Week Six: 1950s: Other Fifties Stuff

Fender Guitars:

The bands heard on the race hits of the late 1940s were small combos, usually featuring a boogie-woogie pianist, a honking saxophonist, and sometimes a lead guitarist. They played loose and loud. Music with a big beat, it still wasn't loose enough, or loud enough, to be rock and roll. For that, something else was needed— instruments able to make a bigger noise.

In 1950, such an instrument appeared. It was the Fender Esquire, the first mass-produced, solid-body electric guitar. The instrument's fret board was bolted to a flat plank of wood equipped with a pickup—a magnet wound with a steel coil that converted the vibra­tions of the metal strings into an electronic signal, which was in turn converted into sound by means of an amplifier and loudspeaker.

Over the next decade, this solid-body design was refined and per­fected by Leo Fender—the Thomas Edison of the rock era. Fender wasn't the first person to build an electric guitar, nor were his electric guitars the best—only the most memorable. It seems fitting that the tombstone of rock's first martyr, Buddy Holly, should depict the silhouette of a Fender Stratocaster, the futuristic solid-body guitar he had played. By 1959, the year of Holly's plane crash, the outline of Fender's uniquely formed guitar perfectly symbolized the dead man, and his musical gift to the world.

Acoustic guitars use a hollow wooden cavity to project the sound of the vibrating strings out toward listeners. At first, inventors tried simply to amplify this sound. Too often, the result was distortion and unwanted feedback, a piercing howl produced when an amplified signal is inadvertently amplified again. A radio repairman by voca­tion, Leo Fender had watched in the 1930s as early electric guitarists struggled to tame their unruly instruments. Near the end of his life, Fender explained how his electric guitar differed from all those that had come before. "On an acoustic electric guitar you have a string fastened to a diaphragm top, and that top does not have one specific frequency. If you play a note the top will respond to it and also to a lot of adjoining notes," producing distortion, particularly at higher levels of amplification; "a solid-body doesn't have that, you're deal­ing with just a single note at a time." In effect, Fender's solid body design, by eliminating the diaphragm top, allowed each string to be amplified cleanly, without unwanted feedback—thus enabling elec­tric guitarists to play louder than ever before.

The Esquire was only one of Leo Fender's inventions. Born on a farm near Anaheim, California, in 1909, just eight years after Mar­coni succeeded in using wireless radio waves to transmit the letter S across the Atlantic Ocean, he had come of age in a world where phonographs and radios were still awe-inspiring innovations, ma­chines with a conjurer's power to reproduce sounds. Fascinated by the prospect of harnessing that power, Fender developed a passion for electrical engineering. A lifelong country music fan, he began to tinker with guitars in his teens, and by the 1930s he was experiment­ing with the pick ups used to amplify guitars. In 1931, Fender opened a radio, music, and record store in Southern California. In the years that followed, he experimented with new electric guitar de­signs, and also built his own public address amplification systems, which he rented out for sporting and entertainment events. At the same time, he was working on other devices, among them a reliable record changer. After the war, Fender decided to sell his design for the record changer, using the profits to build a new plant in Fuller-ton, California, for manufacturing electric guitar equipment.

In 1948, when Fender's first guitar rolled off his plant's assembly line, amplified instruments were still something of a novelty. The sound of swirling violins marked the mainstream pop of the era, while the timbres of the big band—trumpets, saxes, piano—still dominated jazz and jump blues. Even in country music, where the guitar had long been ubiquitous as a rhythm instrument, it was still generally strummed in the background, leaving the melody and im­provisation to a banjo, or mandolin, or a keening fiddle.

Fender's electric guitars would help change all that—but change was already in the air. Earlier in the decade, a Texas musician named T-Bone Walker had introduced the electric guitar as a lead voice in jump blues, while Oscar Moore, inspired by Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman's pioneering electric guitarist, had kept the instru­ment popular in jazz circles with his impeccably swinging solos in the King Cole Trio. In country music, Merle Travis was similarly in the midst of rewriting the rules, transforming the amplified guitar into a stringed equivalent of the pianoforte—an instrument capable of pro­ducing melodies as well as harmonies, with more or less percussive force, at a volume that could compete with brass, woodwinds, and drums. Grasping all of these possibilities and elaborating them still further by building his own solid-body electric guitar was Les Paul, who released his first recordings several years before Leo Fender brought the Esquire to market.

Unlike Les Paul, who was an able musician in his own right, Leo Fender was fascinated, above all, by the sheer romance of electronics. He represents a recurrent type in postwar culture: the technological tinkerer as Promethean innovator.

Just as the introduction of the microphone in the 1920s had revo­lutionized the practice of popular singing, so did the amplification of the guitar transform the craft of popular musicianship. In both cases technological innovations facilitated the cross-fertilization of new vernacular approaches to music. With the aid of a microphone, singers could address listeners with unprecedented intimacy, just as the jazz style popular in the Twenties encouraged them to phrase with rhythmic flexibility. A similar metamorphosis occurred with the electric guitar: amplification allowed guitarists to play fluid and hornlike solos, while the country and jump blues genres popular in the late Forties encouraged them to elaborate a more percussive and riffing style.

In 1948, there was an outpouring of guitar boogie records. John Lee Hooker offered "Boogie Chillen," playing a primal style—one blaring chord, banged out at a boogie tempo. Arthur Smith sounded jaunty and crisp on his influential "Guitar Boogie," a hit with coun­try fans later that year. And then there was Les Paul, whose tongue-in-cheek "Hip-Billy Boogie" was characteristically clever, setting bright riffs in cheerful counterpoint to a bluesy solo, thanks to Paul's pioneering use of sound-on-sound tape recording, or overdubbing.

The guitars that Leo Fender introduced in 1950 proved to be the right product at the right time. The instrument's construction was sturdy, yet elegant. A neck of solid maple was bolted to a gently curved body of flat, solid ash. Two pickups were mounted in the body, one of them angled next to the bridge, to produce the crispest possible treble tones. The headstock, gently curved like the instru­ment's body, announced in spaghetti lettering that this was a guitar made by Fender.

