Most Important Person in Rock and Roll

[hobie1dog]

I think I would have to cast my vote for the Beatles. They are not my favorite band, and you can argue if they played rock or pop (or both), and they were certainly influenced by earlier artists including Elvis. However, I think they were one of the first big commercial successes that inspired other bands to go for it, spawned the whole British invasion, that in turn spawned all of the USA bands of the '60's, and here we are!

+1 :cheers:

 

[talrmn35]

Well you all seem to be discussing who "created" rock and roll...and that can't go to any one individual (obviously). But as far as the rock culture and large influence I would have to say Jerry Garcia....talk amongst yerselves.

 

[CACooper]

Greetings all,

Definitely Elvis. He ruined popular music forever.

Before Elvis, there was Jazz, Big Band, and Swing. Real music, real musicians, talented singers, GREAT sound.

Then came Elvis and everything changed virtually overnight. Then The Beatles invaded, and that was the beginning of the end of popular music.

I'm not that old, I was born in '59. I grew up with The Beatles in the '60s, and the Stones, Zeppelin, Clapton. I don't hate Rock 'n Roll. I listen to it quite a bit. In fact I'm a big Rush fan.

But compared to the Big Band sound, rock doesn't come close.

I guess I was just born too late.

CACooper

 

[Aaron]

Bob Dylan

 

[laherb]

Robert Johnson for me.

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[momus]

Bob Dylan. He was the one that really introduced the Beatles to using pot (or so some documentary once told me...who knows)...if that was true he was responsible for the Beatles becoming a real artistic band ....naw, actually, Bob Dylan should get the kudos. He did inspire the Paul and John to write more serious lyrics. And heck, Sgt. Pepper was a response to the Beach Boys' sonic textures in Pet Sounds. Hmmmm....lets just say Frank Zappa and the now deceased Captain Beefheart and throw in Robert Johnson as well. Ok...just go with Robert Johnson.


Robert Johnson.

 

[laherb]

Momus, for me Frank Zappa and Cpt. Beefheart are very important people in RnR in my opinion. Beefheart, for the most avant-garde RnR. Zappa, for fusing classical with RnR and pointing out how ridicules people are. They inspired some but their greatest contribution was, they have there own sound. Then again I could go on and on about musicians that I feel are important to RnR.

 

[thefoolish]

This is turning into a great thread!

I personally have to cast my vote for Jimi Hendrix (single person) and Led Zeppelin (band). I think they speak for themselves.

 

[Dutch]

Son House was a huge influence on Muddy Waters, and Muddy Waters was a huge influence on Chuck Berry.

It can't be emphasized enough, that without the influence of the Black Mississippi Delta Bluesmen there would be no classic rock of the 40's, 50's, and 60's as we know it.

An example of the seeds of rock can be heard back in the mid 20's with Blind Lemon Jefferson's Black Snake Moan. He was one of the originators of Texas Blues, which was a major influence on Mississippi Delta Blues.

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[pistolero]

Robert Johnson, Muddy waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry. Pick one.

I'd pick any of the above or from a long list of others over Elvis. Elvis was just a pretty face with a good voice, not a musician. Did he ever write anything? Did he play any instrument with any real skill? No he strummed a guitar to other people's music. I don't have anything against the guy but I don't understand the worship Elvis thing.

 

[Dutch]

Robert Johnson, Muddy waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry. Pick one.

I'd pick any of the above or from a long list of others over Elvis. Elvis was just a pretty face with a good voice, not a musician. Did he ever write anything? Did he play any instrument with any real skill? No he strummed a guitar to other people's music. I don't have anything against the guy but I don't understand the worship Elvis thing.

Yep I agree with you, but it took Elvis performing the music in order to "sanitize" it to sell it to a predominately White market because that's where the money was. Even then parents lost their minds when they saw Elvis perform, and the reaction of teenage girls to those performances.

Just imagine what their reaction would have been to hear Willie Dixon performing "Backdoor Man!" lol

Which reminds me that Willie Dixon had to sue Led Zepplin to collect his publishing rights on the song "Whole Lotta Love."

There seems to be a fine line between "inspiration" and "plagiarism."

When the question is asked who is the most important person in Rock and Roll, there are the guys who performed it, the guys who wrote it, and the guys who promoted it, who are responsible for it's transformation over the last 100 years.

