Don’t Believe A Word I Say with Bob Segarini, Jan. 20

The Rock Files: When Radio and Records Ruled the World Part 3 – Covers, Copy Cats, and Teen Idols

You can find Part 1 here andYou can find Part 2 here:

By 1958, Rock and Roll had taken over just about every medium there was. Even television had succumbed to Elvis’s white boy/black voice charm…by degrees. Elvis’s first national television exposure was on a weekly CBS variety show called Stage Show, hosted every other week by either Tommy or Jimmy Dorsey, two big band leading brothers who were teenage favourites in the ‘30’s and 40’s. He was booked for six appearances on the strength of his hit records and sold out live shows in the Southern U.S.

The appearances, stretched out over a two month period, attracted huge ratings, mobs of teenagers outside the studio, and El was immediately, and permanently, on television’s radar.

While following the odd, but newsworthy event that was Elvis’s rise to fame, the more uptight members of the press were appalled when they noticed teenage girls with Elvis’s autograph scrawled on their thighs and stomachs, more than likely out of jealousy…or fear, and started to express their concern for America’s youth in their columns and opinion pieces.

Everybody wanted the kid for their variety shows. His next two bookings were on The Milton Berle Show, and after the second appearance, well…that’s when all hell broke loose…

Just before his second appearance on Berle’s show, Uncle Miltie went into Presley’s dressing room and convinced him to leave his guitar behind, telling Elvis, “Let them see you, son”. Elvis took Berle’s advice.

During his performance of Hound Dog, Elvis signaled the band into a half-time, slowed down tempo and let loose with what would become his trademark “gyrations”. The press went ape shit, along with millions of teenager’s parents.

From Wikipedia:

“Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. … His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. … His one specialty is an accented movement of the body … primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway.” Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”, and Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation’s most popular, declared him “unfit for family viewing”.^[ To Presley’s displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as “Elvis the Pelvis”, which he called “one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin’ from an adult.”

How’s that for snappy reportage?

These people’s heads would have exploded if Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Bobby Brown would have been around back then, but Elvis’s naïve and harmless dance moves were enough to enrage the hypocrites back then. The press , because of their newspaper’s conservative policies, the parents, like all parents, because of not wanting their children to do the illegal, immoral things they had done when their hormones kicked in when they were young. Have you ever seen the Jitterbug or other ‘30’s and ‘40’s dance crazes? Hot.

And that’s the thing. Radio didn’t let you see the more liberated teenagers dancing to swing and jazz music, and photographs from the period focused not on the audience, but the bands, bandleaders, and singers. Television showed the nation more than they bargained for. Television showed youth unfettered, letting loose to a form of music that talked to your loins first, and your brain later…if ever. Hail, hail Rock and Roll indeed…

I turned 13 in 1958 and was a product of comic books, Robert Heinlein, Frederic Brown, radio, television, and movies. If I hadn’t have had such a great family, I would have floated away like a balloon.

Rock and Roll owned radio, and radio owned my generation. New artists with names like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers replaced Frank, Dean, and Tony. Black artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, James Brown and Jackie Wilson, who no one outside of the African-American community and a handful of recently hard-wired kids had heard of a scant 36 months earlier, were suddenly

awash with a new, white, middle class audience of teenagers, and music became a rallying point for a generation of newly empowered consumers who flocked to every dance, movie, and record store within their reach. Some of my friends and I would sneak into the Stockton Ballroom to hear the Merced Bluenotes once a month, and all through 1958 and 1959 would go to repeated screenings of Rock, Rock, Rock, The Girl Can’t Help It, and Go Johnny Go and other rock and roll movies that featured our heroes. We’d also hit the great horror and sci-fi films, from the high end Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth, to the B movie double features that included The Killer Shrews, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and Earth VS the Flying Saucers, not to mention all the Teen based dramas like Teenage Crime Wave, High School Confidential, and, Riot in Juvenile Prison.

We read the EC comics, Weird Science Fiction, Tales from the Crypt, and Mad, when it was still a 4 color comic not a magazine, and always, always listened to the radio and made weekly visits to the record stores to hear new releases and buy what we could afford.

We were real gone, man!

An exciting and creative era in music, brought on by a mellowing of the big band era, and the ageing of teen heart throbs like Sinatra and Bennett that wouldn’t be duplicated in such a world shaking similar upheaval until 1964.

Left to its own devices, the first wave of rock and roll may have remained vital and evolved in a million different ways, but big business had taken notice of this new phenomenon and the huge audience that was ravenous for more, and the fledgling genre would lose some of its rawness and immediacy because of its skyrocketing popularity.

There was big money to be made for those who were able to cash in on our love of all things rock and roll. To some, especially those who didn’t understand anything about the music other than its appeal to teenagers, it would have appeared that we would buy anything that had a connection to rock and roll…anything, and to a certain extent, they were right…but all of this, any of this, would not have been possible without the music that fueled the radio, the fashion, the movies, and the teenage culture itself. The songs we heard on the radio may have been performed by our heroes, but, with the exception of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and a few others, they were written by another bunch of talented artists entirely.

While country and rhythm and blues continued to meld and blend, mainstream music’s contributors were working away to reach the teen audience too. Tin Pan Alley, specifically the Brill Building, housed a Henry Ford style assembly line of young composers and singers that struck a nerve in the teenage heartland as significant and powerful as Elvis, Chuck, and Little Richard. They brought pop music into the mix, and created some of the best teenage music of all time. They had to. It was their job to go into work and come up with a hit. It didn’t matter who performed the song, really, because, since the beginning, there was one truism in music that no one can ever deny. The song is the Star.

