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ROCK @ 50

Who'da thunk it? Never in a million years did the rock'n'roll generation ever consider the idea that they'd one day turn into the Grown-Ups. Yikes! All those rebellious 50s rockers, who rode into town--at least in their imaginations--with bikers dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, are now the parents of teens or, in some cases, grandparents (double yikes!). It is they who are now the ones saying, "Turn that stuff down," "You can't understand the words" or "You call that music?"

Alan Freed said it best, almost fifty years ago, when he reminded our parents that their parents had said the same things when they were jitterbugging to Benny Goodman and swooning over Sinatra at the Times Square Paramount. And now it's come around, full circle. In the famous words of Yogi Berra, "It's like déjà vu, all over again."

Yes, the Baby Boomers are turning gray, balding and getting a little, uh, full around the middle. We've even had two Boomer presidents, one Democrat and one Republican, both raised on rock'n'roll. Wasn't there once a song from the 50s called "We Want A Rock'n'Roll President?" Well, we got, not one, but two now. It's official: we are the grown-ups, like it or not.

Ah, but we've got our memories, haven't we? And we've got songs like the ones on this set to trigger those memories of back when we had slim waistlines, muscles that didn't sag and hair on our heads...still with pigment, no less!

The music on this box takes us from that time when rock'n'roll first erupted on TV, in the form of a young and impossibly handsome Elvis Presley, to the beginnings of the British Invasion, which would signal the start of another generation.

The first sighting of Elvis was not to be forgotten, whether one saw him on one of his six consecutive appearances on the Dorsey Brothers show or with Milton Berle, when Uncle Miltie was so thrown by the audience reaction that he desperately tried every trick in his not inconsequential bag of vaudeville tricks to upstage the young rocker.

Elvis just had to stand there, quiet and still, while Berle drooled, mugged and walked on his ankles in desperation, all in a feeble attempt to keep the future at bay. But the future had arrived that night on NBC and Miltie was not going to be the boy with his finger in the dike who stopped the flood.

Many negative and ignorant words have been written in recent years by those with short memories, in an attempt to "write off," if you will, Elvis Presley as some kind of interloper who "stole" the music of the "real" Kings of rock'n'roll. Perhaps it is high time we take a short look at the facts of the case.

Presley's initial hit, "Baby Let's Play House," first reached the charts in July of 1955, one month before Chuck Berry's "Maybelline" and a full four months before Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti." Prior to that, Berry had made no records at all and Little Richard had been unsuccessfully working in a style which owed its every nuance to that of Roy Brown.

Unknown to each other, Chuck and Elvis were each working in a hybrid style which combined country with rhythm & blues. Both were preceded in this by Bill Haley, who, although he was onto something which clicked with the kids (his "Crazy Man Crazy" had hit in 1953), had neither the looks, the youth nor the charisma to make it big with teenagers over the long haul.

In their quest for drama, many writers have expended far too much energylooking for Bad Guys and Good Guys, oppressors and victims, and far too little attention to this notion that rockíníroll came to be from this combining of various vernacular styles.

In his liner notes to Elvis's second album, RCA Victor a&r man, Chick Crumpacker, looking for a "possible answer for the Why of his unprecedented appeal," answers his own question by citing the fact that Elvis was "combining the four fields (country, gospel, rhythm and pop) into perfect unity." In all the years since, nobody has explained it any better than ol' Chick: folks like rock'n'roll because it is all things to all people.

If you went to one of Alan Freed's rock'n'roll shows at the Brooklyn Paramount or, in Los Angeles, to one of Hunter Hancock's dances at the El Monte Legion Hall, you would see white, black and Hispanic kids, all digging the same music. The seed of this idea of one-music-one-people may have been sown during the Swing Era, but it came to fruition with rock'n'roll.

When Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes first heard her soon-to-be idol, Frankie Lymon, she later said, "I didn't know if he was black or white, male or female, I just knew I had to hear that voice again." The race-less, gender-less nature of Lymon's voice was typical of so many in early rock'n'roll. Many, if not most, of those who first heard these singers on the radio were confused as to the racial identity of both Elvis and Chuck Berry. And few even cared. This was, without doubt, a large part of the appeal, during the 40s, of Frankie Laine and of Nat King Cole, whose particular brand of clear and precise articulation was carefully copied by Berry, in a conscious attempt to capture the broadest possible audience.

This lesson was not lost on an aspiring songwriter named Berry Gordy, who dreamed of owning his own record company as he toiled on the Ford assembly line in his home town of Detroit. When that dream finally became reality, the company slogan, printed on each and every record sleeve, declared, "Motown, The Sound of Young America." Not "The Sound of Young Black America," not "The Sound of Young White America."

The deeper meaning of Gordy's slogan should not be underestimated. Company slogans are not chosen lightly. These few words are how a business entity defines itself. What "The Sound of Young America" says is that Berry Gordy's intent was to make music which would sell to all young Americans.

