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  The main source material for ‘Rock around the Clock’ was jump blues, which had been around since the mid-forties. Jump blues had utilised the big-band swing sound that had dominated the thirties and forties, stripped back the number of musicians, placed the saxophone at the front of the brass section, replaced croons with harsher blues vocals and shifted the guitar to the rhythm section. With all hands to the rhythm pump, the music literally began to jump. The lyrics were frequently filthy and a whole lot of fun.

  Arkansas-born Louis Jordan was the king of jump blues. He had been the one star name who – if you wanted a severely edited pop history – provided a smooth transition between the swing and rock ’n’ roll eras. With the Tympany Five, he had laced his scaled-down swing sound with a blue comedian’s shtick and ribald titles (‘You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business’, ‘I Like ’Em Fat Like That’, ‘That Chick’s Too Young to Fry’). Fast-talking tales of gals in fox furs and zoot-suited brothers were propelled by boogie-woogie piano3 and saucy sax solos. A 1941 engagement at Chicago’s Capitol Lounge, supporting the Mills Brothers, had proved to be his breakthrough; Jordan’s records were then issued in Decca’s Sepia series (which was meant to appeal to both black and white audiences): ‘What’s the Use of Gettin’ Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)’ was his first number one on the race chart in ’42; ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby’ was a pop number one, and a million-seller, in ’44. In Jordan’s wake came Roy Brown (‘Good Rocking Tonight’), Big Joe Turner (‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’), Wynonie Harris (‘Bloodshot Eyes’), Stick McGhee (‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-o-Dee’) – stepping it up, amplifying and emphasising the beat until someone at Billboard magazine4 decided it wasn’t plain blues any more, it was rhythm and blues, and the moniker stuck: the ‘race’ chart was renamed the R&B chart in 1947.

  A DJ in Cleveland called Alan Freed had been using another term, ‘rock ’n’ roll’, since he started his Moondog radio show in 1951: ‘OK, kids, let’s rock and roll with the rhythm and blues!’ he’d shout, beating out the time on a phone book.5 Freed’s hold over Cleveland youth became clear when he put on the Moondog Coronation Ball in March 1952: more than twenty thousand turned up for a bill that included R&B vocal acts the Dominoes, featuring the dynamic tenor of Clyde McPhatter, and the Orioles, along with the lesser known Tiny Grimes, Rockin’ Highlanders, Danny Cobb and Varetta Dillard. In the event, only Paul ‘Hucklebuck’ Williams got to play before the police broke it up, as kids smashed their way into the basketball stadium. One act or none, it qualifies as the first-ever rock concert. The audience, for the record, was almost entirely black.

  Soon enough, by concentrating on ballads with a beat, hollering over them on the radio and almost willing the music to sound younger, Freed’s Moondog show began to stretch out into the suburbs of the north-east – the white neighbourhoods. Two years later he moved to New York, to radio station WINS, and there he introduced millions of white teens to the new music. The New York Times reckoned he ‘jumped into radio like a stripper into Swan Lake’.6

  Bill Haley was a pro musician with a keen ear. He had started recording back in the mid-forties as the Rambling Yodeller and was already thirty by the time ‘Rock around the Clock’ hit number one and there was no turning back. In 1952, around the time the Moondog show was keeping Cleveland’s cops occupied, he began to loosen his cowboy image, changed his band’s name from the Saddlemen to the Comets, and incorporated R&B into their set. First off, they covered Jackie Brenston’s ‘Rocket 88’ – Haley added an intro with a car starting up because he understood pop well, and reasoned that no song couldn’t be improved by the sound of a car revving out of your radio. It became a hit in the north-eastern states.7

  Haley later told Melody Maker that ‘the real turning point for me came with a record called “Icy Heart”. This song broke into the country charts, and I was on the road to Nashville promoting that song and with an introduction to get me onto the Grand Ole Opry. Then suddenly I had a call [from his manager]. Somebody had started to play the other side, which was a fast boogie thing, “Rock the Joint”, and it was selling to blacks and to white teenagers. So he said, get back here, take off the cowboy hat and those boots and get yourself a tuxedo. You’re going into the northern club circuit. It happened just like that, literally.’

