Myers was upset. He knew the song could be a hit if only it was promoted properly. Snapping up hundreds of unsold copies, he loaded up his trunk and set out on a one-man publicity blitz. For the next seven weeks, he toured the country, stopping off at every mom-and-pop radio station he came across, using all his powers of persuasion to convince disc jockeys to play the record. Once back home after his two-thousand-mile trip, he mailed off the remaining two hundred copies to producers in Hollywood, hoping to place the song on a movie sound track.
Several months later, the call came. Director Richard Brook was looking for a tune to kick off his latest film. Returning home from the studio one night, he heard his daughter playing a record. It was the 45 he had received in the mail from Myers and had given to her as a present. “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” was the perfect song to underscore the rough-and-tumble theme of his movie The Blackboard Jungle. Based on the best-selling novel by Evan Hunter, the film was the first Hollywood product to deal with mid-fifties juvenile delinquency. Contacting Myers, he secured the film rights to the song.
The tune and film made headlines. As a result of riots in the theaters, Clare Booth Luce campaigned against The Blackboard Jungle, succeeding in getting it pulled from the Venice Film Festival. The New York Times called it a “full-throated, all-out testimony to the lurid headlines that appear from time to time, reporting acts of terrorism and violence by uncontrolled urban youths.” Several movie critics praised the film, including the influential Brosley Crowther who rated it the second best film of 1955. The inclusion of “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” established not only the trend of placing rock-and-roll songs in major motion pictures, but it also indelibly linked rock and roll with juvenile delinquency.
The furor surrounding The Blackboard Jungle convinced Decca to rerelease “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” this time as an A-side. Treating the reissue as a new record, Decca threw their full weight behind the promotion of the disc, pushing it all the way to Number One and displacing Prez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” On the charts, the rock era had arrived.
Maybellene
Chuck Berry
The year 1955 was auspicious in popular culture. On television, The Adventures of Davey Crockett was a top-rated show, sparking a craze for coonskin caps. The inaugural edition of The Guinness Book of World Records was published. At the bijou, The Blackboard Jungle helped kick off the rock-and-roll craze. And then, along came Chuck Berry. The thirty-year-old father of two scored his first hit with the sublime “Maybellene” in August.
Chuck Berry came to rock and roll late in life. After a few years spent on the assembly line at General Motors, he earned his cosmetology diploma, embarking on a career as a hairdresser. As a sideline, he moonlighted in clubs, fronting the Chuck Berry Trio with Johnnie Johnson on piano and Ebby Harding on drums. The band’s musical vocabulary was broad — a melting pot of styles that gave birth to rock and roll. Berry was studied in jazz and blues, but he insisted on adding country and Tin Pan Alley standards — “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” and songs of that ilk — to their set to attract white audiences. Soon they were a hot item in the clubs.
One night in the spring of 1955, the twenty-nine-year-old Berry took a rare night off and went to see blues legend Muddy Waters. Summoning up all his courage, he asked Waters if he could sit in on a song. The blues guitarist was blown away by Berry’s inventive guitar playing, agreeing to put in a word for the unknown musician with Leonard and Phil Chess. A meeting was set up, and Berry dropped off two demo tapes that he and Johnson had recorded in Berry’s living room, using a $79 tape recorder. The first was an original — “Wee Wee Hours” — a blues tune that was a particular favorite of the pair. The second track was the one that caught Leonard Chess’s ear. “Ida May” was based on a country square-dance tune called “Ida Red,” popular when Berry was an adolescent. Berry updated the tune, restructuring the chorus and, of course, writing new lyrics, turning the “Ida Red” into a teen dream of girls and cars.
On the strength of “Ida May,” Chess invited Berry back to lay down some tracks. He asked Berry to come up with an alternate name for “Ida May,” thinking the original too rural sounding for his uptown market. Johnnie Johnson remembered that there was a mascara box lying on the floor of the studio — made by Maybelline — that inspired the new name, although the spelling was changed to make it less brand specific. It has also been reported that Maybellene was the name of a cow from one of Berry’s favorite childhood books.
