The first trial and conviction were thrown out because of the appearance of racism of the judge, Gilbert Moore, who repeatedly brought up race. Berry was then immediately charged again for a 1958 relationship with a singer. But, like the earlier case against Jack Johnson, this one fell apart because the alleged victim had great affection for the accused and rose to his defense. No matter. They could still get him. They retried the Escalanti case, and this time the conviction was upheld. Berry served almost two years in prison, and after he got out, though he toured in rock ’n’ roll revival concerts, he was never able to restart his career as a music star.
Even Little Richard, who tried to be harmlessly weird, was arrested in 1956 in El Paso, Texas, for shaking onstage. Many aspects of his career had been troubling Little Richard. He did not like the feeling that racist white society was using him. He tried to record songs ever faster in the hopes that Pat Boone could not keep up with the tempo. He also had deep religious convictions and was disturbed by the church’s view that his music was immoral or even on the side of the devil. Little Richard believed in the devil. Suddenly in 1957 he gave up music and announced that he was becoming a minister. He said that he could not live with God and play rock ’n’ roll because “God doesn’t like it.” He enrolled in Bible college but didn’t graduate, and a few years later returned to music but, like Chuck Berry, could not regain his status as a star.
Another rocker who deeply felt the conflict with religion was Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis was first noticed at age fifteen in 1950 on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, a popular radio and later television show where numerous stars, including Pat Boone, were first heard. Mack liked to keep the music tame and white, and Lewis, after a successful round of auditions, agreed to do “Goodnight, Irene.” Although it was a folk song turned blues, and popularized by the great blues singer Lead Belly, in 1950, the folk group the Weavers had a hit with an easy version, with sanitized lyrics. Now it was an established song. Frank Sinatra sang it that year. But young Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t. Instead, he sang a wild rock version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Mack was furious but Lewis won the ten-dollar audience favorite prize. Then he went off to Bible school, where he was expelled for playing rock versions of hymns. It seems that Lewis just couldn’t help rocking. In 1957 he became a star with a cover of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” an R&B song by a number of black artists whose lyrics had inescapably sexual innuendo. Numerous radio stations refused to air it, and while it made Lewis a star, it also made him the leading target of Christian clergy, for a moment even eclipsing the denunciations of Elvis Presley. Not Elvis, not even Chuck Berry, had the wild physical antics of Jerry Lee Lewis, who kicked away his stool and pounded the piano standing, sometimes playing with his feet or even with his head, flapping his long blond hair. Between songs he would take out a comb and sensually rearrange his hair.
But he was never comfortable with himself. Just before the Sun Records 1957 recording session for “Great Balls of Fire,” Lewis announced that he couldn’t record it because it was the devil’s music. Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun, who had launched Lewis’s career along with those of Elvis Presley and other important rockers, sat down with him for hours and persuaded him to do the recording, which became his biggest hit.
Ed Sullivan, who still had not recovered from the Elvis appearances, refused to have Lewis on the show. He had refused to have Elvis on until the rocker appeared opposite him on The Steve Allen Show, and Allen stole away his audience that night. He then had him on three times. The first time, neither of them was there. Elvis was shot from Hollywood, and Sullivan, injured in a car accident, was replaced by actor Charles Laughton in New York. All three appearances—legs, pelvis, and all—were wildly popular and cemented Presley’s stardom, though he was burned in effigy by angry mobs in Nashville and St. Louis. At the end of the third show, Sullivan gave him an endorsement that was a huge boost to the controversial singer, calling him “a real decent, fine boy.” He apparently was surprised to discover that, despite his offensive music, Elvis had fine southern manners.
By 1958 Elvis Presley was in the Army and Lewis was momentarily the king of rock ’n’ roll and the primary target of rock’s enemies. Lewis was easy to go after. He had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and after further investigation, it turned out that he had been married twice before and it appeared that he had not had divorces. So the evil rock ’n’ roller was also an incestuous pedophile and a bigamist. At first he could still get concert bookings but the audiences shouted him down. Soon he could get hardly any bookings at all, and his career was largely over.