Prior to that, the Blues were spawned from the days when Blacks were slaves and weren't allowed to communicate with each other, but were allowed to sing while they worked. Using those songs were the only way they had to communicate with one another, hence the tradition in Blues and Rock of making the lyrics difficult to understand.

Another name that is very much worth mention is Alan Lomax. In 1932 he began scouring the backroads, ****** tonks, work camps and penitentiaries of the south and preserved these Delta Blues and Appalachian Folk performances on a crude recording machine which was funded by the Library of Congress. Without those recordings, the pioneers of Rock music simply wouldn't have had the blueprint from which they started.

 

[cigarsarge]

The most important person in Rock and Roll is the lowly fan that makes the dollars that keep the music flowing. Some artists seem to forget that.

 

[greasemunki85]

hmm
Id say the most important people in my personal opinion.
Chuck Berry > Elvis > Beatles > Frank Zappa > Led Zeppelin > Faith No More
And sadly there hasn't been anything in the past 10 years, really worthy of mentioning as far as rock n roll goes, they have a some good rock and metal bands, but nothing really groundbreaking or noteworthy, as of late.
To clarify - I mentioned Faith no more, without FNM you wouldn't have bands like KoRn, Rage against the machine, Deftones, and all those "Nu-metal" bands that came out several years ago- yet, FNM seemed much more versatile, and kind of paved the way for those type of bands that were so "groundbreaking" back in the 2000's (not that im claiming to like those bands)
Overall tho' Id say Frank Zappa/Beatles would be the most important people in rock in roll to me

 

[dbreazeale]

Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records in Memphis, TN.

 

[Dutch]

I came across this tonight and found it an interesting read on Elvis. I've always preferred the early Elvis music to the cheesy Las Vegas act he later morphed into.