The new instrument—first dubbed the Esquire, then the Broad­caster, and finally the Telecaster—caught on quickly. By 1951, busi­ness was booming—and Fender was putting into production his next major invention, the electric bass.

Musicians were drawn to the Telecaster by its rugged construction and the unusual palette of sounds it could produce. Mute the strings and the notes popped percussively; raise the volume and the notes hung in the air, as if by magic defying the quick decay of the natu­rally plucked string. Using the pickup nearest to the bridge produced a sound that was preternaturally bright and twangy, while using the pickup nearest the neck created a mellower tone, reminiscent of that produced by previous electric guitars.

But Fender was more than a skilled instrument maker. He has also rightly been hailed as the electric guitar's Harley Earl—an engineer with a flair for futuristic design. Like Earl's famous tailfin designs for General Motors cars in the 1950s, Fender's guitars flaunted the arti­ficiality of their shape, using swept-back contours to evoke a fantasy of power and speed. Fender's Stratocaster model, introduced in 1954, was offered in a host of shocking colors, from Fiesta Red to Shoreline Gold. Unlike the saxophones and trumpets played by a big band musician, or even the synthesizers and electronic keyboards fashionable today, these were instruments that made a fashion state­ment. Musicians sported them like necklaces, waved them like scarves, collected them like rare pearls.

Fender's instruments did more than change the sound and look of postwar pop music; above all, they changed the range and variety of people who would be able to make music. The guitar has long been an inviting instrument for amateurs: easily portable, it is also rela­tively easy to play. But Fender's innovations made it even easier. By doing away with the hollow, resonating cavity of wood that was the musical heart of the old-fashioned Spanish guitar, Fender's solid-body design sharply reduced the importance of controlling each string's resonance precisely, enabling players to mask fingering mis­takes. Suddenly even a clumsy novice could sound almost musical: plug in a Telecaster, tap a string, and sound poured effortlessly out, at a volume that was previously unimaginable.

Fender's guitar inaugurated a new era for the design and manufac­ture of electronic instruments. Fender himself worked on the first electric pianos, which his company produced in the mid-Sixties. A generation later, with the use of computers in synthesizers, drum ma­chines, and sequencers—devices able to store and program patterns of sound electronically—a variety of sophisticated electronic instru­ments had all but obviated the need for a musician to acquire, through practice, a certain level of manual dexterity. On a modern electronic synthesizer, one need only touch a button or a key, and samples of every conceivable sort of timbre and sound pour forth ef­fortlessly. Whether this superficial ease of access to the means of pro­ducing sound has brought the world more music of beauty is, of course, another question entirely.

"Let's be realistic about this," Frank Zappa remarked in 1979, usefully summing up Leo Fender's contribution to global culture. "The guitar can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the earth." Powerful, flashy, unspeakably loud, a handy tool for those with little in the way of previous musical experience, the elec­tric guitar became the arch weapon in rock's attack on the decorum and orderliness of previous forms of fine music, profaning its empire of well-tempered tones and refined artistry, and allowing a new spirit—of deliberate musical brutishness—to ring in listeners' ears.”

Moondog’s Coronation Ball:

On the evening of Friday, March 21, 1952, thousands of black youngsters in Cleveland anticipated a night of "sacramental strutting and swinging" (in Albert Murray's phrase). A new local radio personality, Alan Freed, was hosting a rhythm and blues concert and "Coronation Ball" at the area's largest hall, the Cleveland Arena. Freed's late-night show, The Moondog House, had been on radio sta­tion WJW for less than a year, but already his rhythm and blues format had fired up Cleveland's previously inert population of black teenagers. Billing himself as "The King of the Moondoggers," Freed addressed his listeners as if they were denizens of a make-believe king­dom of hipsters and nighthawks, united in their love for Negro music. The idea of coming together to witness the mock coronation of this kingdom's make-believe king was irresistible—and so was the slate of -performers scheduled to perform at Freed's "ball."

Within a week of Freed's announcing the Moondog Coronation Ball, 7,000 tickets had been sold. Capitalizing on the unexpected de­mand, Freed and his partners printed and sold several thousand more tickets, how many nobody knew—they had stopped counting.

At dusk on a rainswept night, the kids converged on the Cleveland Arena. Freed had taken a calculated risk in booking his ball into an old hockey rink that could accommodate 10,000 people. By night­fall, it was obvious that the rink would sell out, but the crowd was still growing. At 8:30, with the hall jammed beyond capacity, the doors were locked shut and the show began.

Still more fans kept coming, tickets in their hands. There was no place for them to go. They pressed forward anyway, trying to force their way into the old arena, jostling, shoving, pushing, waving use­less tickets in frustration.

Inside, the jump blues saxophonist Paul Williams and his band were rocking, evoking an ambiance of Dionysian revelry.

Outside, the crowd grew larger and pushed harder. Suddenly, one of the doors burst open. The angry mob flooded onto the arena floor. The police, unprepared, retreated in bewilderment. The lights were low, the saxes were honking, and the joint was jumping.

As the band played on, and the crowd was jammed ever more tightly against the stage, tempers flared. Fists flew, knives flashed.

Some tried to move toward the exits, while others joined in the melee. One gang of kids stormed the stage, tearing down the sequined "Moondoggers" sign that was hanging on the curtain behind the bandstand. Stunned, the band stopped playing. The fighting grew worse.

Caught off guard, the police were slow to react. They called for re­inforcements, and phoned city hall for advice. When city officials fi­nally arrived, they canceled the concert and ordered the crowd to disperse.

As quickly as it had begun, the riot was over. But Cleveland was stunned. The city had never seen anything quite like it.

"Moondog Ball Is Halted as 6,000 Crash Arena Gate," screamed the headline in Saturday's Cleveland Plain Dealer. That afternoon, the city's other major daily, the Cleveland Press, reported that the mob had numbered 25,000 "hepcats"—in this context, "hepcat" functioned as a racial code word, communicating the fact that the crowd consisted largely of black teenagers. The city's black establish­ment weighed in with its own expressions of outrage. Writing in the city's black newspaper, The Cleveland Call and Post, a columnist de­clared that "the shame of the situation lies not in the frustrated crowd that rushed to the Arena, but in a community which allows a program like this to continue and to exploit the Negro teensters!"