  On a roll, Haley picked up the title ‘Crazy Man Crazy’ from teenage jive speak and crossed over from huckster showman to the big time, writing himself a US number-twelve hit in 1953; in some cities it was a number one, and it soon sold one hundred thousand copies. ‘We were booked into jazz clubs often, because there was no precedent for us. There was no rock ’n’ roll then. So, with a number-one hit on the chart in Chicago in 1953, we found ourselves booked on a double bill with Dizzy Gillespie. The club owner hated us and he threw us out on the street.’8

  He may have been travelling without a guide, a true innovator, but Haley was never a pin-up and his voice was reedy, short on sustain, almost asthmatic. He was partially blind and tried to cover his bad eye with a plastered-down kiss curl. The Comets were a perfectly good, driving little C&W dance band that upped the ante by acting like a circus menagerie on stage – bassist Marshall Lyttle defied physics by twirling his double bass above his head. This way, you didn’t notice the receding hairlines or the crow’s feet. But what took them out of the backwoods and into history was their unintentional adherence to one of pop’s primary unwritten laws – they were in the right place at the right time. Bill Haley did it all when it really mattered.

  A cover of Big Joe Turner’s ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ in 1954 took him into the US Top 10 and, incredibly, to number four in the UK. Hearing it alongside the three records above it in the British charts – Dickie Valentine’s brilliantined ‘Finger of Suspicion’, pub pianist Winifred Atwell’s ‘Let’s Have Another Party’, the Chordettes’ antique nursery rhyme ‘Mr Sandman’ – ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ must have sounded like a bomb had gone off at the school gates.9

  The clincher for Haley’s career came when his manager Dave Myers nailed ‘Rock around the Clock’ – a song he’d co-written that had been on the B-side of ‘Thirteen Women’ in ’54 – to Blackboard Jungle’s opening credits. It duly became, eighteen months after it was recorded, the first international teen anthem.

  It wasn’t that rock, or even rock ’n’ roll, hadn’t been mentioned in lyrics before ‘Rock around the Clock’: possibly first out of the blocks was Wild Bill Moore’s ‘We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll’ (1947);10 Gunter Lee Carr’s ‘We’re Gonna Rock’ (1950) was more basic and brutal, pounded out on a loosely tuned piano. While both implied high jinks, neither was a clarion call.

  The link between the old and new worlds was producer Milt Gabler, who had helped Louis Jordan’s move from the race chart to the mainstream pop chart, producing and co-writing his million-selling ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’ in 1946. Gabler rushed the arrangement of ‘Rock around the Clock’, as it was only a B-side, to spend more time on the top side, ‘Thirteen Women’. This left a clattering, drum-heavy mix. It sounded like jump blues, only with someone dismantling scaffolding in the studio.

  There are a few intros in the pop canon that can give you an adrenalin shot within a second – literally – of them starting up, intros that are guaranteed to cause a sharp intake of breath and a dash to the dancefloor. The hard, silver chord that opens ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is one; there’s also the oddly dolorous but huge sound that launches T. Rex’s ‘Metal Guru’, the barely controlled bagpipe glee of the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, the cascade of Pepsi bubbles on Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’. Right at the beginning there was the sharp double snare hit, followed by ‘One two three o’clock, four o’clock rock …’

  The two solos in ‘Rock around the Clock’ paint a remarkable contrast. The first, an unfeasibly fast-picked guitar line, is a total blast, like a double-speed Tom and Jerry party piece – not violent but exciting enough to make you laugh out loud. The secon
d solo, a unison brass line, was straight out of Glenn Miller, the forties biplane sound of ‘In the Mood’ with the merest sprinkling of modernity.

  Ten years of county fairs and working as a local DJ, working like a dog, had sharpened Haley’s sensibilities; no question, he’d hit on an instantly identifiable sound, and he milked it. In 1957 he had seven more UK hits, five of them Top 10, which all adhered to the same tempo, the same greased-down backbeat: ‘See You Later, Alligator’, ‘Rock-a-Beatin’ Boogie’, ‘The Saints Rock ’n’ Roll’, ‘Rockin’ through the Rye’, ‘Rip It Up’. There was even a film called Rock around the Clock. Having played his hand so well, the firestarter decided to tour Britain in early ’57. Moondog’s coronation may have brought twenty thousand out to party and break free from ballad hell in Cleveland, but Bill Haley’s first tour of Britain was like the second coming. Thousands met him and the Comets, the saviours of modern youth, when they docked at Southampton. They were expecting a sun god, they wanted to anoint the man who had delivered us from Vera Lynn. Instead, they got pop’s own Wizard of Oz. Bill Haley was no deity, he was an uncle.