Elvis Presley may be the single most important figure in American 20th century popular music. Not necessarily the best, and certainly not the most consistent. But no one could argue with the fact that he was the musician most responsible for popularizing rock & roll on an international level. Viewed in cold sales figures, his impact was phenomenal. Dozens upon dozens of international smashes from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s, as well as the steady sales of his catalog and reissues since his death in 1977, may make him the single highest-selling performer in history. More important from a music lover's perspective, however, are his remarkable artistic achievements. Presley was not the very first white man to sing rhythm & blues; Bill Haley predated him in that regard, and there may have been others as well. Elvis was certainly the first, however, to assertively fuse country and blues music into the style known as rockabilly. While rockabilly arrangements were the foundations of his first (and possibly best) recordings, Presley could not have become a mainstream superstar without a much more varied palette that also incorporated pop, gospel, and even some bits of bluegrass and operatic schmaltz here and there. His 1950s recordings established the basic language of rock & roll; his explosive and sexual stage presence set standards for the music's visual image; his vocals were incredibly powerful and versatile. Unfortunately, to much of the public, Elvis is more icon than artist. Innumerable bad Hollywood movies, increasingly caricatured records and mannerisms, and a personal life that became steadily more sheltered from real-world concerns (and steadily more bizarre) gave his story a somewhat mythic status. By the time of his death, he'd become more a symbol of gross Americana than of cultural innovation. The continued speculation about his incredible career has sustained interest in his life, and supported a large tourist/entertainment industry, that may last indefinitely, even if the fascination is fueled more by his celebrity than his music. Born to a poor Mississippi family in the heart of Depression, Elvis had moved to Memphis by his teens, where he absorbed the vibrant melting pot of Southern popular music in the form of blues, country, bluegrass, and gospel. After graduating from high school, he became a truck driver, rarely if ever singing in public. Some 1953 and 1954 demos, recorded at the emerging Sun label in Memphis primarily for Elvis' own pleasure, helped stir interest on the part of Sun owner Sam Phillips. In mid-1954, Phillips, looking for a white singer with a black feel, teamed Presley with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. Almost by accident, apparently, the trio hit upon a version of an Arthur Crudup blues tune, "That's All Right Mama," that became Elvis' first single. Elvis' five Sun singles pioneered the blend of R&B and C&W that would characterize rockabilly music. For quite a few scholars, they remain not only Elvis' best singles, but the best rock & roll ever recorded. Claiming that Elvis made blues acceptable for the white market is not the whole picture; the singles usually teamed blues covers with country and pop ones, all made into rock & roll (at this point a term that barely existed) with the pulsing beat, slap-back echo, and Elvis' soaring, frenetic vocals. "That's All Right Mama," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Baby Let's Play House," and "Mystery Train" remain core early rock classics. The singles sold well in the Memphis area immediately, and by 1955 were starting to sell well to country audiences throughout the South. Presley, Moore, and Black hit the road with a stage show that grew ever wilder and more provocative, Elvis' swiveling hips causing enormous controversy. The move to all-out rock was hastened by the addition of drums. The last Sun single, "I Forgot to Remember Forget"/"Mystery Train," hit number one on the national country charts in late 1955. Presley was obviously a performer with superstar potential, attracting the interest of bigger labels and Colonel Tom Parker, who became Elvis' manager. In need of capital to expand the Sun label, Sam Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA in late 1955 for 35,000 dollars; a bargain, when viewed in hindsight, but an astronomical sum at the time. This is the point where musical historians start to diverge in opinion. For many, the whole of his subsequent work for RCA -- encompassing over 20 years -- was a steady letdown, never recapturing the pure, primal energy that was harnessed so effectively on the handful of Sun singles. Elvis, however, was not a purist. What he wanted, more than anything, was to be successful. To do that, his material needed more of a pop feel; in any case, he'd never exactly been one to disparage the mainstream, naming Dean Martin as one of his chief heroes from the get-go. At RCA, his rockabilly was leavened with enough pop flavor to make all of the charts, not just the country ones. At the beginning, at least, the results were hardly any tamer than the Sun sessions. "Heartbreak Hotel," his first single, rose to number one and, aided by some national television appearances, helped make Elvis an instant superstar. "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" was a number one follow-up; the double-sided monster "Hound Dog"/"Don't Be Cruel" was one of the biggest-selling singles the industry had ever experienced up to that point. Albums and EPs were also chart-toppers, not just in the U.S., but throughout the world. The 1956 RCA recordings, while a bit more sophisticated in production and a bit less rootsy in orientation than his previous work, were still often magnificent, rating among the best and most influential recordings of early rock & roll. Elvis' (and Colonel Parker's) aspirations were too big to be limited to records and live appearances. By late 1956, his first Hollywood movie, Love Me Tender, had been released; other screen vehicles would follow in the next few years, Jailhouse Rock being the best. The hits continued unabated, several of them ("Jailhouse Rock," "All Shook Up," "Too Much") excellent, and often benefiting from the efforts of top early rock songwriter Otis Blackwell, as well as the emerging team of Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller. The Jordanaires added both pop and gospel elements with their smooth backup vocals. Yet worrisome signs were creeping in. The Dean Martin influence began rearing his head in smoky, sentimental ballads such as "Loving You"; the vocal swoops became more exaggerated and stereotypical, although the overall quality of his output remained high. And although Moore and Black continued to back Elvis on his early RCA recordings, within a few years the musicians had gone their own ways. Presley's recording and movie careers were interrupted by his induction into the Army in early 1958. There was enough material in the can to flood the charts throughout his two-year absence (during which he largely served in Germany). When he re-entered civilian life in 1960, his popularity, remarkably, was at just as high a level as when he left. One couldn't, unfortunately, say the same for the quality of his music, which was not just becoming more sedate, but was starting to either repeat itself, or opt for operatic ballads that didn't have a whole lot to do with rock. Elvis' rebellious, wild image had been tamed to a large degree as well, as he and Parker began designing a career built