The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Perhaps the chief adult objection to rock ’n’ roll is to the sexy nature of the lyrics—Variety calls them “leerics”—and of the bumps and grinds executed by certain singers. The sexual overtones are odd, considering that the rock-’n’-roll audience is now believed to lie mostly between the ages of eight and fifteen—much younger than the crowd that listened to the crooners twenty years ago. Perhaps this is another instance of the striking tendency of the young in America to mature—or, anyway, to act independently of adult control—at an increasingly early age. The damage, however, may be less than alarmed parents fear. For all its Dionysian verve, rock-’n’-roll dancing is curiously sexless. “Despite the pelvic contortions of a few singers, and the double meanings in the words of some lyrics,” Mr. Gorer writes, “I should consider rock ’n’ roll the least sexual type of social dancing which Europe has seen in the last couple of centuries; instead of a stylisation of courtship and wooing, there is practically no physical contact nor opportunity for conversation; the dance can only be performed if the pair are in good rapport before they step on to the dance floor.” The accuracy of this analysis may be verified by a look at a current television hit show—Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, in which young Mr. Clark, a former disc jockey, presides over the revels of a roomful of teenagers, who rock ’n’ roll to songs like “Skinny Minnie” (“She ain’t skinny, she’s tall, that’s all”). The show has eight million look ’n’ listeners, half of them adults (another example of the blurring of age lines), and provokes forty-five thousand letters a week, or the equivalent of four people sitting down to write Mr. Clark every minute of the day and night—God knows what about.

  “The feeling that it’s their own,” mentioned by Mr. Miller, is largely an illusion. The Children’s Crusade undoubtedly threw up some inspired teenage leaders, but the very notion of a crusade came from the grownups. Similarly, a fifteen-year-old may write or sing a rock-’n’-roll number, but, whether he knows it or not, his elders have been there before him. The term was coined by an adult disc jockey, Alan Freed—still a high priest of rock ’n’ roll—who in 1949 began plugging, on Station WJW, in Cleveland, what were then called “race records”; that is, “rhythm” and “blues” numbers that appealed especially to Negroes. Freed thought whites might also go for this kind of music if it had a broader name, so he called his program “The Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll Party.” (The original Moondog, a Times Square personage, eventually enjoined him from using that name, but no one has contested his right to “Rock ’n’ Roll.”) In 1952, Freed gave the first of several Moondog Balls, in the Cleveland Arena—or, rather, he intended to do so. The Arena has a capacity of ten thousand, and thirty thousand showed up, the result being a mild riot, no ball, and lots of publicity. In 1954, Freed made his first rock-’n’-roll broadcast over WINS, in New York, and the following year he gave two dances at the St. Nicholas Arena, into which seven thousand teenagers, or double the hall’s capacity, jammed each time. In 1956, Columbia released the first rock-’n’-roll movie, Rock Around the Clock, starring Freed. In 1957, Freed put on a Christmas show at the New York Paramount, and it drew the biggest crowds in that theatre’s history. There are now said, by not disinterested observers, to be four thousand Alan Freed Clubs here and abroad, and Freed is said, by the same observers, to receive ten thousand fan letters a week.

  The great symbol of rock ’n’ roll, of course, is not Alan Freed but Elvis Presley, the Southern back-country boy who began his big-time career only two years ago and who, before he was drafted, last March, received fifty thousand dollars for three brief TV appearances. As Freed stands for the blues-rhythm-Negro element of rock ’n’ roll, so Presley stands for the country-music element—hillbilly songs, folk tunes, and cowboy ballads, most of them composed in Tin Pan Alley and all of them heavily corned with sentiment. Of the current rock ’n’ rollers, Presley is by far the most vulgar, to use the word in its good sense (earthy) as well as its bad (coarse). Imitators on the order of Jerry Lee Lewis, recently extruded from England when it became known that his bride and travelling companion was thirteen, are just vulgar-bad. But Presley has a Greek profile, an impressive physique, lots of animal magnetism, and a not disagreeable singing voice; in fact, it is rumored that he had some talent before Hollywood and television got hold of him. Because of his uninhibited pelvic movements and the vulgar-good-bad way he sings his “leerics,” most parents take an even dimmer view of Presley than of other rock ’n’ rollers. For somewhat the same reasons, he has the most enthusiastic teenage following in the business. Wherever he sings, “I LIKE ELVIS” buttons sprout like mushrooms after rain.

