TAKE A WALK ON THE DARK SIDE
ROCK AND ROLL
MYTHS, LEOENDS,
AND CURSES
R. GARY PATTERSON
A FIRESIDE BOOK
PUBLISHEO BY SIMON & SCNUSTER
New York, London Toronto Sydney
FIRESIDE
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2004 by R. Gary Patterson
Robert Johnson, photo booth self-portrait, early 1930s, © 1986 Delta Haze Corporation, all rights reserved. Used by permission.
Kurt Cobain, AP/Wide World Photos, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.
All other photos: Photofest, 32 East 31st Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10016.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
FIRESIDE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]
BOOK DESIGN BY WILLIAM RUOTO
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-0-743-24423-7
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0364-7
Ruby M. Hunt
For you, Mom:
Mom, this one is for you! Thanks for loading up our car with all my friends and taking us to the drive-in to watch three horror films back to back on Friday nights. Thanks for buying me those Rolling Stones concert tickets when I was fourteen years old and waiting over six hours until the Stones flew in from New York and finally performed. Most of all, thanks for your unconditional love, guidance, and support and for being the person you are.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction
1 Waiting at the Crossroads
2 The Buddy Holly Curse?
3 “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”
4 “Mr. Crowley”
5 “Sympathy for the Devil”
6 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
7 “Welcome to the Hotel California”
8 The Backward Mask and Other Hidden Messages
9 “If 6 Was 9”
10 The Club
Notes 263
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
WHO CREATED ROCK AND ROLL? Was it given life at an obscure country crossroads by a young Robert Johnson willing to sacrifice his soul for the power of the blues? Was it the rhythmic gospel beat found in the southern backwoods churches that gave it a pulse? Or was the part-time delivery boy who stopped in at Sun Records to record a song for his mother the one who breathed life into its body? Pinpointing the origins of rock and roll is an arduous task. Rock and roll, by its very nature, is difficult to define, and even harder to explain.
There may never be one clear-cut, universally accepted theory as to the origins of rock and roll music. One thing, however, is clear: Rock and roll has had a turbulent history. Rock and roll is a living, breathing body, constantly expanding its horizons and pushing its limits. Danny and the Juniors once boasted, “Rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die.” While that may be true, rock and roll has had its share of close calls. From its inception, rock and roll has been peppered with myth, folklore, legend, rumor, and fact. Perhaps no other field in pop culture has had so rich a history. Musicians’ untimely deaths. Lives filled with excess. Bizarre, unusual coincidence. Poignant, prophetic lyrics. Chilling, gripping circumstances.
Rock and roll is an enigmatic body of culture. Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses involves two distinct facets of rock history—fact and irony. Take a Walk on the Dark Side, however, is a different sort of rock history; it is an account of fact, fiction, myth, rumor, and legend.
This combination makes Take a Walk on the Dark Side a labor of love. It combines the two things that fascinate me most—rock and roll music and its history, and that which is bizarre and unexplainable.
My love for rock and roll is easy to explain. I grew up on rock and roll music. Much as it did with contemporary American culture, rock and roll took hold of me. The songs that I grew up with are like old friends. They are a part of my childhood, my memories, my life, and part of me.
My interest in the bizarre and unexplainable is probably best credited to human nature. Many individuals throughout history have been influenced by fate, happenstance, or chance. This allows humanity a glimpse of its own mortality. Public tragedies allow us to experience this vicariously. Some of us, however, have come far too close to the clutches of circumstance. In July 1996, I was in Paris with a group of family and friends. I remember all too well the icy sensations of horror that swept across me as I learned that TWA Flight 800 had exploded off the New York coastline. My return tickets were a grim irony: TWA Flight 802. Flight 800 had left JFK airport in New York and was destined for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. We were leaving Charles de Gaulle and flying into JFK in New York that evening. The incident was chilling yet fascinating.
Rock and roll has had a profound effect on me. On one hand, rock and roll’s pulsating rhythms and poignant lyrics make me feel alive, yet rock and roll’s bizarre coincidences and riveting circumstances serve as a dramatic reminder of my own mortality.