around Hollywood films. Shortly after leaving the Army, in fact, Presley gave up live performing altogether for nearly a decade to concentrate on movie-making. The films, in turn, would serve as vehicles to both promote his records and to generate maximum revenue with minimal effort. For the rest of the '60s, Presley ground out two or three movies a year that, while mostly profitable, had little going for them in the way of story, acting, or social value. While there were some quality efforts on Presley's early-'60s albums, his discography was soon dominated by forgettable soundtracks, mostly featuring material that was dispensable or downright ridiculous. In time he became largely disinterested in devoting much time to his craft in the studio. The soundtrack LPs themselves were sometimes filled out with outtakes that had been in the can for years (and these, sadly, were often the highlights of the albums). There were some good singles in the early '60s, like "Return to Sender"; once in a while there was even a flash of superb, tough rock, like "Little Sister" or "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame." But by 1963 or so there was little to get excited about, although he continued to sell in large quantities. The era spanning, roughly, 1962-1967 has generated a school of Elvis apologists, eager to wrestle any kernel of quality that emerged from his recordings during this period. They also point out that Presley was assigned poor material, and assert that Colonel Parker was largely responsible for Presley's emasculation. True to a point, but on the other hand it could be claimed, with some validity, that Presley himself was doing little to rouse himself from his artistic stupor, letting Parker destroy his artistic credibility without much apparent protest, and holing up in his large mansion with a retinue of yes-men that protected their benefactor from much day-to-day contact with a fast-changing world. The Beatles, all big Elvis fans, displaced Presley as the biggest rock act in the world in 1964. What's more, they did so by writing their own material and playing their own instruments; something Elvis had never been capable of, or particularly aspired to. They, and the British and American groups the Beatles influenced, were not shy about expressing their opinions, experimenting musically, and taking the reins of their artistic direction into their own hands. The net effect was to make Elvis Presley, still churning out movies in Hollywood as psychedelia and soul music became the rage, seem irrelevant, even as he managed to squeeze out an obscure Dylan cover ("Tomorrow Is a Long Time") on a 1966 soundtrack album. By 1967 and 1968, there were slight stirrings of an artistic reawakening by Elvis. Singles like "Guitar Man," "Big Boss Man," and "U.S. Male," though hardly classics, were at least genuine rock & roll that sounded better than much of what he'd been turning out for years. A 1968 television special gave Presley the opportunity he needed to reinvent himself as an all-out leather-coated rocker, still capable of magnetizing an audience, and eager to revisit his blues and country roots. The 1968 album Elvis in Memphis was the first LP in nearly a decade in which Presley seemed cognizant of current trends, as he updated his sounds with contemporary compositions and touches of soul to create some reasonably gutsy late-'60s pop/rock. This material, and 1969 hits like "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto," returned him to the top of the charts. Arguably, it's been overrated by critics, who were so glad to have him singing rock again that they weren't about to carp about the slickness of some of the production, or the mediocrity of some of the songwriting. But Elvis' voice did sound good, and he returned to live performing in 1969, breaking in with weeks of shows in Las Vegas. This was followed by national tours that proved him to still be an excellent live entertainer, even if the exercises often reeked of show-biz extravaganza. (Elvis never did play outside of North America and Hawaii, possibly because Colonel Parker, it was later revealed, was an illegal alien who could have faced serious problems if he traveled abroad.) Hollywood was history, but studio and live albums were generated at a rapid pace, usually selling reasonably well, although Presley never had a Top Ten hit after 1972's "Burning Love." Presley's 1970s recordings, like most of his '60s work, are the focus of divergent critical opinion. Some declare them to be, when Elvis was on, the equal of anything he did, especially in terms of artistic diversity. It's true that the material was pretty eclectic, running from country to blues to all-out rock to gospel (Presley periodically recorded gospel-only releases, going all the way back to 1957). At the same time, his vocal mannerisms were often stilted, and the material -- though not nearly as awful as that '60s soundtrack filler -- sometimes substandard. Those who are not serious Elvis fans will usually find this late-period material to hold only a fraction of the interest of his '50s classics. Elvis' final years have been the subject of a cottage industry of celebrity bios, tell-alls, and gossip screeds from those who knew him well, or (more likely) purported to know him well. Those activities are really beyond the scope of a mini-bio such as this, but it's enough to note that his behavior was becoming increasingly instable. His weight fluctuated wildly; his marriage broke up; he became dependent upon a variety of prescription drugs. Worst of all, he became isolated from the outside world except for professional purposes (he continued to tour until the end), rarely venturing outside of his Graceland mansion in Memphis. Colonel Parker's financial decisions on behalf of his client have also come in for much criticism. On August 16, 1977, Presley was found dead in Graceland. The cause of death remains a subject of widespread speculation, although it seems likely that drugs played a part. An immediate cult (if cult is the way to describe millions of people) sprang up around his legacy, kept alive by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to Graceland annually. Elvis memorabilia, much of it kitsch, is another industry in his own right. Dozens if not hundreds make a comfortable living by impersonating the King in live performance. And then there are all those Elvis sightings, reported in tabloids on a seemingly weekly basis. Although Presley had recorded a mammoth quantity of both released and unreleased material for RCA, the label didn't show much interest in repackaging it with the respect due such a pioneer. Haphazard collections of outtakes and live performances were far rarer than budget reissues and countless repackagings of the big hits. In the CD age, RCA finally began to treat the catalog with some of the reverence it deserved, at long last assembling a box set containing nearly all of the 1950s recordings. Similar, although less exciting, box sets were documenting the 1960s, the 1970s, and his soundtrack recordings. And exploitative reissues of Elvis material continue to appear constantly, often baited with one or two rare outtakes or alternates to entice the completists (of which there are many). In death, as in life, Presley continues to be one of RCA's most consistent earners. Fortunately, with a little discretion, a good Elvis library can be built with little duplication, sticking largely to the most highly recommended selections. ~ Richie Unterberger, Rovi