  Rock ’n’ roll plays one more important part in the teenage syndrome. It is the teenagers’ link to the nihilism of our time—to the Beat Generation and hipsterism. Except for a few precocious sports (in both senses of the word), even the rank-and-file hipsters are well out of their teens, while some of their leaders are positively venerable; Jack Kerouac is pushing forty, and Kenneth Rexroth will never see fifty again. Hipsters dig cool, or progressive, jazz, which is as intellectual as rock ’n’ roll is primitive. Their culture heroes run from Buddha to the late Charlie Parker, a Negro saxophoning genius who had a lot to do with inventing progressive jazz, but definitely do not include Elvis, although there is a romantic feeling for the late James Dean, whom the teenagers have a super-romantic feeling for. Nor can it be said that rock ’n’ roll is the kindergarten of hipsterism, since, in contrast to the Flaming Youth of the twenties, most teenagers quickly turn into Nice Young Married Couples. Hipsterism is a postgraduate course—the novelist Norman Mailer thinks “the hipsters may be the beginning of a new world revolution, like the Early Christians”—and most Americans never get beyond high school. Nevertheless, there is a connection. Rock-’n’-rolling teenagers are likely to express themselves—or, rather, to not express themselves—in the “hip” vocabulary, which is as eloquent as a stammer, as meaningful as a grunt. And they share the hipsters’ contempt for respectability; they, too, feel alienated from adult culture (including spelling and grammar), and they, too, value Dionysian sensation as The Greatest and ever strive to Get With It. In the struggle with Apollo, the teenager is the temporary ally of the hipster, even if later on, in his twenties, he becomes the most Apollonian of credit managers.

  Harriet Ben Ezra

  JULY 18, 1959 (“VARIABLES”)

  HE TELEPHONE PEOPLE are thinking—just thinking, mind you—of someday replacing dial telephones with push-button telephones, and have recently installed, on a trial basis, several hundred push-button telephones in Connecticut and Illinois. Dedicated as we are to bringing our readers the news behind the news, we no sooner got wind of this world-shaking development than we arranged to pay a call on Dr. John E. Karlin, head of the Human Factors Engineering Group of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. A native of South Africa, who started off in music at the University of Cape Town and wound up with a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, Dr. Karlin was the first research psychologist ever to join Bell, an event that took place back in 1945. To give you some idea of the success he has since enjoyed in New Jersey, we will mention that it was Karlin who, in a series of brilliant experiments involving the latest type of dial telephone (the one that has the exchange letters and digits outside the dial wheel), discovered that people tended to dial more efficiently when they had a target to aim their fingers at, and therefore decreed that a single white dot be placed under every hole on the wheel! He has also played in the first-violin section of the Colonial Little Symphony, of Madison, New Jersey.

  Dr. Karlin prefaced our discussion of push-button telephones with a glance at the big push-button picture. “Ours is a push-button era, but what do most people actually know about push buttons?” he asked. “They look simple enough, but the truth is that they bristle with scores of fascinating technological and psychological problems. It doesn’t follow, for example, that an easy push button is the best push button. What if a push
button controlling a mechanism of the greatest importance required so little effort that one became careless in its operation? It’s especially necessary to have just the right kind of push buttons where human beings are under stress, as in, say, the Armed Forces. In my opinion, the relationship between men and push buttons epitomizes the fundamental relationship between men and machines. We at Bell have been carrying out a study of push buttons on an unprecedented scale, and we feel that our researches fill a crucial gap not only in the company’s knowledge but in the knowledge of mankind as a whole.”

