Post by DRL on Apr 12, 2004 10:18:11 GMT -5
The day the music was born
PETER GODDARD
There's no way to pinpoint exactly when rock 'n' roll began, but April 12, 1954 isn't a bad place to start. That's the day Bill Haley and his Comets recorded the song "Rock Around the Clock." Peter Goddard, 11 years old at the time, went on to become the Star's first full-time rock critic in 1973.
A half-century ago this Monday, a big galoot named William John Clifton Haley went into Decca Records' main New York studio to record "Rock Around the Clock," a song that had been kicking around for about a year and was credited to tunesmith Max C. Freedman (who wrote it) and to music publisher James Myers under the pseudonym Jimmy DeKnight.
As a kid at the time, not nearly a teenager yet, I didn't know anything about this, nor was I expected to. As a kid in the '50s, I was to stay in school, do good things and not think those funny thoughts I had about Leslie, the girl from across the way.
Of course, history shows just how much of a hopelessly unaware big lunk I was not knowing about Bill Haley, the man who "launched the rock 'n' roll era," as they say; the cool cat who paved the way for Joey Ramone and Britney Spears.
Then again, most people back then didn't want to know about Bill Haley, and not just because of how remarkably untelegenic he was with his moon-pie face and weird little kiss curl hanging there over his broad forehead.
They didn't want to know because, truth is, rock 'n' roll — or whatever it was variously known as at the time — wasn't that big a deal in 1954, even if The Crew Cuts, a bunch of guys from Toronto's St. Michael's Boys Choir, had a major radio hit with a song called "Sh-Boom."
All of this was about to change mighty quickly, what with 19-year-old Elvis Presley down in Memphis in the summer of 1954, stuck in Sun Records' cramped studio and fooling around with a forgotten blues tune, "That's All Right," written by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
In just two years time, The Toronto Daily Star would be festooned with garish headlines about "frantic" teenagers whipped into a riotous frenzy by Little Richard at a Top Record Stars of 1956 "rhythmic orgy" at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was the template for the way rock — from the arrival of the Beatles, to punk and on to the mosh pits of grunge — has been received by polite society ever since.
Bill Haley and his Comets — "The Rock Around the Clock boys," as an ad in the Star put it — played the Palais Royale in 1955. By then, his song and the movie of the same name were hits in North America and especially England, being soaked up by everyone from Liverpool to London who was going to shape the '60s. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.
The lighting speed with which rock 'n' roll seeped into every seam and crevice of our lives was only one of the lessons we learned in the months after April 12, 1954. Indeed, all the things we now know about pop culture — about how it was shaped and how it still shapes us — came from the lessons learned in the '50s, and from rock 'n' roll in particular.
Besides shaping modern pop — remember, The Beatles came from a '50s smorgasbord of British skiffle music, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Carl Perkins — the '50s were the crucible heating up modern feminism, a time when anger at conventional morality was stirred, when the idea of being hip versus square led to massive Vietnam protests and when, in fact, all these elements were first perceived as being all parts of the same thing: rock 'n' roll culture
PETER GODDARD
There's no way to pinpoint exactly when rock 'n' roll began, but April 12, 1954 isn't a bad place to start. That's the day Bill Haley and his Comets recorded the song "Rock Around the Clock." Peter Goddard, 11 years old at the time, went on to become the Star's first full-time rock critic in 1973.
A half-century ago this Monday, a big galoot named William John Clifton Haley went into Decca Records' main New York studio to record "Rock Around the Clock," a song that had been kicking around for about a year and was credited to tunesmith Max C. Freedman (who wrote it) and to music publisher James Myers under the pseudonym Jimmy DeKnight.
As a kid at the time, not nearly a teenager yet, I didn't know anything about this, nor was I expected to. As a kid in the '50s, I was to stay in school, do good things and not think those funny thoughts I had about Leslie, the girl from across the way.
Of course, history shows just how much of a hopelessly unaware big lunk I was not knowing about Bill Haley, the man who "launched the rock 'n' roll era," as they say; the cool cat who paved the way for Joey Ramone and Britney Spears.
Then again, most people back then didn't want to know about Bill Haley, and not just because of how remarkably untelegenic he was with his moon-pie face and weird little kiss curl hanging there over his broad forehead.
They didn't want to know because, truth is, rock 'n' roll — or whatever it was variously known as at the time — wasn't that big a deal in 1954, even if The Crew Cuts, a bunch of guys from Toronto's St. Michael's Boys Choir, had a major radio hit with a song called "Sh-Boom."
All of this was about to change mighty quickly, what with 19-year-old Elvis Presley down in Memphis in the summer of 1954, stuck in Sun Records' cramped studio and fooling around with a forgotten blues tune, "That's All Right," written by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
In just two years time, The Toronto Daily Star would be festooned with garish headlines about "frantic" teenagers whipped into a riotous frenzy by Little Richard at a Top Record Stars of 1956 "rhythmic orgy" at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was the template for the way rock — from the arrival of the Beatles, to punk and on to the mosh pits of grunge — has been received by polite society ever since.
Bill Haley and his Comets — "The Rock Around the Clock boys," as an ad in the Star put it — played the Palais Royale in 1955. By then, his song and the movie of the same name were hits in North America and especially England, being soaked up by everyone from Liverpool to London who was going to shape the '60s. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.
The lighting speed with which rock 'n' roll seeped into every seam and crevice of our lives was only one of the lessons we learned in the months after April 12, 1954. Indeed, all the things we now know about pop culture — about how it was shaped and how it still shapes us — came from the lessons learned in the '50s, and from rock 'n' roll in particular.
Besides shaping modern pop — remember, The Beatles came from a '50s smorgasbord of British skiffle music, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Carl Perkins — the '50s were the crucible heating up modern feminism, a time when anger at conventional morality was stirred, when the idea of being hip versus square led to massive Vietnam protests and when, in fact, all these elements were first perceived as being all parts of the same thing: rock 'n' roll culture