Influenced by: Red Foley, The Carter Family, Junior Parker, Wynonie Harris, The Swan Silvertones, Roy Hamilton, Jimmy Reed, Roy Brown, Kokomo Arnold, Dean Martin

Inspiration to: Vince Taylor, Dave Berry, Fine Young Cannibals, Dread Zeppelin, Buddy Holly, Eric Andersen, Beau Davidson, Townes Van Zandt, Jon Lucien, Gary Morris

Similar Artists: Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Carl Perkins, Gene Summers, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Scotty Moore, Jerry Reed, Roy Orbison

 

[Dutch]

Here's another interesting read some of you may enjoy, with an additional vid from the Ed Sullivan Show.

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Bill Haley is the neglected hero of early rock & roll. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are ensconced in the heavens, transformed into veritable constellations in the rock music firmament, their music respected by writers and scholars as well as the record-buying public, virtually every note of music they ever recorded theoretically eligible for release. And among the living rock & roll pioneers, Chuck Berry is given his due in the music marketplace and by the history books, and Bo Diddley is acknowledged appropriately in the latter, even if his music doesn't sell the way it should. Yet Bill Haley -- who was there before any of them, playing rock & roll before it even had a name, and selling it in sufficient quantities out of a small Pennsylvania label to attract attention from the major labels before Presley was even recording in Memphis -- is barely represented by more than a dozen of his early singles, and recognized by the average listener for exactly two songs among the hundreds that he recorded; and he's often treated as little more than a glorified footnote, an anomaly that came and went very quickly, in most histories of the music. The truth is, Bill Haley came along a lot earlier than most people realize and the histories usually acknowledge, and he went on making good music for years longer than is usually recognized. The central event in Haley's career was the single "Rock Around the Clock" topping the charts for eight weeks in the spring and summer of 1955, an event that most music historians identify as the dawn of the rock & roll era. Getting the song there, however, took more than a year, a period in which the band had already done unique and essential service in the cause of bringing rock & roll into the world, with the million-selling single "Shake, Rattle and Roll" to their credit; equally important, in the three years before that, Haley and his band had already broken new ground with the singles of "Rocket 88," "Rock the Joint," and "Crazy, Man, Crazy." Born in Highland Park, MI, in 1925, Haley was blind in one eye from birth, and, as a consequence, suffered from terrible shyness as a boy. The family moved to Boothwyn, PA, during the mid-'30s, where Haley developed a strong love for country music and began playing guitar and singing; by 14, he had left school in the hope of pursuing a career in music. He bounced through a few country bands based in the Middle Atlantic states and also tried to establish himself as a singing and yodeling cowboy. His first big break came in 1944, when he replaced Kenny Roberts -- who was being drafted -- in the Downhomers, with whom Haley made his first appearance on records. Haley left the group in 1946 and went through several other bands before returning to his home in Chester, PA, where he initially hoped to get some work as a DJ. Instead, he formed a new band, the Four Aces of Western Swing, with keyboardman Johnny Grande, bassist Al Rex, and steel guitar player Billy Williamson, and signed a contract with Cowboy Records, a new label formed by James Myers, a composer, musician, and publisher, and his partner, Jack Howard. Their first record was released in 1948, a version of "Candy Kisses"; by 1949, the group had changed its name to the Saddlemen and began moving between labels, including liaisons with the fledgling Atlantic Records, Ivin Ballen's Gotham Records, and Ed Wilson's Keystone Records, before finally settling at Holiday Records, a small label owned by David Miller, in 1951. Their first release, done at Miller's insistence, was a cover of "Rocket 88," a song that originated out of Sam Phillips' fledgling recording operation in Memphis, courtesy of Jackie Brenston. It was a pumping piece of sexually suggestive, rollicking R&B, and Haley and the Saddlemen simply put a broader, slightly loping country boogie sound onto it and boosted the rhythm section, while a lead guitar (probably played by Danny Cedrone) noodled some blues licks on the break. Haley hadn't liked the idea of doing the song, but Miller wanted it, and the result -- though no one knew it at the time -- was the first white-band cover of what is now regarded by many scholars as the first real rock & roll song. Just to put this in perspective, rock & roll