The target of this racially pointed barb was black. And because he was black, Alan Freed, like Dewey Phillips in Memphis, in fact felt no compunction about playing whatever his audience wanted to hear, even if it propagated "bum taste, low morality, and downright gutbucket subversions," as the columnist for the Call and Post com­plained.

City hall meanwhile accused Freed of reckless disregard for the public safety. Charging that the promoters had printed and sold too many tickets, city officials threatened legal action.

Under attack on all sides, Freed took the first opportunity to de­fend himself. The Saturday night after his abortive Coronation Ball, the Moondog addressed his radio audience directly.

"I promise you that everything will be righted," Freed said solemnly—and then announced an impromptu plebiscite. "I'd like to have you do this for me tonight when you call in your requests to our Moondog show on this Saturday night. I would like you to tell . . . when you call in, that you are with the Moondog. And if you're not with the Moondog, you can tell them that, too, because if enough of you can show your faith tonight through your telephone calls, through your telegrams, through your cards and letters over the weekend, we will continue the show. If not"—Freed paused melodra­matically, the hitch in his delivery expressing a martyr's conviction of total innocence—"the Moondog program will leave the air!"

Freed was a genius at this sort of spiel. It is hard to believe he meant a single word. After all, the riot was a publicity windfall, turn­ing Freed into a local celebrity overnight. The notoriety was price­less—and so was the aura of danger that now surrounded him. Chaos! Disorder! A fount of moral turpitude! And all right here in River City!

The managers of his radio station, WJW, immediately increased the airtime allotted to Freed's nightly program. In the weeks that fol­lowed, his popularity soared.

Quite apart from his real moral defects—and they were many— Freed was an unlikely pied piper for Cleveland's black teenagers. The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, he had a passion for classical music, calling one of his daughters Sieglinde, after the character in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen. A veteran disc jockey and televi­sion announcer, he had an abrasive personality that repeatedly landed him in trouble. In 1951, with his broadcast career on the skids and his liquor consumption on the rise, Freed, then twenty-eight, struck up a conversation that changed his life. He was drinking at a bar with Leo Mintz, the owner of the Record Rendezvous, one of Cleveland's largest record stores. Mintz had already helped Freed get a job playing classical recordings on Cleveland radio station WJW—as a longtime sponsor on the station, Mintz had clout. Now the businessman offered Freed the prospect of a quite different kind of job, playing a completely different kind of music. Mintz explained to Freed that he had noticed an upsurge in rhythm and blues sales at his store in the past few months. Hoping to broaden the market for such recordings, Mintz proposed that he buy several hours of late-night airtime on WJW—and that Freed serve as the host of a new show devoted exclusively to rhythm and blues recordings.

Freed was reluctant. Negro music wasn't his cup of tea. But he needed work and had no choice. And so on July 11, 1951, Freed started playing rhythm and blues records on WJW.

The few airchecks of the program that have survived suggest that Freed played an eclectic variety of music popular with black listeners: everything from up-tempo swing and jump blues to sloe-eyed bal­lads. Freed's on-air manner was energetic and faintly smarmy. In­spired by an offbeat instrumental called "Moondog Symphony" that had been recorded by a colorful New York City street musician who called himself Moondog, Freed decided to use the record as his show's theme music—and to borrow the musician's moniker. Every show began with the sound of bones rattling, drums beating, and dogs howling, while Freed jabbered genially: "All right, Moondog, get in there, kid! Howl it out, buddy!" Using a cowbell and tele­phone book as props, he rang the bell and pounded the book, some­times shouting into an open microphone when the music got really hot, all in a homey effort to convey excitement. But compared to a wildman like Dewey Phillips, Freed was positively low-key. He took his time announcing the dedications to each song, and he took care to enunciate clearly not only the title of each record he played, but also the record company that had released it.

Freed was neither the first nor the best of the black rhythm and blues radio stars. But his location gave him an edge. In these years, the music industry closely watched Cleveland, regarding it as a "breakout" city—a regional market where national trena Bill Randle, the city's top-rated disc jockey, was widely credi launching the career of more than one recording artist, inc Johnnie Ray, whose sobbing rendition of "Cry" had set a new dard for the histrionic display of emotion on a popular recordint ±\ scholarly music buff who had started his radio career by broadcast­ing jazz, Randle had long ago given up any effort to impose his own musical tastes on his programming: "I don't care what it is," he fa­mously remarked in the early Fifties. "I want to make hits." When Freed's popularity began to soar, Randle took notice—and so did the pop music business in New York City.

Within a year, Bill Randle had begun to play a smattering of rhythm and blues records on his radio show. Tapes of Alan Freed's program began to air in the New York City area. And the show busi­ness tabloid Variety, sensing a new national trend in the making, re­marked on the "strong upsurge" of popular interest in rhythm and blues.

On July 20, 1953, Alan Freed returned in triumph to the Cleve­land Arena. That night, he hosted "The Biggest Rhythm and Blues Show," a package tour that would become the largest-grossing R&B revue up to that time. The headliners were Ruth Brown and Wynonie Harris. And though the audience that night, like the audience for Freed's ill-fated Coronation Ball, was overwhelmingly black, the racial equation was about to shift. After the near riot the year before, the music doubtless struck many as more unsavory than ever. But now that it was spreading over the airwaves, Wynonie Harris' brand of "good rockin' "—its promise of pleasure subtly transformed by the new aura of menace—was poised as never before to break out.

Copyrighting “Rock and Roll”

It had been a bad day for Alan Freed. In the morning, he had been stripped of his right to use the on-air moniker Moondog after a judge ruled against him in a suit brought by Louis "Moondog" Hardin, the blind New York street musician whose "Moondog Sym­phony" had originally inspired the disc jockey to yap and howl. Now, scarcely two months after Freed had moved his Moondog ra­dio show from WJW in Cleveland to WINS in the lucrative New York City market, he was going to have to come up with a new name, a new trademark.

