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WENT AWAY
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The music revolution began
in '54 and was over by '56
of TheColumnists.com
It was the best
of years, it was the worst of years; it was the beginning of
the future, it was the beginning of the end.
It was the year I graduated from high school, it was the year
I had to start paying my own way; it was the beginning of an
era of new sounds, it was the beginning of the end for the sentimental
journeys of Doris Day and her ilk.
It was 1954, and the revolution had begun. Not with a raucous
bang but with a garbled murmur. Quietly. Kind of like, well,
kind of like a sh-boom.
It began something like this:
Hey nonny ding dong,
alang alang alang
Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-a
And ended something like this:
Dee-oody-ooh, sh-boom, sh-boom
Sweetheart!
It was the dawn of a new age of music--rock ‘n’ roll--although
we didn’t know it at the time. Oddly, it wasn’t a group
of Americans who got rock a-rollin’. It was a bunch of clean-cut
Canadians. Four of them from Toronto, who called themselves The
Crew Cuts. They did it by covering a rhythm-and-blues song originated
by the Chords titled, “Sh-Boom.” It went to #1 on the
pop charts in November.
Those of us who turned 18 in ’54 found ourselves caught
in the middle. Born and bred in the era of the Big Band sounds
of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, we reached our teen-aged years
listening to the likes of Nat Cole, Joni James, Frankie Laine,
Dean Martin, Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, Kay Starr and groups
like the Four Aces, the Four Freshmen and the Four Lads. Theirs
was the kind of music our parents liked, too. No conflicts there.
By itself, “Sh-Boom” didn’t make waves on the
air. It took a 1955 movie to turn rock ‘n’ roll into
a tsunami. That was “The
Blackboard Jungle,” which spotlighted
a virtually unknown group by the name of Bill Haley and His Comets
singing “Rock Around The Clock.”
White kids were suddenly turned on by the music that black kids
had been listening to for years, but with a twist: Some Southern
boys had mutated their rockabilly sound with R&B--and rock
‘n’ roll was born. Then a young fellow from Memphis
by the name of Elvis Presley sang “Heartbreak Hotel”
in 1956 and the lyrics were on the wall for the music that had
preceded it.
Thanks to break-through efforts of The Crew Cuts and Bill Haley
and Elvis, the R&B and doo-wop sounds of black singers finally
became part of every teenager’s world, regardless of their
color. Black singers like Little Richard and Fats Domino and
Chuck Berry quickly became household names in all-white neighborhoods.
To claim the sounds alone were responsible for the sudden popularity
of rock ‘n’ roll would be to defy reality. Money wasn’t
made on music solely from the play it received on the radio.
There were records to be sold, and, for the first time in history,
teenagers had disposable income and they bought records. Lots
of records. They bought records because they could play them
in their bedrooms on their own phonographs that they could now
afford to buy. Their parents were out of the loop.
I was luckier than a lot of my contemporaries in making the transition
from the sentimental love songs of the past to the new sound
because I was exposed to all kinds of music during the Fifties.
I worked for my parents, who owned a small drive-in restaurant--the
Cross Roads Drive-in, one of two such establishments in the small
California seaside community of Santa Cruz. Drive-ins were where
teens hung out during the Fifties, and teens played a lot of
music on the restaurant’s jukebox.
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the 1950s. That's the ever popular jukebox shown in the upper right corner. But where's Fonzie? |
The earliest R&B tune I can remember
is 1951’s “Sixty-Minute Man.”
It started off like this:
Look a here girls I'm
telling you now
They call me "Lovin' Dan"
I rock 'em, roll 'em all night long
I'm a sixty-minute man.
Rockin’ and rollin’ originally meant something entirely
different from a style of music. Later in the lyrics, it goes:
There'll be 15 minutes
of kissing
Then you'll holler "please don't stop"
There'll be 15 minutes of teasing
And 15 minutes of squeezing
And 15 minutes of blowing my top.
I think you get the message by now.
Of course there was plenty of country and western music on the
Cross Roads jukebox, such as Hank Williams and Tennessee Ernie
Ford. And a few folk singers, too, like Burl Ives and The Weavers
with Pete Seeger singing “On Top Of Old Smokey” and
“Goodnight, Irene.” And jazz masters like Dave Brubeck
and songstress Ella Fitzgerald. There were Dixieland and the
blues. And the unique styling of Harry Belafonte.
Whatever the genre, the jukebox carried it.
Old-time rock ‘n’ roll, as it is now known, had about
a 10-year run before it began to change. It’s still called
rock ‘n’ roll today, but I can’t recognize it
from its origins.
Something happened. As a matter of fact, a lot happened.
The growing use of drugs, a free-spirited movement whose adherents
were called Hippies, a little pill that did more to make women
independent than any other social change or invention, a war
in a place few of us had ever heard of, integration of the races
throughout America, the British Invasion led by The Beatles,
etc.--all affected an even more radical change in the music of
the mid-1960s.
Singers and songwriters of the Sixties not only reflected the
cultural changes under way but also, in my opinion, played important
roles in effecting change. The anti-war songs of the Sixties
and early Seventies, for example, surely helped influence America’s
attitude toward our reasons for being and staying in Vietnam.
Politicians should never underestimate the power of music and
the people who make it.
If I were King . . . I mean, if I were President W and wanted
to initiate a war in some Middle Eastern country, I would have
called in all the leading singers and songwriters and explained
precisely the reasons why we should invade Iraq and ask them
to compose some songs extolling the virtues of freedom in that
country. Get the singers and songwriters on your side, and you’ll
get the young people on your side.
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or what? No, we don't think so either. Don't they look like they belong on "The Love Boat"? Would you believe their hits included the classic "Rock Around the Clock," "Don't Knock the Rock" and "See Ya Later, Alligator"? |
Nobody knows the impact of young people on society better than Madison Avenue. If you don’t believe me, then why do you think all of those TV shows and TV commercials are directed at youth. (The lone exception is the 6 o’clock news, studded almost exclusively with commercials for ailments and ills that only we seniors suffer.)
But W didn’t do that, and it won’t be too long before some songwriter is going to pen a tune titled, “The Red States Are Going Blue Over You.”
As for me, one of those teen-aged buyers of “Sh-Boom” in 1954, old-time rock ended when the guitarists took over and the music no longer included saxophones.
That phenomenon of becoming disenchanted with the next and succeeding generations of music is called ageing. You got to get older before you’re mature enough to understand why your parents didn’t like your music.
P.S. I did get to see Little Richard and the Everly Brothers and Fats Domino in concert in their prime and a bunch of others whose names I can’t recall.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The photo of The Cross Roads Drive-In is the property of the author. All rights reserved. The other photos are courtesy of Amazon.com and the copyright owners. The jukebox drawing is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted April 3, 2006.
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