is usually written about as a phenomenon (and a reaction to) the complacency of the Eisenhower era. But Haley had released what amounted to a rock & roll single in 1951, when "Ike" wasn't even yet running to be president, the country was still mired in Korea, and John Kennedy not yet even a senator. Howlin' Wolf was still based in Memphis and cutting sides for Sam Phillips, while a 15-year-old Elvis Presley was in tenth grade. The members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were still in grammar school; Lonnie Donegan was still known as Anthony Donegan and thinking of becoming an entertainer; and Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies had not yet even met. And Big Bill Broonzy was about to introduce American blues to England. At the time, "Rocket 88" didn't seem to matter too much in terms of sales, as it was neither fish nor fowl; not good enough R&B to eclipse Brenston's original among black record buyers, nor sufficiently a country record the way white audiences or the radio stations that catered to them wanted. No one even had a name for what it was; a "race record" as the trades called discs done in a style that seemed aimed at black listeners, but one done by a white band in a kind of country style. Indeed, the band itself remained strangely anonymous; Miller had seen to it that there were no publicity photos of Bill Haley & the Saddlemen, a calculated effort to obscure their race, though the band's name and the country ballad B-sides to those early singles pretty much told who they really were. That debut single sold just a few thousand copies regionally, as did its follow-up, "Green Tree Boogie." Meanwhile, when Haley and his band played, they and their business manager, Jim Ferguson, began to notice that it was the younger audience members who responded best to the R&B-style songs that Miller had them doing. They also saw all around them that enthusiasm for country music was flat, and that if they were looking for a hit, it likely wasn't going to come from this new direction. They were trying all kinds of permutations of country and R&B and getting some response, but they didn't know what it exactly was that they were doing musically. Then came "Rock the Joint," their first release on Miller's new Essex Records label; it had a beat, it had a memorable catch phrase, and it had a great performance at its core (including the very same solo that Danny Cedrone would later use on "Rock Around the Clock"), and it sold well enough that the band had to go on tour promoting it. One of the places where it sold well was Cleveland, where DJ Alan Freed picked up on the song; it was immediately after this that Freed began referring to the music embodied by "Rock the Joint," music that he played every night on his show, as "rock & roll," thus giving Haley a good deal of justification for his later claim to have been in on the birth of the music before anyone ever knew it. [Note: Marshall Lyttle remembers "Rock the Joint" as the song Freed was playing during an appearance by the band on his radio show, when he began using the phrase "rock & roll" -- scholars who agree with the Haley connection also often attribute Freed's inspiration to the later single "Crazy, Man, Crazy," while other historians say that Freed appropriated the phrase from Wild Bill Moore's "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll".] By this time, the bandmembers, all well into their 30s and long past being teenagers, were taking what amounted to a crash course in what that audience wanted; at Ferguson's suggestion, they played hundreds of high-school dances, not normally a venue that a professional country band would bother with. In the process, they also changed their image and name. By 1952, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen were history; instead, playing off of their leader's name and the celestial phenomenon called Halley's Comet, they became Bill Haley & His Comets. The cowboy hats and other country paraphernalia were junked as well. And they took a close look at the successful R&B stage acts of the time, especially the Treniers, and began working out wild quasi-acrobatic moves by their bass player and saxman, in particular, stuff that was unthinkable for a country band but seemingly what the kids devoured at dances. Most important, they would try out material, phrases, and stage moves, seeing what worked and what didn't, in front of the teenage audiences they found in Pennsylvania; and they listened to the way that this teenaged audience talked. Haley tried to use phrases that he heard, and put them into this musical stew; some of what they came up with was pleasantly silly material like "Dance With a Dolly" and "Stop Beatin' Round the Mulberry Bush" (though even the latter had a guitar solo worth hearing more than once). But some of it, like "Rockin' Chair on the Moon," was years ahead of its time; and some of it, like "Crazy, Man, Crazy" -- a