That night, Freed and his cronies retired to P.J. Moriarty's, a restaurant on Broadway. "Alan was having a few drinks and be­moaning the fact that he had to come up with a new name," one wit­ness later recalled. "To be honest with you, I couldn't say if Alan said it or somebody else said it. But somebody said 'rock and roll.' Every­body just went, Yeah. Rock and roll"

Since Freed for months had been billing his show as the "Moon-dog Rock and Roll Party," it made sense simply to shorten the old name. Freed himself brushed aside the one obvious objection: what­ever its broader musical connotations, "rock and roll" was still in 1954 black slang for sexual intercourse. "I don't give a shit," Freed erupted. "That's what I'm going to call the show!" Thus was born Alan Freed's Rock and Roll Party.

The phrase "rock and roll" was not, of course, a new one. In 1922, blues singer Trixie Smith had recorded "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" for a company called Black Swan—the first recording company owned and operated solely by African-Ameri­cans. Twelve years later, the Boswell Sisters, the best of the era's black jazz vocal groups, had a modest popular hit with their record­ing of a song called, simply, "Rock and Roll." In 1938, band leader Erskine Hawkins—whose recordings would later inspire Glenn Miller ("Tuxedo Junction") and Patti Page ("Tennessee Waltz"^re­leased "Rockin' Rollers' Jubilee." And ten years later, Wynonie Har­ris' "Good Rockin' Tonight" had provoked a flood of songs with the word "rock" in the title. Freed himself had been using the phrase since 1952, promising radio listeners in Cleveland "a rock and roll session with blues and rhythm records."

Having decided to call his show a Rock and Roll Party, Freed went one step farther. Stung by the outcome of the court case that day, he and his friends hatched a scheme to copyright the phrase. The most famous of his partners in this ill-fated venture was Morris Levy, the self-styled godfather of New York's black music world, and a man widely feared for his ruthless business practices and rumored ties to organized crime. (In 1988, Levy finally went to jail, after be­ing convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit extortion.) Levy had made his fortune in the music business by running one of the most famous midtown jazz clubs, Birdland, which had first opened its doors in 1949. Levy next moved into song publishing. Un­til 1953, he trafficked almost exclusively in jazz and Latin music. But that changed after an associate, George Goldner, convinced Levy to help him promote the Crows, a pioneering doo-wop group. Using his influence with disc jockeys who played black music—and also offer­ing cash bribes, or "payola"—Levy helped Goldner turn the Crows' recording of "Gee," released four months before "Sh-Boom," into the first doo-wop song to cross over from the rhythm and blues charts and sell as a mainstream pop hit (on Billboard's pop chart, it reached number fourteen).

By the fall of 1954, when Freed moved his radio show from Cleve­land to New York, Morris Levy had become a key figure in the city's rhythm and blues scene. With his long experience in booking and music publishing, Levy was an invaluable contact. Shortly after ar­riving in New York, Freed asked him to help book his local rhythm and blues concerts. The two men became partners. The copyright claim for the phrase "rock and roll" was eventually filed on behalf of Seig Music, a corporation consisting of Freed, Morris Levy, veteran promoter Lew Platt, and WINS, Freed's new radio outlet.

After his move to New York in September, Freed had quickly be­come one of the city's top-rated disc jockeys. Rhythm and blues fans, long accustomed to the relaxed patter of black disc jockeys like Tommy "Dr. Jive" Smalls, were at first stunned by the frenzy of Freed's style. Willie Bryant, a veteran soft-shoe dancer, singer, big band leader, and radio announcer, tried to rally Harlem residents to protest the use of a black man to air black music. But the protests fizzled out, and new listeners simply assumed that Freed's maniacal shouting during his shows was part of the atmosphere at any "rock and roll party."

The character of the music that Freed played did not, at first, change at all. An aircheck of a show broadcast early in 1955 cap­tures Freed on a typical evening. The references to "rock and roll" are endless: "Hello, everybody, yours truly, Alan Freed, the old king of the rock and rollers, all ready for another big night of rockin' and rollin', let 'er go! Welcome to Rock and Roll Party number one!" But the range of the records that Freed plays scarcely differs from what he had been playing in Cleveland: ballads by singers like Dinah Washington; harmony records by doo-wop groups like the Cadillacs; and one unusually intense jump blues by Ray Charles, "I Got a Woman." In these months, "rock and roll" was simply Alan Freed's trademark name for rhythm and blues. It was just another eu­phemism for black music.

Still, the fact that Freed now called the music that he played "rock and roll" was not without significance. Working in New York City, the entire music industry could see what he was up to. And the change in his show's name by chance coincided with a dramatic— and widely remarked—shift in the racial composition of Freed's audi­ence.

On January 14 and 15, 1955, Freed presented his first dance con­cert in New York City, at St. Nicholas Arena. A fit successor to the Moondog Coronation Ball, this concert was billed as a "Rock 'n' Roll Ball." (When Freed's trademarked phrase acquired its apostro­phes is something of a mystery: the first Billboard story reporting the Freed show's new name spelled it "Rock and Roll.")

As Morris Levy, who promoted the concerts, would later recall, the demand for tickets caught everyone by surprise: "He made four announcements, six weeks before the dance, and $38,000 came in the mail. I says, Oh my God. This is crazy."

> And that was only the first shock. The second shock came from seeing the crowd in person. Freed's ball featured a by-now pre­dictable lineup of rhythm and blues talent: Ruth Brown, Joe Turner, the Drifters, Fats Domino, and two doo-wop groups, the Moon-glows and Harptones. The musicians were all black. But the audience was nearly half black.

Both nights, the old arena was jammed with people. Inside, as Morris Levy later recalled, "the ceiling was actually dripping from the moisture. It was raining inside the St. Nicholas Arena."

Freed's "Rock 'n' Roll Ball" went off without a hitch. And music industry insiders, noting the size and composition of Freed's audi­ence, laid plans to pay Freed for the privilege of billing selected new releases as bona fide "rock 'n' roll."

A new label had appeared. It only remained to make a new kind of music that fit the label.

