In 1957 Elvis was twenty-two and therefore should by rights have regarded himself as an adult, but he still identified with the burgeoning army of youth. By early 1956 there were estimated to be thirteen million teenagers in the United States. This cohort could mobilize a combined income of $7 billion a year. Not many years before that what little money teenagers had been able to earn would have gone directly into the family exchequer. Now they were free to spend it on themselves. They duly exchanged $20 million a year for lipstick and even more than that on deodorants, a product their parents had managed without. Recorded music was a growing category. Teenagers spent $75 million a year on singles alone. New technology was making it possible for them to take their amusement where they pleased. The first transistor radio appeared in 1954 and 100,000 units were sold in a short time. By 1957 American companies were selling ten million portable record players a year. Manufacturers were starting to react to the teenage market, which they had never taken notice of before. Where the manufacturers went the advertising followed, where there was advertiser demand the media rushed to catch up, and where the media rushed the agents were not far behind.
The custodians of the big US TV shows were people like Ed Sullivan, a lantern-jawed undertaker figure who had made his name in the days when reporters had tickets announcing them as ‘press’ in their hatbands and cameras required gripping tightly in both fists. These people might not have liked rock and roll but they understood the importance of providing variety. On the night of 6 January 1957, when Sullivan introduced Elvis for his third and final appearance on the show (Colonel Parker having already raised his price too high to encourage repeat bookings), he also introduced Lonnie Satin, the Six Gutis, Sugar Ray Robinson and the British ventriloquist Arthur Worsley. Sullivan finished by giving the camera his sincere face and assuring the family audience at home that Elvis was a fine young man who had never given them a moment’s trouble while doing the show. At around the same time the army draft board had announced that Presley was liable for military service and there was no reason why he wouldn’t soon be in uniform. Elvis’s short period as a rebellious rock star was officially at an end.
While America was enjoying the fruits of a post-war boom, Britain was coming to terms with its newly reduced circumstances. It had come out of the war on the winning side but was losing the empire it had entered the war to protect, and facing a massive bill for the cost of waging that war. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan may have said in the course of a speech at Bedford in the summer of 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, but there was a feeling that Britain’s days of mattering were in the past. In April a new John Osborne play had opened at the Royal Court in London. The Entertainer starred Laurence Olivier as a desperate down-at-heel comedian. The theatre in which he performed was similarly shabby and faded. During the interval an actress, naked except for the Union flag, occupied the stage in the pose of Britannia. She was not permitted to move a muscle in case the censor closed the show. Most critics took The Entertainer as a savage attack on Britain’s dreaming of a warlike past, a past that wasn’t nearly as glorious as the mythology made out.
For Britain’s teenagers, the ones who were in their early adolescence when Elvis and Little Richard began to filter through, there was the immediate comfort of knowing that they were the first generation in years not required to do compulsory military service. Jobs were easy to find, they lived at home and they had disposable income. They had grown up in the shadow of the war and didn’t want to hear any more about self-denial or patriotic duty. This generation looked to America for everything: Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories, coffee, blue jeans, chewing gum, slang, hair products, and above all an American way of carrying themselves that they were just starting to pick up from the new rock idols.
In 1957 the Canadian pop singer Paul Anka was touring the United States in the package tour called ‘The Biggest Show of Stars’. At different times this caravan included everyone from Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis to Carl Perkins, the Drifters, Frankie Lymon, Buddy Knox and Clyde McPhatter. It was a medley of the wide variety of people having rock and roll hits at the time. Anka noticed that the acts could be divided into three groups: the older black acts, the Italianate city slickers, and the Southern boys. This last group tended to drink, curse and threaten people with the consequences of stepping on their blue suede shoes. They generally played guitars, had impenetrable accents, spoke in a thick patois and had an unlearned swagger about them. These Southern boys were the men laying down the template for what would come to be thought of as rock-star style. It helped immeasurably that they played guitars. The guitars were less important as instruments than as natural extensions of their cool. Although Eddie Cochran hailed from Minnesota and had lived since 1952 in California he fitted right in with the Southern boys because he too looked the part. Whereas Chuck and Fats were too old for the audience to wish to emulate and the Italian boys were too obviously showbiz, the look of somebody like Cochran seemed achievable to the kids who were drawn to the music.
In 1957 the British cultural historian Richard Hoggart published his book The Uses of Literacy, which pondered the apparent decline of self-improvement among working-class males, many of whom he pictured spending their days sitting around in milk bars ‘with drape suits, picture ties and an American slouch’. The American slouch was particularly appealing to those whose army-trained fathers had insisted that the only proper posture of a man was at full attention. In Britain these imported manners appealed right across the social spectrum. When Blackboard Jungle, with its rock and roll soundtrack, had first played in British cinemas it had unleashed something previously unsuspected in the British character. Even nice girls in Cromer had gone along and found they were screaming before they knew what had come over them. Although the sociologist Mark Abrams, researching his book The Teenage Consumer, came to believe that teenagers were an almost entirely working-class movement, the American way of doing things was just as popular with the young men who would have been officers as with those who would have been other ranks.