Meanwhile, Elvis was denounced for everything he did. Even his 1957 Christmas album was attacked for the sacrilege of having Elvis the Pelvis crooning Christmas carol standards. He was a famous person admired by kids and he was not promoting “wholesome,” i.e., conventional, values. In 1956 the New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote a scathing review of Presley’s television appearances with the headline “Elvis Presley: Lack of Responsibility Is Shown by TV in Exploiting Teen-Agers.” Gould, trying to understand the inexplicable popularity of Presley, wrote:
Quite possibly Presley just happened to move in where society has failed the teen-ager. Certainly, modern youngsters have been subjected to a great deal of censure and perhaps too little understanding. Greater in their numbers than ever before, they may have found in Presley a rallying point, a nationally prominent figure who seems to be on their side. And just as surely, there are limitless teen-agers who cannot put up with the boy either vocally or calisthenically.
The article was a call to ban Elvis Presley from television. Such cries were relentless. Curiously, critics like Gould could not grasp that Presley was vocally and calisthenically, not to mention musically, brilliant. A large segment of society wanted Presley silenced as Berry, Lewis, and Little Richard had been. Urged by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, Presley was trying to retreat from being a 1950s rebel to being Ed Sullivan’s “fine boy.” Those allegedly bland 1950s were turning out to be dangerous. Screenplay writers were being blacklisted for political convictions, rockers and deejays were destroyed for their music, even poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti would be put on trial for obscenity because he published a poem, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which is now widely recognized as one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. Ferlinghetti, in his mid-thirties, the son of Italian immigrants and orphaned at an early age, had made his San Francisco bookstore, City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in America, and its publishing wing the center of the new upstart Beat poetry, the literary equivalent of rock ’n’ roll. He expected trouble when he published Howl and had it printed in England. The bookstore manager was arrested for selling the book to undercover San Francisco policemen. Ginsberg could barely control his glee at being treated like a rock star, and in the end the court ruled that it was not obscene, leaving thirty-one-year-old Ginsberg a new counterculture literary star. But if you wanted to be a counterculture star in the 1950s you had to face a legal assault.
No one forgot how Freed, Berry, and Lewis were destroyed, or how Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were almost destroyed. The only difference between the attackers of rock ’n’ roll and the attackers of Beat poetry was that Beat’s enemies tended to be better read. If you rebelled against the established norms, if you dared to be different, the forces of the Establishment would try to destroy you. Ginsberg was even more of a target, because he was openly homosexual and his poem referred to homosexual sex acts. This could be even worse than being a pedophile, bigamist, or integrationist. The civil rights movement kept their most brilliant activist, Bayard Rustin, in the background because he was homosexual.
In 1957 Presley was drafted and received a deferment so that he could complete the movie he was shooting, King Creole. He was inducted in 1958 into the Army’s Second Armored Division’s “Hell on Wheels” unit that had been famous in World War II under General George Patton.
The press
had a great moment with the regulation haircut. A good-humored Presley quipped, “Hair today, gone tomorrow.” But there was a significant metaphor taking place in the odd sight of Presley’s being diminished, Samson-like, to a white-walled G.I. cut. The Elvis who emerged from the Army two years later was not the same. Colonel Parker steered him clear of further controversy.
Parker also steered himself that way. He was a Dutchman who entered the U.S. illegally and pretended for most of his life to be an American. Tom Parker was born in Breda, and was originally named Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. Nor was he a colonel. He did serve in the Army, but deserted and was prosecuted and eventually discharged for mental illness. While most managers at the time were taking 10 percent of earnings, the Colonel sometimes took as much as 50 percent. But it was Parker who moved Elvis from Sun to RCA for a handsome fee and a bigger company. Presley was confident that Parker saved him and his career by steering him away from the controversy that had ruined others. Surely they would have gotten him sooner or later.
