More Rock and Roll, From My “Commonplace Book”

This is #8 in a very occasional series plucked from my files of quotes and snippets and what-have-you. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year or so immersed in the early history of rock-and-roll, both because I find it inexhaustibly fascinating [a shout-out to Andrew Hickey’s stupendous “History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” podcast] and because I’m thinking of writing something “serious” about the way that several arcane provisions of US copyright law affected the structure and development of the music industry in the ’40s and ’50s. So this post, and probably others into the future, will be full of rockandroll-iana. 

1.  Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller started writing songs together as teenagers, two East Coast Jewish music nerds recently transplanted with their families to Los Angeles. They had their first (of many) #1 hits before either turned 20 years old—”Hound Dog,” recorded in 1953 by Big Mama Thornton (and by many, many others in subsequent years). They went on to become one of the most successful songwriting duos in the early years of rock-and-roll, with a long string of mega-hits (Jailhouse Rock, Stand By Me, On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Love Potion #9, Yakety-Yak . . .) to their credit.

Stoller was the better technical musician of the two, a talented classically-trained pianist (a big Bartok fan, apparently) whose true passion was jazz and rhythm-and-blues. He was able to persuade the great jazz pianist James P. Johnson to give him lessons in stride/boogie-woogie piano, a style that Johnson himself had basically invented back in the 1910s and 20s, and which Johnson had taught to, among others, Fats Waller and Willie (“The Lion”) Smith, and whose influence on a whole generation of great jazz pianists is impossible to overstate.

Stoller later said: “It was as if Beethoven were giving me lessons — except that, unlike James P. Johnson, Beethoven had never given lessons to Fats Waller.”

2.  Rock Around the Clock

I always thought Bill Haley was a lucky one-hit wonder who stumbled onto his 1955 megahit by chance. Wrong, wrong. Haley was a hard-working pro; he and his band (the “Comets”) had a #1 hit in 1953 with “Crazy Man Crazy,” and they worked hard to find the next big thing. Haley had a day job as a DJ at a local radio station in southeast PA, which meant not only that he heard pretty much everything that was being recorded at the time, but also that the band had access to an empty studio they could use after closing hours to work on their songs. And because the station had (primitive) tape equipment, they could record themselves and listen to what they had come up with—an almost unheard-of luxury for a 50s band. They did dozens of shows, for free, at local high schools; Haley wanted to see what kind of songs teenagers were getting into, and he would constantly change the band’s set-list as they watched what the kids reacted to.

The original version of Rock Around The Clock was recorded and released in 1953 by “Sonny Dee and his Knights.” The record flopped, but Haley heard it and wanted to work up a cover version; his producer at the small record label he was signed to (Essex Records), however, didn’t like the song and wouldn’t let the band record it, going so far as to tear up the sheet music in the studio when Haley brought it in for a recording session. But in 1954 Haley signed with Decca, and got to work with their star producer, the legendary Milt Gabler (Billy Crystal’s uncle, as it happens), who had worked with Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, Louis Armstrong, and other R&B and jazz giants.

Gabler, it turned out, wasn’t too crazy about the song either, but he let the band record it and Decca released it in 1954 as the B-side (!!) to a pretty dopey novelty song, “One Man (and 13 Women Around).” Sales were disappointing—it almost (but not quite) made it into the top 50 on the Billboard Pop chart.

That would’ve been that, but the following year (1955) Richard Brooks, who was directing the film “Blackboard Jungle,” asked Peter Ford, the teenage son of the lead actor in the film, Glenn Ford, to bring some of his favorite records to the movie set so Brooks could listen to them. Brooks wanted to hear what kind of music real teenagers were listening to (as opposed to the fictional teenagers in his movie, who were portrayed as swing jazz fanatics) so he could include some in his film in hopes of getting teenagers to come to the theater. He chose Rock Around the Clock, using the entire recording, start to finish, as background over the opening credits.

Mass hysteria ensued across the land. It was an early version of Beatlemania, but in movie theaters rather than live shows, and the kids weren’t screaming like banshees, they were jumping up and down in their seats and dancing in the aisles. Theater owners in several cities had to call in the cops to quell it all, those old movie theater seats not having been engineered to withstand the pounding of teenagers jumping up and down on them.

Frank Zappa was one of those kids, and he had a very interesting observation about what made the whole thing so incredible:

“I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his Comets started belting out ‘One, Two, Three O’Clock, Four O’Clock Rock…’ It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms, across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and crappy transistor radios and cheap record players listening to their ‘dirty music.’ (“Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap…and turn the volume all the way down”.) But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn’t tell you to turn it down. I didn’t care if Bill Haley was white or black, phony or sincere…he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem, and it was so LOUD we were all jumping up and down.”

It went on, incidentally, to sell 25 million records.

If you haven’t heard it in a while—or have never heard it (is such a thing possible?)—the original recording is here. Worth hearing, if only for Marshall Lyttle’s fantastic slap-back bass and Danny Cedrone’s terrific guitar solo.

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