  Even this may not have been too tragic. But he wasn’t your cool Uncle Bill, the one who’d play you his stash of Wynonie Harris 78s and give you a sneaky can of beer when your mum wasn’t about – the one who made you feel like part of a secret society, a cut above the meatheads at school. No, this was the Uncle Bill who was a bit too loud and sweaty at a wedding party, dark rings under his sleeves, making bitter, off-colour jokes about his ex-wife.

  Having obeyed one of modern pop’s primary rules with his sense of timing, Bill Haley messed up on another: keep the mystery caged. The kids had fun at his shows, made the most of it, but the sense of anti-climax was palpable. Haley had one more hit after his UK tour, then disappeared from the charts.

  By 1967, when he toured again, the Comets were a museum piece. ‘We’re going through the same period that Sinatra and Armstrong went through,’ he told the NME. ‘You’re up, you’re down, and if you were good in the first place, you make it back. We’ll be there.’ The Vegas engagements never came; instead he was seen almost as a novelty figure, Fatty Arbuckle with a guitar, consigned to cabaret until his lonely death in 1981. His heyday was brief but, truthfully, without Bill Haley the rest of this book could not have been written.

  1 Though Haley claimed the writing credit, it was based on Jimmy Preston and the Prestonians’ 1949 boogie-woogie record of the same title. Country had been influenced by black musicians for decades, and there was a strain known as ‘country boogie’ in the late forties: the Delmore Brothers’ ‘Hillbilly Boogie’ (1945), Jack Guthrie’s ‘Oakie Boogie’ (1947), Arthur ‘Guitar’ Smith’s ‘Guitar Boogie’ (1948), Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Shotgun Boogie’ (1950). The only other strong claim to the first cohesive R&B/country blend is Hardrock Gunter’s ‘Birmingham Bounce’ (1950), a country-boogie single that mentioned rockin’ – and was in turn derived from black ragtime pianist Charles ‘Cow Cow’ Davenport’s 1929 single ‘Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here’ – though it still sounds like a hillbilly record. Haley’s ‘Rock the Joint’ was the first to effectively rip an R&B single and make it feel comfortable in the hands of a country band.

  2 Racism in the music industry was a given before rock ’n’ roll. When RCA came to release DeFord Bailey’s version of ‘John Henry’ in 1928, they had a problem – it was a folk instrumental played on the harmonica, but Bailey was black. It ended up being released separately in both RCA’s race and hillbilly series. Never the twain would meet, apparently. Hindsight’s a fine thing but it’s hard to understand how RCA in Britain released nine EPs of vintage blues under the banner of the RCA Victor Race series in 1965 – that’s after the Rolling Stones’ cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ had been number one, Sonny Boy Williamson and John Lee Hooker had toured Britain, playing to largely white crowds, and Millie’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ had been the UK’s first major ska hit.

  3 Boogie-woogie had been a major step up for blues in the late thirties, more urban, less country, reflecting the migration of black Southern workers to cities like Chicago. The rolling, rhythmic piano that pushed it along was as basic and direct as the name, which, like rock ’n’ roll, was a euphemism for sex.

  4 It was Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine who coined it as a marketing term in 1948, as ‘race music’ had become an embarrassing name even to the white music industry. Louis Jordan has the cosmic claim of eighteen R&B chart number ones, a figure only bettered by Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder.

  5 As the rise of television forced non-network radio stations to go for a more distinctive, specialised sound in order to keep their audience, it led to the rise of other hip DJs around the country in 1953 and ’54 who were white but happy to play black music to a mixed audience: Dewey Phillips (Memphis), Art Laboe (Los Angeles), Bob ‘Wolfman Jack’ Smith (Shreveport).