It was Parker who insisted that Presley serve as a regular soldier, a jeep driver, rather than as an entertainer in Special Services because this would be important to his new image. It was Parker who arranged to have the media witness the cutting of Elvis’s hair. Presley grew his hair back but was much more clean-cut in appearance. The rebel look was gone.
Parker, a heavy man with a high voice and a fake southern twang to his accent, remembered how Jerry Lee Lewis had been ruined, and urged Presley to marry Priscilla Wagner, his girlfriend who was ten years younger, fourteen, when they had met. The Colonel argued that if they married, they would seem more respectable.
Elvis did not make a concert appearance again until 1967, and this prevented the unseemly scene of screaming teenage girls. He did appear regularly on television. His first appearance was in 1960 with Frank Sinatra, for which Parker got Presley $125,000 for two songs, which was more than Sinatra was making for the special. This was a complete reversal for both of them. It is often seen as Sinatra relenting on rock, and now that he was in his mid-forties, he seemed somehow hip again. But in reality it was the new Elvis, no longer one of Sinatra’s “cretinous goons,” looking “normal” and joining the Establishment. He recorded mostly ballads, and appeared in a series of films, mostly harmless romantic comedies. Elvis the rebel was replaced by a Hollywood crooner. In the 1960s, a uniquely volatile decade for which he was one of the early harbingers, Elvis was largely irrelevant, a fact that Presley was aware of and about which he often complained to his manager. But his manager wanted to keep him out of trouble.
When the great popular crooner Bing Crosby predicted that rock ’n’ roll would soon vanish, he was asked what would take its place. He said, “Slow, pretty ballads.” If rock ’n’ roll had been nothing but Elvis Presley, he would have been right.
• • •
In 1960 rock ’n’ roll entered into a brief period in which, avoiding controversy, very little interesting music was produced. Had it continued, there might have been a complete British takeover of American music, because the British were just beginning to find their rock ’n’ roll voices. Cousin Brucie said about that time, “We had nothing to play. We had British stuff. I played the Beatles before they came over.”
Nothing to play was, of course, an exaggeration. The excitement of the 1950s rock ’n’ roll era was gone, but there was still some very good music, mostly black. For one thing, there was the emergence of an important 1960s phenomenon known as “the girl groups”: the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Crystals. A few of their songs are memorable classics, such as the Shirelles’ 1960 “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” a number 1 hit on the white pop chart and number 2 on the black R&B, and the Ronettes’ 1963 number 2 hit, “Be My Baby.” Others were less memorable, such as the Crystals’ 1962 song “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” Both the Crystals and the Ronettes were produced by Phil Spector, who was a pioneer in girl groups. His Philles label produced music with a large, carefully orchestrated band, which he called “the Wall of Sound,” aimed at small radios and jukeboxes. The songs had prominent hooks with staying power and throbbing drum bridges that made people move. The girl groups were tightly choreographed. Most of the girls were from New York. You could tell that the Ronettes were New Yorkers because they were able to rhyme “Since the day I saw you” and “I have been waiting for you.” Not as enduring or as productive as Motown artists, they still had twenty-five Top 40 hits in the early 1960s, a huge presence on the charts at a time when Gordy was trying to figure out the Motown way. Spector was a somewhat forgotten but huge influence on Motown.
Another influence on Motown was gospel, and though they were far from the church music, Motown records were to have an unmistakable gospel tinge. Popularized gospel, “rhythm & gospel” as Wexler said, was at a high point in the early 1960s. Gospel had always been there. It was a huge influence on Elvis Presley, who enjoyed listening to it and could impress gospel singers with his knowledge of their music. But in the early 1960s, a few R&B singers who had come out of gospel were singing the church music with a very hard beat and secular lyrics, so that it was really pop music in gospel form. Two enormous pop stars of gospel emerged, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. Ray Charles, who had been born with sight but lost it by the age of seven, had a background in classical music but loved jazz, gospel, and blues, and somehow put them all together, so that, defying all labels it was all those things at once and appealed to lovers of all forms of black music. He developed a huge black following in the 1950s, but as white ears grew more accustomed to black music, he started acquiring a huge white audience in the early 1960s.