  Dr. Karlin indicated that Bell had first made sure that push-button telephones were technologically superior to dial telephones, then set out to discover whether they were psychologically superior as well. “We don’t bring out new models every year, as the car people do,” he said. “When we make a change, we have to be absolutely confident that it’s a good change. Now, push-button telephones can get a number a lot faster than dial telephones. The average person can tap out a number with push buttons in about five seconds, which is a saving of four seconds over the dial system, and that not only increases efficiency at the central office but also, we were interested to learn, increases the user’s efficiency. The faster you can get a number the easier it is to get it right, because memory falls off very rapidly with time, and just waiting for the dial wheel to return to position causes many people to forget a digit or two of an unfamiliar number. This matter of memory is only one aspect of the problem; all told, we’ve studied thirty-eight human-factor variables, in three categories.”

  The first of the three categories, Dr. Karlin told us, was configuration, or the pattern in which the push buttons were to be disposed. Should they be arranged like digits on a Comptometer, or like digits on an automobile speedometer, or like digits on a clockface? “We polled people at random, inviting design suggestions, then made up samples of the most popular choices—triangles, half-moons, and the like,” he said. “Oddly enough, a lot of crosses turned up, but in practice they worked out very badly. We tested the various arrangements according to speed, accuracy, and how the users felt about them. The three samples that scored highest were an arrangement of push buttons similar to the present dial wheel; an arrangement of two horizontal rows of five buttons each; and an arrangement of three rows of three buttons each, with a single button below. Under laboratory conditions, all three seemed equally promising. We decided to use the three-rows-and-a-button-below arrangement in our field tests, because it’s considered best from an engineering point of view.”

  The second category of human-factor variables involved what Dr. Karlin called “force displacement.” “The things you have to know about the dynamics of push buttons!” he exclaimed. “How far should the button project from the surface of the phone? How far should it move? How much force should you have to exert to set it in motion? What about final force, which is the force you continue to exert once the button has been set in motion? What about snap, which is the click that can be mechanically put into a button to tell the pusher that he has pushed far enough for the action to take place? Snap happens in the middle of the button’s downward journey. Should it be smooth or jerky? Finally, what kind of bottoming action do you want? Would you like a thud at the end, or would you prefer to sink gently into an imaginary ooze?”

  Having settled these vexatious questions to their satisfaction, Dr. Karlin and his cohorts had to deal with the third category of variables, which he described as something of a catchall, dominated by the shape of the button top. “How big should a button top be?” he asked, again launching interrogatories to which we could supply no answers. “Should it be rectangular, square, or circular? Should it be flat or concave? Should it have a glossy or matte finish? And what color should it be? Suffice it to say that the buttons we’re using in our field tests are about half an inch square and an eighth of an inch apart, are rectangular and flat, have a matte finish, and are white with black letters. Whether push-button phones will be in general use next year, or five years from now, or never is no concern of this department’s. Our job was to state the human-factor requirements for the best possible push button, and we’re pretty sure that nobody on earth knows more about them than we do.”

  Louis P. Forster

  AUGUST 8, 1959 (“TAPED”)

  HE UNEXPECTED DEBATE with which Premier Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon opened the American National Exhibition in Moscow served to call attention to an extraordinary process that not only is revolutionizing commercial television but is having a marked effect on worlds as far apart as horse racing and medical education; to wit, Videotape recording. The Moscow debate got under way with Mr. Nixon explaining to Mr. Khrushchev that their words and images, the latter in color, were being set down on tape and would be played back immediately; Mr. Khrushchev appeared delighted, like a ham actor who can never see too much of himself. The subsequent discussion between the two having caused a sensation, the tape was rushed to this country by plane that very evening, and on the following evening innumerable duplicates, with an English translation of Khrushchev’s remarks dubbed in over his voice, were being telecast from coast to coast.

