerry Wexler, who introduced himself as the guy who’d produced Ray Charles. It just so happened that Jim had recently been knocked out by hearing Brother Ray, and was flattered by Wexler’s interest in his tiny record company. A deal was hammered out whereby Atlantic would lease the record from Satellite, issue it nationally, pay a tiny royalty for it, and have first refusal on future Rufus and Carla records. Oh, and he cut a check for $5,000. As it turned out, “Cause I Love You” didn’t do much nationally, but in November, Satellite issued a record by Carla on her own, “Gee Whiz.” Atlantic picked it up and promoted the hell out of it—Wexler knew this was a hit, and it was: top-ten R&B and pop. Satellite had been launched.
And the most famous Memphian of them all? It didn’t take long for Elvis to get back into the groove, finishing off GI Blues and recording its soundtrack. His first post-Army single, “Stuck On You,” was a good enough effort, crafted by two professional songwriters, J. Leslie McFarland and Aaron Schroeder, but it was the second one that was a bit of a shocker; it was an Italian folk song that Caruso had recorded, and in its story lies a clue to what lay ahead. Elvis was calling the shots on his new sessions, carefully going through the material that the Colonel and his people were bringing to them. One song he wanted to do—apparently he’d wanted to do it for a long time—was “O Sole Mio,” and this made some people nervous, not because it was a big departure, but because it was public domain, and there was no publishing money to be made from it. The English-language version Elvis had learned, “There’s No Tomorrow,” was published by people who wouldn’t cut in the people at Hill and Range that the Colonel insisted had to be dealt a piece of any song Elvis recorded.
This situation had come together while Elvis was in the Army, and is very likely what would have shown up on that blank piece of paper Jerry Leiber had refused to sign had he signed and returned it. Some songwriters—Otis Blackwell, Doc Pomus, and Mort Shuman, among them—were okay with this, and in fact cutting the pie this way is a fairly standard music-biz practice. So when Freddy Bienstock, the Colonel’s man inside Hill and Range, asked Elvis if he’d mind if they gave the tune new lyrics, he readily agreed. The tune, now known as “It’s Now or Never,” wound up credited to Wally Gold and (again) Aaron Schroeder. For the moment, there was no problem with quality, but in years to come, many talented songwriters would be cut out of the possibility of getting a song to Elvis by this rigidly enforced detail. “It’s Now or Never,” although some people (including Elvis) were apprehensive as to whether or not the teenage fans would go for it, proved to be a bigger hit than “Stuck On You,” sailing easily to #1 and staying on the pop chart for twenty weeks.
Apparently, romantic ballads would sell if Elvis did them, and so he finished out the year with one of his most enduring songs ever, “Are You Lonesome To-Night?” It was the Colonel’s wife’s favorite song, first recorded in 1926, and had a sentimental recitation halfway through. Elvis made it his own.
As the year drew to a close, there was a palpable sense of an era passing, which was made explicit by a record store in New York’s Times Square subway station. Irving “Slim” Rose had discovered that he could get up to five dollars apiece for old, out-of-print singles, and that all kinds of people were discovering his Times Square Records as the place to find obscure oldies. It had a lot of stuff on the Old Town label, which leased some old records (as well as being the home of proto-soul singer Billy Bland, whose “Let the Little Girl Dance” had been a big hit this year), including the Capris’ “There’s a Moon Out Tonight,” which had failed to be a hit in 1959 and 1960 on two different labels. Old Town would take care of that in the early months of the coming year. Various deals were being announced for ’61, the biggest by far was that of Frank Sinatra leaving Capitol (for whom he’d just recorded “Ol’ McDonald,” as it was titled; his friends told him he could record anything and it’d be a hit, so he did and it wasn’t, but hey, he was out of the contract) for Warner Bros., who gave him not some high-dollar production deal, but his own label, Reprise, the first time any artist had been offered anything like that. The Chipmunks released a version of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and Atlantic released “Spanish Harlem,” another beautiful record, this time by Ben E. King. It was written and produced by Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector, and Spector co-wrote the other side, “First Taste of Love,” with Doc Pomus. The kid was getting around! And, as always, a silly story crept into the trade press as Billboard announced that the emir of Qatar, sitting on untold oil money, had bought jukeboxes for his harem, and then sent a couple of his eunuchs, with an interpreter, to Western Europe to learn how to maintain and repair them. Unfortunately, they couldn’t learn, so he imported a couple of European mechanics, with their wives, and gave them a place to live and special dispensations from some of Qatar’s laws. There was no indication of what the harem ladies were listening to, but it just could have been Elvis.