Chuck Berry performing at the 1995 concert for the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, forty years after penning the classic “Maybellene.”
Once “Maybellene” was in the can, Chess wanted to ensure that the tune would earn some airplay. To this end, he gave famed disc jockey Alan Freed and record distributer Russ Fratto cowriting credits on the tune. This was a practice some might have called “payola,” but Chess preferred to think of it as greasing the wheels. Since the cowriters Freed and Fratto were making money every time a record was sold, it was in their best interest to give a little extra attention to the single. The dubious ploy worked. With the pump provided by Freed’s top-rated radio show, “Maybellene” rocketed to the top spot on the R & B charts, staying at Number One for eleven weeks. On the pop charts, the hard-driving single paused at Number Five, the first of fourteen Top Forty singles Chuck Berry would record over the next eighteen years.
In 1986, Berry won back the full copyright to “Maybellene.”
Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” was inspired by a fan at a Denver Auditorium rock concert. She wore a yellow flowered dress and enthusiastically gathered autographs from all the performers on the bill. Berry, amused by the gusto with which she pursued the artists, was struck by the purity and innocence of her zeal. He never did learn her name but credits her for inspiring his biggest pop hit of the 1950s.
Tutti Frutti
Little Richard
The earliest words to “Tutti Frutti” were so risqué that Little Richard was embarrassed to sing them for a female visitor at a recording session. “Tutti Frutti, good booty,” the song went. “If it don’t fit, don’t force it. You can grease it, make it easy … Awopbopaloobopalobamboom.”
September 13, 1955 was Little Richard’s first recording session for Specialty Records. He had been summoned to New Orleans to lay down some tracks after bombarding Specialty owner Art Rupe with phone calls and letters for the better part of a year. Replacing Richard’s tight nightclub band with Fats Domino’s slick sidemen (including piano players Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker), producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell hoped to record eight songs in six hours.
The results were disappointing. Blackwell didn’t even turn on the tape machine for the band’s run through of “He’s My Star.” The gospel-tinged “Wonderin’ ” and “Baby” were better but didn’t have the sound he was looking for. “I’m Just a Lonely Guy” by New Orleans songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie had good lyrics but an unremarkable tune. The trouble, however, ran deeper than weak material. Blackwell felt Richard was too inhibited, his vocal delivery too mannered. Richard’s live act was over the top, and Blackwell wondered where that vigor was now that they were in the studio. Even worse, the producer didn’t hear any songs with hit quality. Art Rupe would not be pleased.
Fretfully, he called a break. Specialty was spending a great deal of money on these sessions, and they weren’t panning out. Needing time to rethink his approach, Blackwell took Richard to a nearby bar, the Dew Drop Inn. Once inside, Richard stood, stooped over the piano, furiously pounding out a rocking version of “Tutti Frutti.” It was an old favorite he used to fire up the audience in his club act. Written years earlier while he was washing dishes at a Macon, Georgia bus station, Richard sang the song to himself while washing all the pots and pans. “Awopbopaloobopalobamboom” was a secret code. As much as he hated that job, he needed the money. So instead of swearing at his boss when he got frustrated, he wo
uld walk through the kitchen muttering this nonsense word. Over time, the song developed, but the lyrics were so dirty, it hadn’t dawned on Richard to record it. It was, after all, a funny song about sodomy.
“That’s it! That’s a hit,” shouted Blackwell as Richard finished up the song.
Desperate to salvage the costly sessions, Blackwell was set on committing “Tutti Frutti” to tape. The only obstacle was those obscene lyrics. After the recess, he spoke with Dorothy LaBostrie who had been hanging around the studio to hear Little Richard’s take on “I’m Just a Lonely Guy.”
LaBostrie was a neophyte tunesmith who had submitted dozens of songs to Blackwell. “The trouble was they all sounded like Dinah Washington’s ‘Blowtop Blues,’ ” he told Charles White, author of The Life and Times of Little Richard. She might not have had much melodic sense, but she could write lyrics. “So I said to her, ‘Look. You come and write some lyrics to this [because] I can’t use the lyrics Richard’s got,’ ” recalled Blackwell. “He had some terrible words in there.” Richard was too shy to sing the song one-on-one to a woman. LaBostrie, for her part, having been told how dirty the song was, wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. “Time was running out,” Blackwell told White, “and I knew it could be a hit. I talked, using every argument I could think of. I asked him if he had a grudge against making money. I told her that she was over twenty-one, had a houseful of kids and no husband and needed the money. And finally I convinced them.”