Blackboard Jungle:

The scene was repeated round the world. The lights in the theater dimmed. The film began to roll. Nervous drum fills ac­companied a written prologue:

"Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency—its causes— and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools. The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional. However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem. It is in this spirit and with this faith that BLACKBOARD JUNGLE was produced."

A snare drum cracked. Out of the theater's speakers boomed a voice: "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock ROCK!" Against the backdrop of a blank blackboard, the film's credits flashed by. The drama in the voice intensified: "Nine, ten, 'Jeven o'clock, twelve o'clock ROCK! We're going to ROCK around the clock TONIGHT!" The band on the soundtrack jumped into a medium-tempo boogie, with the singer barely hugging the rhythm and the drummer nailing double rim-shots at the end of each line. On screen, after the credits had finished, with the song still blaring, a new image appeared: an ele­vated train hurtling into a jungle of tall buildings, an urban heart of darkness.

Stepping off the train, a man soberly dressed in suit and tie ap­proached a somber brick building, NORTH MANUAL HIGH SCHOOL. In the asphalt schoolyard ahead of him, just visible through the school's wrought iron fence, a bunch of kids were danc­ing. As the stranger approached the front door, a few toughs hooted at him. In the background, a saxophone and electric guitar played a blaring riff in unison. The singer sounded jubilant: "When the band slows down we'll yell for more ..." As the song finally faded into the background, the boys in the schoolyard surged forward, pressing against the fence to leer at a passing woman, their arms waving through the cast iron bars—like convicts in a prison, or apes in a zoo.

In the two minutes and ten seconds it lasted on screen, this combi­nation of image and song—teenagers under detention, Bill Haley singing "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock"—defined the cul­tural essence of the music that Alan Freed had just named. It would be all about disorder, aggression, and sex: a fantasy of human nature, running wild to a savage beat.

The director of blackboard Jungle, Richard Brooks, was an earnest liberal. Genuinely concerned about chaos and violence in the nation's high schools, he had no personal interest in glorifying juve­nile delinquency. But his style was melodramatic, and so was the movie's ad campaign: "A drama of teenage terror! They turned a school into a jungle!"

Released on March 25, 1955, the film hit a nerve. As one film critic, Andrew Dowdy, has remarked, "more important than the vio­lence in Blackboard Jungle was the implication of irreversible cul­tural tensions." These tensions were dramatized in the film's most memorable sequence. In an effort to communicate with students, one of the teachers at North Manual High brings in to class his personal collection of old jazz recordings. But the punks don't dig Bix Beider-becke. In a carnival of defiance, the kids trash the teacher's "vision of American popular culture, sailing the fragile 78's across the class­room, while the sound track blares their own competing music."

From Los Angeles to London, self-styled hoods reacted with glee. They danced, they sang, they slashed seats. The booming riffs of Bill Haley's opening song were a reveille. At Princeton University one night in May, a student broadcast Haley's recording of "Rock Around the Clock" out of a dormitory window, provoking others to join in, using their phonograph players to produce a thrum of chaotic noise. In the streets, a crowd gathered; a party began; parad­ing through campus, the students set fire to trash cans.

Alarmed educators warned that the senseless violence was a pre­view of worse to come. Time deplored the aid and comfort the film was giving to Communist critics of America and its way of life. That fall, when Blackboard Jungle was announced as the U.S. entry in the Venice Film Festival, America's ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, threatened to "cause the greatest scandal in motion picture his­tory" unless the film was withdrawn.

Spurred, in part, by the controversy over Blackboard Jungle and its rock and roll anthem, educators, commentators, and politicians struck up an edgy debate over the state of America's youth. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held a hearing, asking experts to testify about the effects on teenagers of film violence. The very existence of this Subcommittee reflected America's preoccupa­tion in these years with teen disorder. The problem had first been identified during World War II, when a small but influential group of criminologists reported that roving bands of unsupervised youth were running wild when they weren't quietly wreaking havoc— moral termites, gnawing at the foundations of civil society. "The psy­chopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasure of gratification," the psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner warned in 1944 in his influential study, Rebel Without a Cause—The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. The juvenile delinquent, as Lindner analyzed him, "can­not wait upon erotic gratification," so he rapes; he cannot wait for approval from adult society, so he grabs attention by becoming an outlaw, a menace to society, a rogue male, "a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program."

As the popular reaction to Blackboard Jungle suggested, the spec­tacle of youthful anarchy had its charms—and not only in the eyes of the young and the restless. In his essay "The black Negro," Norman Mailer, citing Lindner, wrote about the psychopathic components of the hipster's personality with warm sympathy, going so far as to say that the psychopath "could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over." A few months later, the director Nicholas Ray and the actor James Dean gave a definitive (and truly glamorous) form to the figure of the psychopathic hipster in Rebel Without a Cause—a film with a script based on the work of Lindner as adapted by Irving Shulman, the author of the first impor­tant piece of pulp fiction about juvenile delinquents (The Amboy Dukes, published in 1947).

The ongoing public fascination with teen hooliganism, film vio­lence, and its impact on the moral future of the United States of America helped turn Blackboard Jungle (like Rebel Without a Cause a half year later) into one of the benchmark films of 1955—and also one of the most profitable. The uproar also sold records. "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" entered Billboard's chart of best­sellers on May 14, 1955. Two months later, it was number one in the United States; by the end of the year, it was number one in England as well; in the months that followed, as the film made its way into theaters around the world, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" followed it, introducing a new genre of music to a large audience and turning Bill Haley into the world's first—and to this day, least likely—rock and roll star.

Thirty years old in 1955, Haley was no Greek god. A paunchy man with thinning hair, he had chipmunk cheeks, a spit curl lac­quered to his forehead, and a dead eye that left him painfully self-conscious. A veteran of country-western radio and the Jersey shore nightclub scene, he was ill-suited to the global scale of his sudden fame, which had come about largely by chance, as an artifact of the wider controversy over Blackboard Jungle.

