Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 4. 7 April 1970
Salient looks at — Rock Music
Salient looks at
Rock Music
1954: Bill Haley—kiss curl—Rock Around the Clock— velvet drape suits—unbelievable.
1969: Deep Purple in live concert at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Arnold— Concerto for Croup and Orchestra.
The difference—the change in 15 years, is incredible, but whatever the difference it's still rock'n'roll. In that period has emerged a super industry—a giant rock machine that has turned Frankenstein on many of its creators and left them dry. And it all started with a bunch of tired-looking guitar pickers from the Mid-West who called themselves the Comets. They weren't exactly new—they borrowed the term rock'n'roll from an old blues lyric, "my baby rocks me with a steady roll". They borrowed their hit song Rock Around the Clock from lvory Joe Hunter. Anyway, they made it big, and for a couple of years stayed that way. Now, fifteen years later, Haley and his Comets do much the same tired old thing. They cut a competent version of Tom Hall's That's How I Got to Memphis for United Artists last year but apart from that their image is kept alive by fifteen million copies of Rock Around the Clock clogging up record collections and rubbish dumps all over the world.
Haley was the first big one—the first to be seen by sharp—eyed promotors as commercial icon fodder and he lived up to it as best he could. Elvis Presley didn't even have to try. Born in Mississippi in 1935, Presley mowed lawns and drove trucks before he was discovered by a local record promoter and recorded by Sun Records. Under Sam Philipps, Presley cut his first disc-Arthur Crudup's That's all right Mamma—and he was set. He wasn't just all hips and hair grease—he was good. His early rock records are still probably the best examples of rock'n'roll ever made. But what really got to people was that he was sexually blatant—" morally insane" as one Baptist preacher put it. He gave the kids what others hadn't dared to give on stage and he got away with it. He didn't croon, he spewed, and everybody went mad. But there were two sides; on stage, Presley epitomised freedom from parental and musical convention; offstage he remained a true son of America—God-fearing, polite and clean. It was the illusion that mattered then, and soon Presley was so powerful that they didn't even bother with the illusion. Even when he took to castrating Italian love ballads nobody seemed to mind—he was so far out he was untouchable.
Most of the rock'n'rollers who scrambled on to the national charts after Presley were from the South and some of them were classic. The biggest were probably Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Buddy Holly, backed by his Crickets, hiccoughed through such epics s That'll be the Day, Rave On, Peggy Sue, Oh Boy and a succession of hit songs that were far in advance of their time. Until he was killed in a plane crash in 1959, Holly was a major figure in the real rock'n'roll scene from 1955 on.
Little Richard was the wildest of the wild bunch; he played piano, screamed and made Jimi Hendrix look like Pat Boone. Self-opinionated and totally conceited, ("I am the emancipator of soul and rock, the Georgia Peach. I don't need drugs or Black Power. I gave the Beatles their first break . . .") Little Richard Penniman roared through a series of rock classics like Good Golly Miss Molly. Lucille and Long Tall Sally.
Jerry Lee Lewis, currently back with his first love-country and western, was a drawler from down Louisiana way. He shouted his way through Whole Lotta Shakin'Coin' On and Great Balls of Fire while standing on the top of his piano. He had a country grounding behind him and it is this that has kept him going when standing on pianos has become passe.
There were other big names in the fifties. This era saw the rise of Chuck Berry, who wrote some of the best teen material ever while duckwalking up rational charts. There was Sam Cooke, who had musically one of the best voices ever for range and control. The Drifters were a coloured harmony group who gave rise to such tremendous vocalists as Clyde McPhatter and Ben E. King. There were the Coasters ( Charlie Brown and Yakey Yak) and the Everly Brothers, who looked like a couple of weasels and sang like a barber shop duo. With them all were Eddie Cochran, Fabian, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins and a host of other figures that gave popular music the biggest boost since Rudy Vallee.
It all had to run out of steam, and by 1960 it all had. Groups and singers were moving away from hard rock, and settling for a more commercial, more 'acceptable' sound. In America this went the way of assorted vocal gymnasts like Del Shannon whose voice could travel over 3½ octaves. His hit songs like Runaway, Two Kinds of Teardrops and Hats Off to Larry rank with the best, even today. He was an innovator, something he's not generally given credit for now. First he introduced the organ as an acceptable instrument in the pop field. Secondly, he sang a lot in falsetto. Now negroes had been tinging in falsetto, accidentally or otherwise, for years, but no all-American boy had been game enough to touch it. In the rock age, if you didn't give the appearance of being tough and ready to tackle