Sam Cooke was a gospel singer, and though he switched to rock, even the rather inane version of rock in the early 1960s, he always went back to gospel, recording it and singing it in churches. Cooke always had the emotional and vocal power of a gospel singer and a flawless lyric voice so that he became a star with such lightweight songs as the 1957 “You Send Me” or the 1962 “Twistin’ the Night Away.” He also continued to sing with gospel groups and even made gospel recordings with his own money. R&B deejay Montague said, “It was Sam, in the early sixties, who showed us how to lift the rising, majestic feeling that swirls within the Negro church and apply it to rhythm & blues.”
In Detroit, the Motor City, an important black center that had still not made its mark on the new music—a city where great music was performed in both churches and nightclubs—a huge change was quietly taking place.
CHAPTER TWO
A BRAND NEW BEAT
Among the great and often overlooked immigrant stories of America is the twentieth-century migration of southern blacks to Detroit. They came, as most immigrants did, not for riches but for a somewhat better deal, an escape from poverty and persecution for the opportunities, no matter how much of a long shot, of a better life. Immigrants are people who dare to dream.
From the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s, there was an enormous transformation in the African American population of the United States. It dispersed from its largely southern concentration to the rest of the country, and went from rural roots to urban settings. At the beginning of the century the African American population of the United States was almost entirely southern. In 1930 the state populations of both Mississippi and North Carolina, where few blacks were able to vote, had black majorities. But by 1960 only a little over half still lived there. They had moved to northern cities because jobs there were far better than those the rural south could offer. By the 1960s, 95.3 percent of blacks outside of the South lived in cities, which meant that northern cities were much blacker than they had ever been. Chicago went from 14 percent black to 28 percent. Newark, New Jersey, went from 17 percent to 47 percent, and Detroit went from 16 percent to 30 percent. In such cities as Detroit and Newark, if trends continued, blacks would soon represent the majority of the population, as in fact they did in Detroit by the mid-1970s.
Detroit, a French tr
apper settlement on the straits—détroit—of a river that would divide the United States from Canada, opened its first important chapter in African American history before the Civil War, when it became one of the critical last stops on the Underground Railroad. From there, escaped slaves had only a short boat ride across the river to Canada and freedom.
Detroit gradually became a city. In 1825 it was the vital link between the Great Lakes, which were connected to New York City through the Erie Canal, and the exploration and settlement of the Pacific Northwest. In 1884 Detroit became more of a center when a railroad link to Chicago was completed.
But Detroit got its big boost in 1909, when Henry Ford began producing Model T Fords. Ford offered no real technical innovations but rather a game-changing marketing concept. Automobiles up until then had been toys for the rich. But it was Ford’s idea to use the existing technique of assembly-line production to make an affordable car that would make everyone want to drive. The original price was $825. By 1915 he had produced a million Model T cars and by 1927 the Ford Motor Company had turned out 15 million of them—a single car design for everyone. To do this required a huge workforce, far more laborers than Detroit could supply. And so Ford offered a very high wage for labor and attracted workers from around the world, changing the face of the city.
Ford drew workers from eastern Europe and as far away as Palestine. But he drew mostly southern blacks trying to escape a life of endless humiliation and hopeless poverty. By 1927 Ford had competition from other carmakers who had newer ideas, and stopped making Model Ts. Meanwhile, Detroit had become the car center of America, had earned the nickname Motor City, and was home to the highest-paid blue-collar workers in America.
Not only was Ford offering unheard-of salaries—in 1914 he offered five dollars a day and a profit-sharing plan—but he was offering white jobs to black people. They were not just hired to be cleanup crews but to work side by side with white workers on the assembly line. Factory work appealed to southern blacks raised on agricultural labor because factory work had no association with slavery.
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