The basis for Haley's accidental apotheosis had been laid four years earlier. In 1951, the owner of a small Philadelphia record label had convinced Haley, until then strictly a country singer, to record a new version of a rhythm and blues hit recently produced by Sam Phillips in Memphis, a stomping barrelhouse blues called "Rocket 88". Haley's recording of the song was a flop; but his version proved popular in local nightclubs. He added other rhythm and blues songs to his repertoire. Though Haley had broken into show business by dubbing himself the "Ramblin' Yodeler," he couldn't ignore the pop­ular response to his new material. So in 1952, Haley hired a new band of players schooled in jazz, and recorded a hot new version of a 1948 jump blues hit, "Rock the Joint," which sold well in the Philadelphia and New Jersey area. Doffing his cowboy duds, Haley donned a Scotch plaid jacket, and began trying in earnest to copy the classic jump blues shouters, men like Wynonie Harris and Joe Turner. A few months later, his makeover was complete when his version of a jive novelty, "Crazy Man Crazy," finally became his first, modest nationwide hit.

Haley's voice was solid as a plank—and as wooden. But his musi­cians knew how to swing. And Haley knew how to lead a band. Em­ulating the stage act of the Treniers, a tightly choreographed black rhythm and blues act popular in the Northeast, and instructing his band to emulate as well the musicianship of Count Basic, among other masters of the jump idiom, Haley and the Comets painstak­ingly refined their new style, creating a showy stage act to go with their blues riffs, which they delivered with a lumbering, distinctively heavy backbeat.

After "Crazy Man Crazy" had climbed to number twelve on the Billboard charts, a Philadelphia impresario named James Myers commissioned Max Freedman, a sixty-three-year-old Tin Pan Alley veteran, to write something with Haley in mind. Freedman's claim to fame was "Sioux City Sue," a cute song that Bing Crosby had popu­larized in 1946. His main talents were a knack for wordplay and a feel for the musical marketplace. Taking as his model "Rock the Joint," and drawing as well from "Around the Clock Blues," a song recorded in 1945 by Wynonie Harris, Freedman produced "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock"—a generic jump blues, jointly credited to "Jimmy DeKnight," a pseudonym for Myers, who owned the song.

In the summer of 1953, Haley began to work the new song into his nightclub act. And on April 12, 1954, shortly after signing his first contract with a major national label, Decca, he recorded "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" in New York City.

The session was under the supervision of Milt Gabler, a producer who had previously worked with such jazz stars as Billie Holiday and Lester Young, and also with the great jump blues artist Louis Jordan. Gabler recorded Haley in the same Manhattan ballroom he had used to record Jordan, exploiting the hall's acoustic depth to juice up the beat. A veteran of the swing era, Gabler focused his en­ergy on getting just the right drum sound; for the session, he hired a New York studio musician named Billy Guesack, placed three micro­phones around his drum kit, and asked him to hit rim-shots on the snare drum, in order to produce a heavy backbeat (a technique that jazz drummer Gene Krupa had perfected with Benny Goodman's band in the 1930s). The band played every stereotyped riff with panache and precision; Gabler's recording was alive, full of energy and excitement; the electric guitar solo, by the Comets' Danny Ce-drone (a note-for-note reproduction of Cedrone's solo on Haley's version of "Rock the Joint"), was a model of real grace (and a fitting if modest homage to Cedrone's musical idol, jazz guitarist Charlie Christian).

Released on May 10, 1954, Haley's Decca recording of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" reached the Billboard pop charts, but barely: it spent just one week at number twenty-three.

James Myers was undaunted. Convinced that Haley's version of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" would make him a wealthy man yet, he set his sights on Hollywood. In the fall of 1954, shortly after Haley's second Decca record, a bowdlerized version of Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll," had become a huge national hit, selling more than one million copies, Myers mailed dozens of copies of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" to Hollywood producers, suggesting they consider using the song.

This was how Haley's song came, belatedly, to the attention of Richard Brooks and the producers of Blackboard Jungle. Wishing to use the song as a symbol of youthful mayhem and menace, Brooks decided to add a crucial new dimension to the music—sheer volume. In those years, it was customary for Hollywood producers to lower the levels of the bass and treble on the music used on soundtracks, lest the audience in theaters be deafened by the giant loudspeakers behind the screen. For Blackboard Jungle, however, the producers ran Milt Gabler's recording of "Rock Around the Clock" wide open, letting the music hit listeners in the gut.

In a large theater, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" was loud—for most people, it was the loudest music they had ever heard. The volume of the beat added to the menace of the scene on screen. A crude but effective symbolic association was put into play: the louder the sound, the more strongly it would connote power, aggres­sion, violence. Haley's band may sound quaint when compared to Led Zeppelin or the Sex Pistols: but heavy metal and punk both have their origins in the shock waves produced by the soundtrack of Blackboard Jungle.

Freed's phrase for this loud new music seemed more apt than ever. If "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" wasn't rock and roll, what was? Oddly enough, Freed himself was less than thrilled. The sudden, overwhelming popularity of the term "rock and roll" made his copyright of the term all but unenforceable. And the defining as­sociation of the genre with images of disorder posed a potential pub­lic relations problem of a sort that Freed knew all too well, having weathered the outcry after the riot at his Moondog Coronation Ball two years earlier. "Hollywood is to blame," Freed complained, sin­gling out Blackboard Jungle. "It was unfortunate," he said, that the song had been used in "that hoodlum-infested movie . . . [which] seemed to associate rock 'n' rollers with delinquents."

The charge that certain styles of music bred violence was an old one. Similar accusations had been leveled at swing. Not by coinci­dence, both rock and swing were styles broadly associated with African-Americans. The panic over the "violence" of such music was racially tinged, an indirect way of expressing the fear of miscegena­tion, a fear provoked by the fact that rock, like swing before it, was a music designed to put bodies in motion. But in contrast with swing, rock and roll to this day has never completely shaken its formative association with violence—one need only recall the riots that have greeted rap movies like Boyz N the Hood to realize how little has changed, despite the passage of nearly a half century. And an associa­tion that a businessman like Alan Freed viewed with understandable ambivalence, since recurrent episodes of real violence threatened the orderly exploitation of rock and roll, many of the young fans viewed with excitement, as offering a real and rare promise—of untram-meled freedom, of daring the unknown (no matter the brutality of some free acts) by doing "what one feels whenever and wherever possible" (as Mailer described the hipster ethos).