The Brill Building (named after Brill Brothers Clothiers on the ground floor) had housed songwriters and artists back to The Dorseys, Johnny Mercer, and Glenn Miller, and was. in the ‘50’s, the home of the songwriting teams of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who between them wrote such hits as A Teenager In Love, Save the Last Dance for Me, Hushabye, Young Blood, and the very seminal and influential Hound Dog, and dozens and dozens of other top ten hits. Joining them in the early ‘60’s would be Goffin and King, Neil Sedaka, Harry Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and later, Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and even Paul Simon when he was Jerry Landis. Add to them dozens of other writers like Gene Pitney and Bobby Darin, and you have the songs that launched many of the stars of the day, and continue to be performed and covered by today’s contemporary artists.

So covers were always around, from simultaneous releases of a song by multiple artists in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, to Elvis’s cover of Hound Dog, which was originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton in 1953. Artists with good taste and a knowledge of music would make others songs their own, and sometimes an A&R (which stands for Artists and Repertoire) man who worked at the record label would find songs to present to the artist for consideration. Good A&R men were essential. Bad ones didn’t last long.

What, someone at a record company thought, would happen if we recorded songs that were being released by big names with an artist on our roster, and either beat them to release, or to compete with them for airplay and exposure?

What happened was a lot of toned down covers of great performances. The original Chords version of Sh-Boom covered by the Crew Cuts early on in Rock and Roll’s climb to prominence, dueling versions of Dallas Frazier’s Alley Oop, by the Hollywood Argyles and Dante and the Evergreens, (both of which made number 1 in Cashbox Magazine) and a young, fresh faced idealized version of what mom and dad wanted their teenagers to be, named Pat Boone, who was the worst of the PG 13 pretenders, and earned the ire of  rock and rollers everywhere by covering Little Richard’s songs and reducing rock and roll’s energy and edge to a middle-America acceptance, a watered down and de-clawed travesty that was country club ready and church social friendly, endorsed by those who were afraid of the raucous real thing, but knew a good song when they heard one, and an opportunity to attempt to steer their kids into a well scrubbed, well behaved existence. If Richard was methamphetamine, Boone was Prozac.

The band wagon was built, and a lot of people climbed on board. Boone would record some fine songs that fit him much better like April Love, Bernadette, and Love Letters in the Sand, but will always be frowned upon for his neutering of Little Richard’s classics.

While watered down covers began to proliferate, so did remakes of old mainstream hits. Some good, like the Platters’ Twilight Time, originally a hit by the Three Suns in 1944 and later, in 1945, a hit by both Les Brown and Jimmy Dorsey, and Elvis’s Love Me Tender, (a re-write of a civil war ditty called Aura Lee) and others that just had the rock and roll beat added and a more teen oriented vocal, just sounded like the cash grabs they were. While this was going on, record companies started releasing records by newly minted singers singing songs the label owned and had written specifically to cash in on the rock and roll mystique, giving their charges names like Bobby Jimmy and Johnny Velvet, they put money and muscle behind these less than stellar releases and had a certain amount of success, especially the ones that introduced their singers in rock and roll movies singing these slap-dash facsimiles of the real thing.

While all of this was going on, a new sub-genre of rock and roll took root in the teen landscape, and believe it or not, it centered around another find by Colonel Tom Parker.

When Parker signed him, he was 15 years old. He recorded a few failed singles, but nothing was happening for him. Then, in 1957, he auditioned and won the lead in a play that was to be broadcast on Kraft Television Theater. From Wikipedia: “He played the part of a singer who was very similar to Elvis Presley with guitar, bouffant hair, and excitable teenage fans. On the show, his song presentation of a Joe Allison composition called “Teenage Crush” went over big with the young audience and, released as a 45 rpm singleby Capitolit went to No.3 on the Billboard  Hot 100 record chart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BorLhDbPO38

The play was called The Singing Idol, and the fledgling actors name was Tommy Sands, and suddenly rock and roll softened up just a little, just enough to keep the little girls screaming, and drawing their mothers into the mix. Controlled pandemonium, a kinder, gentler rebellion, a movement that would introduce what were believed to be non-threatening boys to the world at large, singing songs about young love, and dancing, and going steady. They would look like Elvis and have Elvis’s politeness and quiet charm not only off the stage, but on it as well. No more gyrating hips, no more sneers and passion, no more stoking the flames of sexual fantasies and unleashing of hormones, just wholesome, innocent teen entertainment. The songs would be written by the best songwriters, and the look would both reflect and influence the audience, and boys would want to be them and the girls would want to date them…and managers and record companies would make sure their behavior was above reproach.

They would be Teenage Idols, and, for a time, some would become more important than the songs they sang.

The first decline of rock and roll has begun.

Next Wednesday…The  Teen Idols, Mashed Potatoes, and The Great Folk Scare of 1962

That’s enough for now. Email me at segarini@fyimusic.ca with your comments, complaints, and thoughts…and remember…don’t believe a word I say.

Bob “The Iceman” Segarini was in the bands The Family Tree, Roxy, The Wackers, The Dudes, The Segarini Band, and Cats and Dogs, and nominated for a Juno for production in 1978. He also hosted “Late Great Movies” on CITY TV, was a producer of Much Music, and an on-air personality on CHUM FM, Q107, SIRIUS Sat/Rad’s Iceberg 95, (now 85), and now provides content for radiothatdoesntsuck.com with RadioZombie, The Iceage, and PsychShack. Along with the love of his life, Jade (Pie) Dunlop, (who hosts and writes “I’ve Heard That Song Before” on RTDS), continues to write, make music, and record.