I think the Grateful Dead aptly described the history of rock music when they sang “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” How it began, where it started, what caused this thing called rock and roll music is an enigma. Rock and roll is constantly changing and ever-expanding.
In any event, it is clear that rock and roll was created in the American rural South. To some degree its very creators have struggled with the age-old question of whom the music actually serves. The self-proclaimed originator of rock and roll, Little Richard, who many of the British invasion groups believed to be bigger than Elvis, was ordained a minister in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. This conversion occurred in October of 1957, after Little Richard became alarmed that his chartered plane, with part of the fuselage on fire, would crash somewhere over Australia. Richard remembers the event: “I gave up rock and roll for the rock of ages! I used to be a glaring homosexual until God changed me!”1 To seal his pact with God, Little Richard promptly threw thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry into the Tasman Sea after he safely landed in Sydney. Strangely, the Australian tour included Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Cochran would die in an automobile accident on April 17, 1960, and Vincent would be injured in the same accident. Gene Vincent would die of a hemorrhaged ulcer on October 12, 1971. In this event Little Richard definitely made the best decision. Today, Little Richard has finally been recognized for his contributions to rock and roll and has been inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. But he hasn’t retired from performing, and he still manages to present the conflict between the infectious beat of rock and roll and his religious upbringing.
Perhaps the strangest conflict within an early rock and roll innovator occurred in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis. Even his birth was accompanied by the unusual: “On that day, September 29, 1935, at an hour more dark than light, Mamie Lewis heard the first scream of her newborn child. A dog no one had ever seen had been howling outside the window near the bed. Her sister Stella had thrown stones to chase it away, but it had come back. Now, finally, it went off into the brush toward Turtle Lake, and Stella Calhoun never saw it again.”2 I was first introduced to the southern lore involving a howling dog at night when I was a student at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville,
Tennessee. My roommate, Steve, his girlfriend, and I were sitting up late one night watching a movie when we heard the sound of a howling dog. The sound was chilling. Steve’s girlfriend calmly looked us both in the eye and whispered, “Someone close to one of us will die tonight.” At first I laughed but then she looked seriously at me and exclaimed, “Ever since I was a little girl in Columbia [Tennessee] and heard a dog howl at night someone close to me has died.” At that time I was glad she was Steve’s girlfriend and not mine. “But,” I demanded, “I hear dogs bark at night all the time!” Giving me a knowing glance she simply responded, “Barking is normal, but how many times have you heard a dog howl?” I had to admit that she had me there. As I slept that night I paid little attention to our conversation about the nocturnal habits of howling dogs. However, just before dawn, the high-pitched ringing of the phone awakened me. Steve answered the phone and then became very quiet. I asked him, “What’s up? Who’s calling us at this hour?” I’ll never forget the haunted look in his eyes when he explained to me that his mother had just called. It seemed that she wanted to notify him of the death of his uncle. According to his mother, his uncle had died at approximately the same hour we heard the howling dog outside our apartment.
The reference to the dog outside the Lewis home may have signaled a run of incredible bad luck for the rock and roll giant who became known as the Killer. Jerry Lee Lewis’s career was practically destroyed when the media discovered that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra. To complicate matters more, this marriage took place before his divorce from his second wife was final. The marriage to Myra ended in divorce in 1970. In all, Lewis has been married six times. “His fourth wife, Jaren, drowned in 1982 while awaiting terms of the final settlement of their divorce. He married his fifth wife, twenty-five-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens, in 1983; after less than ninety days she was taken from his home dead of an overdose of methadone … Both of his sons have died untimely deaths: one, Steve Allen Lewis, named for the television host and announced enemy of rock and roll, drowned in a swimming pool at age three in 1962; the other, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., died in an auto accident at age nineteen in 1973. Lewis’s older brother Elmo died when he was still a boy.”3
At times Lewis followed in the footsteps of Little Richard and would preach in the local Pentecostal churches. It appeared that in his family the choice was usually music or the ministry. One of Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousins, Mickey Gilley, made a career for himself as a country singer. Another cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, became a famous televangelist. It may very well be left to the individual to decide which force each of the three cousins serves. In some cases this has become a continuous internal struggle between faith and fame.