  6 No one will counter Freed’s claim to coining the term ‘rock ’n’ roll’; claims on the first rock ’n’ roll single, though, are almost entirely subjective. Revisionists have given a big shout for Jackie Brenston’s ‘Rocket 88’, a 1951 Sun Studios recording that featured a sax solo, a boogie-woogie piano intro later pinched note-for-note on Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, distorted electric guitar, a leering vocal and a suitably teenage lyric (cars, no more or less). It was a great record, and topped the rhythm and blues chart for five weeks. The ingredients were pretty much ready for the chef, then, but Brenston’s ‘Rocket 88’ was all murk, rich with the fug of a speakeasy. It hardly sounded young at all. It was proto-rock ’n’ roll, but it wasn’t any more rock ’n’ roll than the Ames Brothers’ irresistible, nonsensical, beat-backed, guitar-driven ‘Rag Mop’, a US number one in 1950.

  7 Different regions of the US had local charts, which could be based on record sales but were more often compiled by radio stations, combining airplay and sales. The vastness of America meant that records could be purely regional phenomena. Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘Hanky Panky’, for instance, was picked up by a Pittsburgh DJ in 1966 three years after it was recorded, and the record was re-pressed locally, becoming a Pittsburgh number one before it eventually broke nationally. Los Angeles band the Merry-Go-Round had two LA number ones in 1967 but neither even reached the national Top 20.

  8 This tale reveals the widening gap between a music for white teenagers and club-based jazz – still very much a black, adult music. As the music the Comets were playing had no obvious name, Haley toyed with idea of calling it ‘crazy’ music. Luckily Alan Freed came up with a rather better name for it soon after.

  9 It is received wisdom that Haley’s version is bowdlerised, deleting the black slang from Turner’s take, making it acceptable to picket-fence America and privet-hedge Britain. Yes, he lost ‘I can look at you ’til you ain’t no child no more’, which probably sounded faintly uncomfortable then and sounds a whole lot worse now. More importantly, Haley kept in ‘I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store’, which remains the most sexually graphic and grubby line on a Top 5 single to this day.

  10 Moore later played the joyous sax break on Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me’.

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  A MESS OF BLUES: ELVIS PRESLEY

  In the early seventies Elvis Presley’s record label, RCA, released an album of unreleased outtakes called A Legendary Performer: when it outsold his new album of maudlin country ballads, the singer must have felt he had begun to lose the battle with his own myth. Trapped inside Graceland, the Memphis mansion that was half home, half prison, the humble country boy who had done more than anyone to invent teen culture grew overweight and suffered severe depression; to the outside world, though, he was still the ultimate superstar, the invincible King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Eighteen months before he died, Elvis told his producer Felton Jarvis, ‘I’m so tired of being Elvis Presley.’

  No one has had the pop-culture impact of Elvis Presley. Adults didn’t get him at all. He invented himself, a
true modernist, drawing on the best of everything that surrounded him and making it new. He rose faster, fell further, had the most glorious comeback, and died young, alone in his palace. Elvis Presley was a deity and a comic monstrosity. He was tender, thuggish, generous, narcissistic, charming, sensitive, self-destructive and paranoid. Sam Phillips, the producer at Sun Records who first recorded the boy wonder in 1954, remembered Elvis, even at the outset, as having ‘the greatest inferiority complex of any person, black or white, that I had worked with. He was a total loner. He kind of felt locked out.’ His music was also sweet, brutal, lonely, ecstatic. And for this Elvis has been loved more fiercely than any pop star since.

  Some argue that rock ’n’ roll would have happened without Elvis, and they may be right, but that doesn’t mean it would have taken over, not at all. Bill Haley had arrived at his sound by trial and error, mixing graft, a keen ear for what the customer wanted and a willingness to dabble in R&B’s black arts. It took him ten years to find the right sound. Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios, Memphis, one day in summer 1954, and did it in a heartbeat.

  He was pure instinct. What’s more, he was so precisely what post-war youth had been waiting for: sex incarnate – ‘I got so many women I don’t know which way to jump.’ With ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, his national breakout hit (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’56), America suddenly discovered it had hormones that Haley, Eddie Fisher and Perry Como – perfect husband or not – were never going to stir. For the rest of the world, living in desperate times, he was just what they wanted – the consummate American. The low, heavy lids, the curling lip, the pelvis. Best of all, adults thought him crude, vulgar, animalistic. At a stroke, Elvis Presley created the generation gap.