Still feeling bashful, Little Richard faced the wall as he ran through the song for LaBostrie. She listened while he sang an uncensored “Tutti Frutti” — “good bootys” and all — three times. Richard was called back to the studio to work on two more songs. LaBostrie sat in the hall, ousting the scatological references, writing new, radio-friendly lyrics.
Fifteen minutes before the session was scheduled to end, LaBostrie was finished. Passing the new lyric sheet to Richard, Blackwell suggested recording the song.
“I got no voice left,” protested Richard, who had been singing for six hours.
“You’ve got to sing it,” said Blackwell. With no time to write an arrangement, Richard took Huey “Piano” Smith’s place at the keyboard to lead the band. The hired hands were warmed up and followed Richard’s fierce piano. For the first time during the sessions, Richard let loose. Paying homage to the gospel music he grew up with, he punctuated the song with “woos” reminiscent of the church singers of his youth. Three screaming takes and fifteen minutes later, “Tutti Frutti” was in the can. “Bumps” Blackwell knew he had the hit he had been fishing for.
But Rupe wasn’t so sure. He saw “Tutti Frutti” as a novelty tune — one that might make back the money spent on the New Orleans’ sessions. He tweaked the original recording with the addition of some echo and raised the pitch by speeding up the tape. Rewarding himself, he claimed a cowriter’s credit under the pseudonym Lubin, a common practice by early rock-and-roll entrepreneurs to put a few extra dollars in their coffers.
“Tutti Frutti” became one of the seminal rock-and-roll records, an early experiment in fusing churchy R & B with rock and roll. It reached Number Seventeen on the Billboard charts in January 1956. The next month, Pat Boone’s anemic cover version overshadowed Richard’s original, climbing to Number Twelve. Boone, best known for wearing white buck shoes, took advantage of white-rock radio’s reluctance to play black artists, covering a number of hits by Little Richard and Fats Domino such as “Long Tall Sally” and “Ain’t That a Shame.”
You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out the double entendre of Hank Ballard and the Midnighter’s 1954 hit “Work with Me, Annie.” In ghetto slang, “work” meant sex. Young men would often boast, “I got some work last night.” Ballard further pushed the tune’s lascivious message with suggestive squeals and yelps. He said he wrote the song in tribute to childhood sweetheart Annie Butler. During one club performance several decades after the song had hit the top of the R & B charts, Butler was in the audience. Ballard introduced her and said “she had to sign more autographs than I did.”
Heartbreak Hotel
Elvis Presley
Mae Axton, an amateur songwriter, was running Colonel Tom Parker’s public relations office in Florida when she first met Elvis Presley. “You need a million seller,” she told Presley when he signed to RCA Victor Records, “and I’m going to write it for you.” Holding true to her word, she helped pen “Heartbreak Hotel,” Presley’s first Number One hit.
Tommy Durden, a Gainesville, Florida musician and an acquaintance of Axton’s, was reading the Miami Herald when a headline caught his eye. Next to a photo of a suicide victim was the header “Do You Know This Man?” The corpse was a John Doe, having been found with no identification, only a note saying, “I walk a lonely street.” Durden couldn’t shake the image of the dead man and imagined how low down and blue he must have felt to take his own life.
Later that day, Durden visited Axton and told her about the story in the paper, suggesting they write a blues song about an unfortunate man who “walks a lonely street.” She liked the idea, thinking it would be a good tune for Presley. But she wanted to expand on the note to include a stanza describing how the man’s family would feel when they found out about his death. Together, they came up with the idea of placing a “Heartbreak Hotel” at the end of “lonely street” to represent the anguish of this man’s family. Durden hammered out chords on Axton’s piano as she improvised the lyrics. Legend has it that the pair finished the song in just twenty-two minutes.