Lewis had one such struggle during the recording of “Great Balls of Fire.” After Lewis and the session players got to drinking, Jerry Lee became filled with the Holy Ghost, and he decided that the song “Great Balls of Fire” was of the devil and that to sing it was to sin. Sam Phillips (owner of Sun Studios) argued against Jerry Lee’s stand. Following a long period of time filled with mutual quoting from the Scriptures by Phillips and Lewis, the rock classic was finally cut between midnight and dawn. Perhaps it was appropriate that the recording would occur around the very witching hour of night. In a recent interview Lewis said he still believes that his music may have served the devil. When his daughter reprimanded him over that comment, Lewis commented something to the effect that “If my music hadn’t served the devil, then I sure gave him a good shoeshine.” Jerry Lee Lewis may well have believed that on the night of his birth Robert Johnson’s legendary hellhound had found him and led him down a path of self-destruction.
When rock and roll legends are discussed there are mentions of doomed bands and bizarre coincidences that reach from beyond the grave. One of the most incredible coincidences concerns the tragic legacy of Buddy Holly. Holly was one of the first white artists to take the black man’s music and adapt it to a more diverse audience. When he and his band the Crickets were signed to their first label, Brunswick, the record executives had first thought that the band was a black group. Little did they know that an all-white southern band from Texas would take the legendary all-black Apollo Theater in New York by storm. Did this diffusion of musical styles help lead the country to denounce the Jim Crow laws and lay the first foundation for the establishment of the Civil Rights movement? Maybe; this is a point that could be well argued. When Holly appeared on stage and on national television wearing his trademark black horned-rimmed glasses, he gave other musicians, including a very nearsighted John Lennon, the courage to appear naturally on stage wearing glasses and not be hung up promoting a cool stereotypical image. As a matter of fact, Buddy Holly’s look was the epitome of cool!
If the cultural acceptance of Buddy Holly was important, even more so was his music. The secret to his songs was primarily the clever wordplay and an infectious beat. Holly’s playing did more to promote the Fender Stratocaster guitar than any other artist (notwithstanding Jimi Hendrix, of course). In a time filled with the terrible uncertainty of the Cold War, Buddy Holly and his music provided a much-needed reprieve. After Holly’s marriage to Maria Elena Santiago, he became a solo artist and booked himself into a series of winter rock and roll shows. It was at this time, on February 3, 1959, that the music died.
The pilot, Roger Peterson, was twenty-one years old and was not instrument certified to fly in the conditions that that fateful night demanded. (One of the most interesting rumors concerning the plane was that its name was American Pie. This namesake was said to serve as Don McLean’s inspiration for his “American Pie,” an ode to Buddy Holly and the day the music died. Unfortunately, this concept of “American Pie” is just an unfounded urban legend. There is no documentation that the plane was christened with a name; this has become yet one more instance of rock and roll folklore.) Shortly after 1:00 A.M. Eastern time in the early morning hours of February 3, 1959, the small Beechcraft Bonanza airplane crashed into an open field. All the plane’s passengers were killed, as well as the pilot. Holly died at the age of twenty-two, the Big Bopper at twenty-eight, and Ritchie Valens at seventeen. The untimely death of these three young stars has played a major role in rock and roll mythology.