When sixteen-year-old John Lennon was being raised by his Aunt Mimi amid solid middle-class respectability in Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, the rock and roll way of behaving was almost as attractive as the music. It could be quickly achieved, at minimum expense. Men in their twenties who worked for a living might go for the full teddy boy uniform but those who were still at school and had to obey their parents’ or guardians’ wishes had to be more discreet about it. They could announce themselves as one of this tribe simply by taking off their ties and pulling up their shirt collars, as James Dean had done in Rebel Without a Cause. Fourteen-year-old Paul McCartney had spotted Lennon around Liverpool before they formally met. This was going on all over the country. The members of this emerging tribe would silently note each other well before moving along.
McCartney’s father had run his own dance band. Hence Paul’s first instrument was a trumpet. A trumpet was difficult to play and it didn’t seem to have much of a role in rock and roll. More important than that, in the eyes of a teenage boy, it didn’t make the player look as good as a guitar did. The guitar transfigured he who owned it. So he persuaded his father to let him swap the trumpet for one. There wasn’t a great deal of choice. Like hundreds of teenage boys across Britain he had his nose pressed to the window of a local musical instrument supplier, searching for something that did the job musically but also looked like the kind of machine he might have seen an American rock and roller holding in a picture, rather than the type of guitar favoured by the brilliantined men who operated them from a sitting position in the old dance bands. The way this new music looked was every bit as important as the way it sounded.
In Britain the bridge between the old world of the jazz band and the new world of rock and roll passed through skiffle. Skiffle’s foremost star, Lonnie Donegan, started out as a featured turn with Chris Barber and Ken Colyer’s jazz bands. He and a couple of ot
her musicians would perform songs by the likes of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie in the middle of the set. It was all done in a self-consciously home-made, almost comical fashion using a guitar, a bass that was improvised out of a tea chest, and percussion provided by the sound of thimbles on a washboard. This mini-act proved so popular that Donegan went out on his own and started having big hits. It’s no exaggeration to say that skiffle swept the nation in 1956. Its repertoire was up-tempo and catchy, it didn’t seem to require virtuosos to play it, and the tools needed to make it could be found in anyone’s garden shed. Skiffle groups immediately sprang up everywhere, from workplaces to churches.
By the summer of 1957 skiffle had peaked, but not before it had galvanized teenagers all over the country. Donegan was at number one with a song called ‘Puttin’ On The Style’. This was the last British chart topper to be released on 78 only. It was an old novelty song which went back thirty years. It was about young people’s tendency to behave in a way their parents considered outlandish. One of the most appealing things about skiffle was that it gave young people a chance to pretend they weren’t English. In Newcastle, Brian Rankin and Bruce Cripps, later to be known by other names, were in a group called the Railroaders. In Manchester, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, two of them still in short trousers, were preparing for a performance as the Rattlesnakes. Over in Belfast, Ivan Morrison had started the Sputniks. In the suburbs of London, thirteen-year-old James Page was in a skiffle group that got as far as appearing on a BBC talent show. Huw Wheldon, the tweedy schoolmaster figure who presented the programme, asked him what he was going to do when he grew up. ‘Play skiffle?’ he chortled. ‘No,’ James replied, ‘I want to do biological research.’ Nine-year-old Ron Wood made his first appearance on stage playing the washboard in his older brother’s skiffle group. They played ‘Puttin’ On The Style’.
That same song was part of the repertoire of the Quarrymen when they played the village fete in Woolton, a comfortable suburb of Liverpool, on 6 July 1957. John Lennon’s first group had been playing together a year and their set comprised all the key songs associated with skiffle, many of which had roots in the African-American experience. There were train songs, work songs, songs about men running away from a chain gang. It was the kind of stuff averagely inhibited young English males could feel comfortable playing. It didn’t require them to be themselves or pretend they were in love. In fact the only song about a female they played was ‘Maggie May’, an old Liverpool favourite about a prostitute.
The Quarrymen played three times that day. The first performance was from the back of a lorry taking part in a procession round the streets. The second was in the field at Woolton where the fete took place. The third was an evening show at the church hall where they were billed as light relief for the youngsters in between the dance band’s stints (just like Ed Sullivan, the elders of the local church understood the importance of having something for the youngsters). A photograph was taken of the band during the second performance. They are surrounded by small children who have moved to where the action is. John Lennon is the only one who has a microphone. He isn’t wearing his glasses but has somehow managed to pick out the camera. His collar is turned up, his sleeves pushed back, his hair piled up and artfully mussed. It’s clearly his band. He doesn’t look at all apologetic. He looks as though he’s found his place.