  Prompted by this transatlantic episode, we’ve been pestering the Ampex Corporation, whose prodigious baby Videotape recording is, to tell us something of its history and how it works. To begin with, the first experimental device for recording sound magnetically, on wire, was constructed by the Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, back in the nineties, but magnetic recording didn’t catch on in a big way until the Second World War, when the Germans developed methods of recording on tape instead of on wire. The tape, a plastic coated with minute particles of iron oxide in a resinous base, is drawn over a recording head, where a magnetic field fluctuates in response to variations in the incoming electrical voltage, and the iron particles are instantaneously magnetized in a pattern conforming to those variations. The technical superiority of magnetic tape over other forms of recording, Ampex says, in a characteristically Latinic business prose, “is attributable to its capacity to record any variable which can be expressed as an electrical signal, over an extremely wide frequency range, and with minimum distortion of the recorded signal on reproduction. Magnetic tape is an unvarying and permanent record. Accuracy…does not deteriorate through repeated use; unwanted recordings may simply be erased by demagnetizing and the tape reused almost indefinitely. Magnetic tape is easily spliced and edited.”

  Ampex got into tape recording after the war. Urged on by Bing Crosby, who was tired of doing his radio shows “live” and was enchanted by the possibility of recording them in advance, at his convenience and yet with a happy minimum of distortion, the company produced, in 1948, “the first professional quality, high-fidelity tape recorder to be made in America” and promptly sold twenty to Crosby’s employer, the American Broadcasting Company. With the rise of TV, it became obvious that TV shows should also enjoy the advantages of being recorded in advance; filming them, however, proved technically unsuccessful, for even the best kinescopes have always managed to look rather like forty-year-old Westerns. Ampex set to work developing a tape recorder capable of handling pictures as well as sound. Its engineers must have been a little dashed to discover that while a good sound tape recorder handles from fifteen to twenty thousand electrical impulses a second, a good picture tape recorder would have to handle four million. To fit this appalling number of impulses onto a conventional tape would mean using up a reel of tape as big as an automobile tire every ninety seconds. Ampex solved the problem by constructing a machine with four recording heads, all travelling at the rate of a hundred and six miles an hour and recording on separate channels of a two-inch-wide tape. An entire frame of a TV picture can be duplicated on a half inch of this tape, and an hour-long TV show can be recorded on a single reel with a twelve-and-a-half-inch diameter. Ampex brought out its first Videotape recorder in 1956, priced at forty-five thousand dollars, and within five days had orders for four and a half million dollars’ worth. The pric
e is still forty-five thousand for a black-and-white job; a Videotape recorder like the one on display in Moscow, capable of recording and playing back in color, will cost you an extra twenty-nine thousand.

  We mentioned that Videotape is a boon not only to commercial TV but to other worlds as well. The Ford Foundation, for example, is experimenting with Videotape in public-school education; astronomers are using Videotape to measure the cosmic field; closed-circuit televising of Videotaped surgical operations is becoming commonplace in medical schools and at medical conventions; and, last and most certainly least, race tracks all over the country are installing Videotape to record races, instead of filming them. The time saved at Yonkers Raceway by using Videotape, which can be instantly played back if a protest is made, instead of film, which must be laboriously processed, has made it possible for the track to schedule nine races a day instead of eight, for an increased gross of some thirty thousand dollars a day; thus the Yonkers recorder paid for itself halfway through the second day.

  By way of postscript, we can’t help wondering whether Khrushchev, hamming it up at the Exhibition, would have been amused, or only made more querulous, to learn that the founder of the Ampex Corporation is himself a Russian—Alexander M. Poniatoff, a flier in the Russian Navy during the First World War, who left Russia at the time of the Revolution and became an American citizen in 1932, and whose initials, combined with the “ex” in “excellence,” gave the company its name.