Once the tune was written, Axton called Glen Reeves, a local singer, to come over and make a demo of the song. Reeves sang the song into Axton’s tape recorder, trying to mimic Presley’s voice. In lieu of payment, Axton offered Reeves a songwriting credit on “Heartbreak Hotel.” He turned her down. “That’s the silliest song I ever heard,” he reportedly said.
The last photo ever taken of Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires. The Jordanaires sang on almost every Elvis record from 1955 to 1970, including “Heartbreak Hotel.” Left to right: Neal Matthews, Gordon Stoker, Elvis, Hoyt Hawkins and Roy Walker.
With the demo completed, Axton’s next call was to Presley. She asked that he meet her in Nashville so she could play him his first million seller. They hooked up in the country music capital where Elvis was scheduled to record his first album, and she played him the tape. He asked her to play it again, and again, until they had listened to it ten times. By the end of the meeting, Presley had agreed to release “Heartbreak Hotel” as a single from his upcoming LP for RCA.
Recording for the album, with producer Steve Sholes at the helm, commenced on January 10, 1956, just a few days after Presley’s twenty-first birthday. Sholes assembled a band of Nashville heavyweight session players, including Chet Atkins on guitar and Floyd Cramer on piano, to try to recreate the Sun Records’ sound that had been so effective on Presley’s first singles. For his part, Elvis was still wet behind the ears in terms of working in a recording studio. Sholes had to surround him with three microphones to catch his voice at all angles because he moved around so much, often straying out of range.
The band warmed up by playing three or four songs, one right after the other. Elvis was so worked up by the time they settled in to record “Heartbreak Hotel” that he split the seat of his pants and kicked off his white bucks, releasing a waft of foot odor that hung in the studio air for the rest of the session. Elvis’s vocal on the tune so closely followed Reeves’s original demo that Durden commented later, “Elvis was even breathing in the same places as Glen Reeves did on the dub.”
“Heartbreak Hotel” was released as a single on January 27, 1956, less than three weeks after the recording session. The next day, Presley made his first appearance on the Dorsey Brothers’ television variety program Stage Show. He was such a hit, he was invited back five more times, singing “Heartbreak Hotel” on his third, fifth and sixth appearances. By the end of April, the single had reached Number One, knocking Les Baxter’s syrupy i
nstrumental “Poor People of Paris” out of the top spot.
The record sold an unprecedented quantity. It was to become 1956’s biggest single, sitting at Number One for eight weeks and making a barrelful of cash in the process. The song’s publishers Hill and Range refused to cash the first royalty check from RCA — in the amount of $250,000 — thinking the accountants at the record company must have added some extra zeros by mistake.
“Heartbreak Hotel” was the first of 107 singles Elvis Presley placed on the Billboard Top Forty in the next twenty-five years.
Blue Suede Shoes
Carl Perkins
A dancer at a honky-tonk gave Carl Perkins the idea for one of the most well-known phrases in rock-and-roll history. In 1956, “Blue Suede Shoes” was Sun Records’ first million seller.
On December 4, 1955, Carl Perkins was playing a honkytonk in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee. His set was comprised of hillbilly songs with a twist; he filled in the space around the vocals with lead-guitar runs, a trick he learned from listening to old blues records. As an aspiring songwriter — having issued several self-penned singles by this time — he was always on the lookout for a snappy phrase to build a song around. This gig provided one that would echo through the next four decades.
A young couple were jitterbugging near the bandstand. “They were really good,” he remembered. “You know, when you are playing, you often pick out a certain pair that are really rockin’.” He kept his eye on the lively couple who continued to dance until the end of the set. At the end of the last tune, Perkins heard the boy admonish his date. “Don’t you step on my suedes!” he said loudly, sounding annoyed. “I’m sorry,” she replied, with a hurt look on her face. Suede shoes were getting popular around Jackson and Memphis at the time, but Perkins couldn’t believe the way this boy had spoken. “I thought, ‘You fool, that’s a stupid shoe. That’s a pretty girl, man.’ ”
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 3