Haley's Decca recording of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" sold at a hectic clip. By the end of 1955, it had become the most influential recording in the United States since "The Tennessee Waltz," selling an estimated six million copies (it remains, along with Bing Crosby's "black Christmas," one of the best-selling single records in history). Hoping to make more money still from Haley's current popularity, Hollywood producer Sam Katzman rushed out a short feature film starring Haley and featuring Alan Freed. Designed to rebut critics who linked rock and roll with juvenile delinquency, the plot was simple: Haley plays the new music at a dance, and proves to relieved parents that it needn't breed rioting. Freed, playing the role of a suave rock and roll disc jockey who is beyond moral re­proach, stands up for the new music with a stream of smarmy speeches about the power of rock and roll to keep kids off the streets, and out of trouble. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one's point of view), half of the seventy-minute film featured the new music, which spoke for itself. There were nine songs by Haley alone, including a reprise of the film's title hit, "Rock Around the Clock."

Shot in two weeks in January 1956, Rock Around the Clock was in theaters around the world three months later. Despite Freed's on­screen reassurances that rock and roll was innocuous—no more threatening, really, than the swing that mom and dad once danced to—more than one young audience around the world, inspired by the music, reacted with a display of more or less pointless violence, just like the jazz-hating hoodlums depicted in Blackboard Jungle.

In Minneapolis, a group of youngsters charged out of a theater showing Rock Around the Clock and briefly ran wild, committing acts of petty vandalism. In Hartford, Connecticut, a similar outburst prompted a local psychiatrist to call rock and roll violence a "com­municable disease," spread by a "cannibalistic and tribalistic sort of music." Confirming the doctor's worst fears, teens in Dublin, Ireland, went on a rampage after watching the film, leaving exhibitors elsewhere in Europe understandably nervous. In Copenhagen, Den­mark, a motorcycle gang roared through the streets after seeing the film, terrifying citizens. In Egypt, authorities denounced the movie as an American ploy, designed to sap the nation's morale by disturbing the peace. In England, things were calm until one crowd left a South London theater chanting Bill Haley songs—and proceeded to stall traffic on the city's Tower Bridge. The British tabloids couldn't resist blowing the incident up—and British teens couldn't resist imitating it. There was a national outbreak of dancing in the aisles, chanting in the streets, and deliberate rudeness toward assorted figures of au­thority: when the manager of a Croydon cinema reprimanded one mob, he was squirted in the face by a youth armed with a fire extin­guisher. In a Manchester theater, the crowd lobbed lightbulbs from the balcony. In a show of official concern, the Queen screened a print of the controversial film. And in a gesture of self-defense, Bill Haley told London's Daily Mirror, "We don't make boys bad!"

It was too late. Nihilism had become a pop fad. In civilized old England, even more dramatically than in the United States, a lot of Haley's new fans took pride in being bad: that, to them, was what the new music was all about. Affecting an air of foppish brutality, they made rock and roll their own.

And in Liverpool, one of those boys, a fifteen-year-old fan named John Lennon, felt the sting of disappointment. At the theater where he had gone to see Rock Around the Clock, there hadn't been a riot.

Payola:

What came to be known as "the payola scandal" summed up the paradoxical status in America of rock and roll as the Fifties drew to a close. The rise of rock had created a booming new market for pop music. But the resistance to the style remained fierce, not least from critics inside the music industry.

Tin Pan Alley professionals had cause to worry. Under the new musical dispensation, there was no need for arrangers, orchestras, conductors, schooled players who could read music; there was scarcely a market anymore for sheet music, once the backbone of the music business; and there was certainly no demand for old-fashioned pop singers, who usually lacked the immunity to standards of musi­cal taste essential to carry off a convincing rendition of a typical rock and roll tune. For just this reason, the legendary Lucky Strike Hit Pa­rade, a staple on radio and television since 1935, was canceled in the spring of 1959.

At the same time, unease about the vices of the new music ebbed and flowed alongside anxiety over the fate of America's still growing mass of teenagers. With the Cold War at its height, a diffuse but widely shared sense of moral crisis was deepened by fears that the national culture was vulnerable to sabotage. Government officials worried publicly about Communist infiltration; and in cities and towns, citizens mobilized to prevent the addition of fluoride to local water supplies. It was in this context—of pandemic paranoia about secret plots to poison the public—that rumors, adroitly manipulated by the old-guard American Society of Composers, Authors and Pub­lishers (ASCAP), began to spread about "payola," the practice of giv­ing a disc jockey money or gifts in exchange for playing a record. By associating rock and roll with corrupt business practices, the rumors suggested that a shadowy conspiracy lay behind its otherwise inex­plicable popularity.

At first, the rumors were largely confined to the music industry, as ASCAP waged a turf war with its upstart rival, Broadcast Music In­corporated (BMI), a competing trade association (and collection agency) for composers and music publishers that, not coincidentally, had cornered most of the writers active in the fields of country-west­ern, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. When the rest of America finally heard the allegations, the news came as a shock. On Novem­ber 22, 1959, The New York Times carried the headline on page one: "Alan Freed Is Out in 'Payola' Study."

The day before, the man who had popularized the term "rock and roll" had been fired from his job as a disc jockey for WABC radio af­ter refusing to sign a statement that he had never taken money or gifts to promote a record. And this was just the start of Freed's trou­bles. The next day, Freed lost his job as host of the television show The Big Beat. Two days later, he was served with a subpoena issued by the New York district attorney. Shortly afterward, congressional investigators called Freed and several other prominent rock disc jockeys, including Dick Clark, to testify the following spring before a House Commerce subcommittee investigating corrupt practices in the music industry.

The symbolism of a subcommittee hearing was hard to miss. The 1950s had begun with a witch hunt conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who adroitly used the powers of Congress to subpoena and publicly grill a variety of suspected subversives, in the process ruining lives and wrecking careers. More recently, Congress had con­ducted a highly publicized probe into the rigging of certain television quiz shows (including The $64,000 Question), destroying still more reputations—and placing the mass media and its impact on the na­tion's moral fiber at the top of the cultural agenda.