While all this meant nothing at the time to those who fell in love with rock'n'roll, it had a great subliminal effect on their
attitudes. The fact that the sounds of Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Five Satins, the Chiffons and Mary Wells were racially ambiguous had more to do with social change than all the protest marches, civil rights legislation and speech makers on soap boxes in the world. Long before self-serious protest singers became popular in the late 60s, rock'n'roll, without one preaching word or pointing finger, brought people together, organically, in their mutual love of the same music.

And that mutual love of the music has lasted. Look at the audiences you see at those televised oldies shows on PBS. You'll still see the same ethnic mix, now grown to middle age, digging the songs of their youth. And you'll see them smiling. For these are not angry, hostile songs, urging the listener to tear down "the Establishment." Nor are they narcissistic, introspective songs of angst. Rock'n'roll is all about feeling better, or at least wanting to feel better. Even when singing about the pain of lost love, rock'n'rollers help us through our sadness toward something better.

For those who remember these songs from their high school years, the memories tend to be pleasant ones. High school years tend to be happy times, certainly more simple. And if some of those memories are not so happy: that fist fight, that broken heart, that time you backed Dad's new Buick Roadmaster into that telephone pole, bad memories fade more quickly than happy ones and it is the happy memories which these songs evoke.

Memories persist, like paying twenty-five cents admission to a dance at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel school hall, where you could do the latest dances (yes, Johnny, dances had names back then), like the Slop, the Mashed Potatoes, the Stroll and, of course, the Twist. You could slow dance with the girl or boy of your dreams, cheek to cheek and torso to torso, your raging hormones telling you that this was True Love...4-Evah, as you wrote on your schoolbooks. Your ecstasy was always interrupted by Father Flotsky, sticking that ruler between your bodies and saying,"Leave a little room for the guardian angel, now, kids."

What a joy it was to go to a rock'n'roll show and see ten acts perform, not for two tedious hours of mostly filler, but three songs each, their best three songs, the only ones you really wanted to hear them do. Remember the first time you saw Smokey & the Miracles onstage, dancing the Monkey? Or the Temptations do the Temptation Walk? Or Chuck Berry do his Duck Walk? They always left you wanting more.

If you lived in the suburbs or in the farmlands or especially, in Southern California, a car was a big part of your life. Maybe you had a 49 or 50 Ford. Or perhaps, a '53 Mercury, chopped and channeled, with mud flaps, and a Continental spare on the back with a stenciled picture of Woody Woodpecker, smoking a big cigar. With a little technical know-how, you could hook up a couple of speakers from an old radio, so you could play songs like these really loud, as you drove down Main Street with your Glass Pak mufflers roaring.

Gas was only 25 or 30 cents a gallon. You could see a double feature for 50 cents and, afterwards, go for a burger and a milk shake, all for a buck, including the tip. You didn't need to buy a whole album, just to get the one song you liked; you bought the 45...and it only cost 89 cents.

We knew so much less about our movie stars than we do now. Actors and actresses have probably always been just as self-involved and decadent as those of today, but we didn't have to read about their foibles in the paper or listen to them spout their opinions on TV. We could just watch their movies and imagine them to be the heroes and nice girls they seemed to be on screen.

Most young people didn't use drugs. Most girls didn't have babies out of wedlock or have abortions. Your children might be surprised to know how many of your generation actually waited for sex until marriage.

It is now cliche to say this, but those really were simpler times. Fashionable as it may be to mock Ozzie & Harriet or the Eisenhower Years, who wouldn't want a Mom like Harriet Nelson? You come home from school and she's not only there, waiting for you, but she says, "You want some milk and chocolate cake, Ricky?"

And was it not comforting to have presidents like Ike and Harry and FDR, who were like father figures? Later, we had a movie star president and his socialite wife, JFK and Jackie, the Brad and Jennifer of their time.

We can all recall just where we were at the moment when we heard the bad news. I was in a record store, Times Square Records, down in the subway off 42nd Street, alone with Greasy Harold behind the counter. I was holding a 45 by Johnny Ace, the singer who died from a bullet in the head, in his dressing room, backstage at a theater in Texas. Just then, Slim Rose, the store's owner, came in and in his nasal Bronx accent, said, "Hey, did youse hear? Da President was just shot in Texas!" I ran upstairs and, all along Broadway, people were crying and dazed, as if the world had just ended.

The world really did change after that horrible day. We would never again be as happy and carefree. We would never again be as open and innocent. All too soon would come the mistrust, the cynicism and, perhaps worst of all, the New Tribalism, that self-separation of Americans into separate sub-groups with separate agendas.

But when I hear songs like these, I can pull up those old, good feelings from the past. I can remember what it felt like to smile upon hearing the first four notes of a song. I can feel the camaraderie of my buddies when we were driving down the street with the radio blasting. I can almost smell the perfume of my first True Love. I am a child again.
Music, take me there.

Billy Vera, 2003