It seemed that tragedy would continue to pursue other associations with Buddy Holly. His birthplace in Lubbock, Texas, was condemned for demolition on February 3, 1978, the nineteenth anniversary of Holly’s tragic death. Another coincidence that concerned Buddy Holly involved the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon. Moon had long been known as a wild man of rock. His drinking and other madcap exploits were legendary. The last album Moon made with the Who was Who Are You, released in 1978. On the album cover Moon was shown sitting in a chair that is labeled “Not to Be Taken Away.” The dramatic irony of the chair’s statement was reinforced with the announcement of Keith Moon’s death. According to published reports, Moon had attended the London premiere of The Buddy Holly Story with Paul McCartney and some other friends. After the premiere, Moon and his girlfriend returned home, where he took his medication and went to bed. A few hours later Moon awoke and took some more pills. This was to be a fatal mistake. The large meal had slowed the reaction of the first pills. When the second dosage was taken an accidental overdose occurred. Keith Moon was dead at the age of thirty-one. The incredible irony in Keith Moon’s death was not only in the fact that his last public appearance was at The Buddy Holly Story, but that he died on September 7, 1978. You see, September 7 was Buddy Holly’s birthday! Another strange coincidence involving Keith Moon concerns the suite in which he died. The flat belonged to Harry Nilsson, and four years earlier Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died in the same room from a heart attack (and not from choking to death on a ham sandwich!).4 Maybe this gives a new meaning to “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Many DJs claimed that rock and roll would never die, but in the late 1950s the music was placed on temporary life support. For instance, it was in 1957 that Little Richard became an ordained minister
and cut back on his devotion to rock and roll. Nineteen-fifty-seven was also the same year that Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin. This scandal made headlines early the next year in 1958 and effectively, but thankfully temporarily, pulled Lewis’s music from the airwaves and Lewis’s presence from the concert stages. Also in 1958, Elvis Presley was drafted into the army. When he returned he played the role of a pop singer and movie star but finally rediscovered his rock and roll roots in 1968. The next year, 1959, saw the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens, as we have noted. At the conclusion of this year, Chuck Berry would be arrested and imprisoned on a morals charge. At the very moment that rock was reeling from the deaths and seclusion of its most brilliant performers, the U.S. Congress began the payola scandals. “Payola” referred to bribes being given to certain disk jockeys to play certain artists’ recordings on the air. Of course this would result in hit records. The central figure of this investigation was none other than Cleveland, Ohio’s own Alan Freed, the man who coined the term “rock and roll” and its first promoter. Sadly, Freed was blackballed by the very industry he helped create. He died indigent on January 20, 1965, at the age of forty-two.
It is my sincere hope that the material presented in Take a Walk on the Dark Side might make you see things in a different light. Perhaps some of the references will make your pulse race a little faster. Maybe you’ll find yourself glancing over your shoulder when you are alone in the room. Perhaps you will never listen to one of your records or CDs in the same way. Please remind yourself that some of these stories are simply myths and legends; the others? Well … you be the judge of that, but above all, enjoy the book.
In compiling my sources I would like to thank my publisher, Fireside Books, at Simon & Schuster, and especially my editor, Brett Valley, for his guidance and assistance. I would also like to thank Matt Walker, my former editor, who is now at Yale working on his Ph.D. My very special thanks goes to Lisa Lyon, producer of Coast to Coast AM and the Premiere Radio Network, as well as to Barbara Simpson (the Princess of Darkness) and to Ian Punnitt, two of the best interviewers anywhere. I’d like to thank Anne Devlin from Anne Online, and my attorney Norman Gillis; and Connie Loy for being there and believing. There are several other individuals who have made a difference in my professional life. I’d like to thank Jeff Cohen of Richmond, Virginia, Allan Handelman, J. Fox and Dave Bolt of the ABC Radio Network, and the hundreds of DJs across the country who sit with me and discuss these incredible tales. Indeed, “Music is our special friend.” Special thanks also goes out to the incredible Susan Vargas, my favorite television producer in Hollywood. Susan, I’m sure we will do more incredible series together. As for my ultimate source of strength, I would like to thank my family, especially my mom, who guided me with unconditional love, and my daughter, Shea, who is growing up way too fast. I know that this work would not have been possible without all of their combined efforts. I would also like to thank Derek Davidson at Photofest, Jon R. Hichborn at royaltytracking.com and Delta Haze, and Yvette Reyes at AP/Wide World Photos for their much appreciated assistance.
Take a Walk on the Dark Side Page 1