Between the afternoon show and the one in the evening the Quarrymen hung around, killing time. It was during that time that Lennon was introduced to the boy, almost two years younger, who had been watching them in the company of a mutual friend. The friend had brought him because he felt they would have plenty in common. Being teenage boys it’s possible that John and Paul never did anything so formal as introducing themselves or shaking hands. They mooched around and found somewhere to smoke a cigarette. At one point McCartney asked to borrow Lennon’s guitar. He then tuned it properly (Lennon had learned with banjo tuning) and proceeded to play this right-handed instrument in his usual left-handed position, rattling off a series of rock and roll songs with a facility and confidence that belied his age. One of these was Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, which was significantly more complex than anything in the Quarrymen’s set. Paul didn’t just know all the words, he also had the stamina to perform the whole thing. Emboldened by the fact that he had clearly impressed the others, he then got on the piano in the church hall and did his Little Richard impression. This was something else. The then thirteen-year-old McCartney had studied how he did it. ‘The screaming voice seemed to come from the top of his head. I tried to do it one day and found I could. You had to lose every inhibition and do it.’
The following day’s Sunday Times had a review of the new film Around the World in Eighty Days and the previous evening’s BBC broadcast of Madam Butterfly. While the Quarrymen had been playing at the Woolton village fete, Althea Gibson of Harlem, ‘the first coloured player of either sex to win the championship’, had been collecting her trophy from the Queen at Wimbledon. But more than sixty years later 6 July 1957 is still most remembered for the consequences that flowed from that meeting between two Liverpool teenagers who were obsessed with rock and roll. For years afterwards each of them was asked what had impressed him the most about the other. Lennon said he was struck by how well McCartney had managed to imitate the American acts. He knew McCartney was better than he was and realized he would never improve unless he played with somebody who was better. In his company they might be able to produce something worth hearing. For his part, McCartney said he was most impressed by Lennon’s confidence, the way he adapted the songs he sang to include references to the name of the vicar. Together they could first of all copy things and then change those things in all sorts of interesting ways.
A couple of weeks later they happened to run into each other in the street. After some small talk, Lennon said, almost as an afterthought, ‘Do you want to join the group?’
McCartney replied distractedly, as if he too had given the idea no thought: ‘OK.’
1957 PLAYLIST
Paul Anka, ‘Diana’
Sam Cooke, ‘You Send Me’
Everly Brothers, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’
Buddy Holly, ‘Everyday’
Jerry Lee Lewis, ‘Great Balls Of Fire’
Little Richard, ‘Lucille’
Chuck Berry, ‘Rock and Roll Music’
Miles Davis, Miles Ahead
Johnny Duncan, ‘Last Train To San Fernando’
Elvis Presley, ‘Loving You’
22 MAY 1958
LONDON AIRPORT
A bad boy flies in
IF SUCCESS WAS a straightforward question of the amount of sheer musical talent, then twenty-two-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis of Ferriday, Louisiana should have had more of it than anyone. He was the first rock star to be a master of his instrument. From the age of nine he had taught himself to play, showing self-discipline at the piano not readily apparent anywhere else in his life; by the time he was in his late teens and had already dropped out of Bible College he could sing and play anything – jazz, gospel, blues, Gershwin, you name it – with an assurance that dazzled anyone, particularly anyone who thought that compared to jazzers and dance-band players, rock musicians were strictly cavemen.
Jerry Lee sounded as though he came out of the woods. His father was one of those cotton farmers who was hit by the Great Depression and never got out from under. He diversified into making moonshine, which led to a period in the penitentiary. The family, who had started off as Baptist, joined the Assembly of God, a sect that condemned drinking, dancing, fornicating and playing secular music; in fact they drew the line at pretty much everything Jerry Lee had any aptitude for, which accounted for his occasional bouts of bad conscience about the way he wound up making his living.
Jerry Lee’s prodigious talent made him almost a novelty act. When, in 1956, Sam Phillips had taken his twenty-year-old charge up to New York City in an effort to get him booked on one of the big TV shows before he had eve
n had a hit record, Jerry Lee performed for the man from NBC right there in his office. He barely got to the end of the number. ‘I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you don’t show him to anyone else,’ said the man to Sam as though the two were discussing a racehorse.
That man’s confidence was not misplaced. When Jerry Lee’s record came out it was a huge hit all across the country. It deserved to be. In the years since 1956 hundreds of performers have covered ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ but not one has endowed it with the coiled power young Jerry Lee invested in it in Sam’s studio on Union Avenue in Memphis. Whereas Little Richard sounded like the helpless vessel of a power too great for him to tame, Jerry Lee sang like a man with the monster on a leash. No matter how much mayhem he might have summoned in the course of a performance there was never any question that he had both hell and tarnation in reserve.
The only drawback – and here Jerry Lee could be said to have laid down a marker for the ages – was that all that talent was at the mercy of a man with the appetites of a Viking raider, the manners of a Confederate skirmisher and the tractability of a mule. Jerry Lee’s problem was that he actually was the obnoxious redneck hoodlum his rock and roll peers only pretended to be. Paul Anka, the sixteen-year-old clean-living boy from Canada, never got over meeting him on that 1957 package tour. ‘I can’t even explain how abusively unpredictable this guy could be,’ he recalled later, still white with shock. ‘White trashy spew, that’s what it was.’ Fellow Southern boys were less easily thrown by Jerry Lee’s front, preferring to say he didn’t mean nothing by it, but even they were forced to concede that he would argue with a signpost.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 4