In November of 1959, as the congressional hearings on the quiz show scandals wound down and the latest allegations about payola in rock and roll spread, John Steinbeck, a cranky populist tribune and the revered author of The Grapes of Wrath, addressed a jere­miad to the nation's leading liberal, Adlai Stevenson, a two-time Democratic presidential candidate. "HAVE WE GONE SOFT?" Steinbeck angrily asked in his open letter. "If I wanted to destroy a nation I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick ... on all levels, American society is rigged. ... I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis."

Perhaps not. But America's music business had not only survived, it had flourished in an atmosphere of generalized greed and bribery. The "rigging" of publicity for a song in exchange for cash or gifts was a practice dating back to the 1890s, when the unprecedented sales of the sheet music for Charles Harris' ballad "After the Ball"— more than five million copies were sold—revealed that the mass-mar­keting of music could be a very lucrative business. By the 1930s, it was customary for so-called song pluggers to pay for the debut radio performance of a song, and also for the song publisher to foot the bill for a debut recording. Star vocalists and bandleaders routinely cut deals with the song publishers to share the boodle. The pluggers became adept at selling songs, giving gifts, and doing favors, like picking up the tab for a band's arrangements. In 1935, fearful that envelopes stuffed with cash were replacing the personal touch, plug­gers in America even formed a fraternal organization, called Profes­sional Music Men.

It was thus business as usual on Tin Pan Alley when Alan Freed, after arriving in New York in 1954, began to ask for, and receive, publishing credits, cash, and various gratuities. A nonchalant paragon of "cynical immorality" (to borrow Steinbeck's phrase), Freed was so deeply imbued with the ethos of the industry that he didn't have the faintest idea what the uproar over payola was all about. On Saturday, November 28, 1959, when he arrived at the WNEW television studios for the final broadcast of his Big Beat show, Freed was mobbed by reporters and sobbing teenagers. After comforting his fans ("Now don't cry"), he talked to the press. Payola "may stink but it's here and I didn't start it," he remarked. He saw nothing wrong, he said, with taking money from aspiring artists in return for giving them airtime. He saw no harm in getting paid for services rendered as a consultant to record labels. Nor did he see any problem with accepting a gift, "whether it ranged from a bottle of whiskey to a Cadillac." Once, he recalled nostalgically, "a man said to me, 'If somebody sent you a Cadillac, would you send it back?' I said, 'It depends on the color.' "

For the grand finale of The Big Beat, Freed invited a number of old cronies and veteran song pluggers to join him in front of the cameras. They presented Freed with a scroll, stating their apprecia­tion for his friendship. He shrugged: "Payola, payola, that's all we've been hearing. These are the nicest guys in the business."

It is symptomatic of their respective personalities that Dick Clark, in a similar jam, behaved completely differently. The same week that Freed was summarily fired from WABC radio and also lost his Big Beat television show, the ABC network gave Clark a choice: either give up his outside interests in the music industry, or lose American Bandstand. Clark hardly skipped a beat: he gave up his outside inter­ests.

He was giving up a lot. By then, he had a financial stake in several music publishers, a record-pressing plant, an artist management firm, and three record companies. He owned several song copyrights. He had a share in a toy company that made a stuffed cat that could spin 45 rpm discs, the Platter-Puss.

In a way that Alan Freed's career never had, Dick Clark's position hinged on his personification of mainstream American values. For the past year, he had written a weekly newspaper column, offering advice to teenagers, retailing prim maxims and platitudes. If his im­age of integrity were successfully impugned, he would lose one of his most bankable assets. With his reputation on the line, Clark seized the initiative in a pre­pared statement that he delivered before the congressional subcom­mittee on April 29, 1960. Acknowledging the outside financial interests he had so assiduously cultivated in his three years as host of American Bandstand, Clark explained that he had been hedging his bets, prudently aware that "television can be an extraordinarily fickle medium." Handed "a unique opportunity"—to turn his "ex­pert knowledge" of popular taste into a steady source of income— Clark had only done what any red-blooded American would have done under the same circumstances. It seemed unjust to cast asper­sions on an entrepreneur who, having "followed normal business practices under the ground rules that then existed," was remarkable only for his acumen and good judgment. "I was surprised to learn," said Clark sweetly, "that some people were apparently shocked to hear that I made 30-some thousand dollars from a $125 investment in Jamie records. Believe me, this is not as unusual as it may seem. The music industry is the only business I have any personal knowl­edge of where a man can invest less than $500 and profit by as much as $50,000 to $100,000 from one single record. ... I think this probably explains why there are over 2,000 record companies in ex­istence."

Clark implied that the congressmen should praise, not bury him. After all, as he reminded the subcommittee, by broadcasting Ameri­can Bandstand, he was performing an important public service: "I seek to provide wholesome recreational outlets for these youngsters whom I think I know and understand." Still, Clark in his concluding remarks went out of his way to be conciliatory: If, after gathering its evidence, Congress wanted to create new ethical standards for the music business, "I am glad to have participated."

By the time the public outcry over payola had died down, Dick Clark had secured his fortune and his future, while Alan Freed was a broken man. (He died in 1965 of medical complications caused by years of heavy drinking.)

But even before Freed was laid to rest, a revealing metamorphosis had occurred. Among serious rock fans, Clark became a figure of fun. A sharp salesman, he was thought to epitomize a commercial ethos that was somehow alien to rock and roll (a claim that required a heroic suspension of disbelief, combined with an ignorance of the historical facts).

In disgrace, Alan Freed, by contrast, loomed larger than ever. He became a martyr, a mythic hero. Tough, cynical, worldly, unafraid to throw his weight around, he represented for some an ideal way to do business. And it was Freed's ethos, of the vulgar outlaw, that would for better or worse mark the music's distinctive moral economy, in­spiring a number of wayward disciples, from the producer Phil Spec-tor to the British manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who taught the Rolling Stones how to turn buccaneering behavior into a badge of cultural honor—another lasting legacy of the rock and roll revolu­tion.

-end