Haley original whose title came from a piece of teen slang that he'd heard -- did exactly what was intended, hitting the Top 20 on the pop charts in 1953, a first for a white band playing an R&B-style song. Late that year, James Myers offered Haley and Miller a song that he had published (and, on paper, at least, co-authored as Jimmy De Knight) entitled "Rock Around the Clock." Written almost as a parody of R&B conventions, its principal composer was Max C. Freedman, a songwriter best remembered up to that time for his 1946 hit "Sioux City Sue," and also responsible for such songs as "Do You Believe in Dreams" and "Her Beaus Were Only Rainbows." Miller either genuinely didn't see the potential of the song, or else he didn't like the business arrangement that Myers had with Haley, because he refused to record it. After a few more attempts at cutting other songs for the teen market that simply didn't work, Haley and the band and their manager were ready to leave Miller and Essex Records. A meeting was set up with Milt Gabler, a producer at Decca Records, who not only liked the song and had no problem cutting it, but saw some serious potential in Bill Haley & His Comets, based on what Essex had done with them on "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy, Man, Crazy." A contract was signed, and on April 12, 1954, the band, with Danny Cedrone on lead guitar, did a two-song session in New York that yielded "Thirteen Women" -- a post-nuclear holocaust sex fantasy worthy of Hugh Hefner (who had only started up Playboy magazine a year earlier) -- and "Rock Around the Clock." It was released a month later and made the charts for one week at number 23, selling 75,000 copies, not bad but not very significant either. It was enough, however, for Gabler to schedule another session in early June, where the band recorded "Shake, Rattle and Roll." That was the record that broke the band nationally on Decca, reaching number seven and selling over a million copies between late 1954 and early 1955. They followed it up quickly with "Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere)," a jaunty piece that reached number 11 nationally and actually made the R&B charts for Haley, a first for him. Then, in early 1955, James Myers managed to get "Rock Around the Clock" placed in the juvenile delinquency drama The Blackboard Jungle, playing over the credits. The movie was a huge hit, and in its wake Decca re-released the song that spring. "Rock Around the Clock" shot up the charts this time, and the result was an eight-week run in the number-one spot; by some estimates, it became the second biggest worldwide-selling single after Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" (oddly enough, also a Decca release), 25-million copies sold worldwide. The success of "Rock Around the Clock" took place while Elvis Presley had yet to chart a record nationally; at a point when Chuck Berry's very first single for Chess had barely been recorded; and when Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly weren't even close to auditioning for recording contracts. One has to visualize a reality in which Bill Haley & His Comets were the only established white rock & roll band, and the only white rock & roll stars in the world. Within a year, that would all change, but it was long enough for Haley and his band to become stars, with appearances on national television and a movie deal of their own. From the end of 1954 until the end of 1956, they would place nine singles into the Top 20, one of those at number one and three more in the Top Ten. The Comets were one of the best rock & roll bands of their era, with a mostly sax-driven sound ornamented with heavy rhythm guitar from Haley, a slap-bass, and drumming with lots of rim-shots; they had the "blackest" sound of any white band working in 1953-1955. It wasn't always obvious then, and has been forgotten today, precisely how fluid their membership was, for all of the consistency of that sound. Haley's two original bandmates from his Four Aces days, Johnny Grande and Billy Williamson, were formal partners, joined to him at the hip legally, with fixed shares in the group's earnings; tenor saxman Joey D'Ambrosio, bassist Marshall Lytle, and drummer Dick Richards, by contrast, were hired employees earning 150 dollars a week plus expenses -- a respectable living for most working musicians in 1955 -- when "Rock Around the Clock" hit the top of the charts. Ironically, Danny Cedrone, whose guitar dominated that song and the key Essex hits "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy, Man, Crazy," died in an accident in July of 1954, and his successor, Franny Beecher, was earning 150 dollars a week when he worked with the band. In the late summer of 1955, with a number-one single to their credit and lots of work in front of them, D'Ambrosio, Lytle, and Richards all demanded raises, which Haley refused to grant them. They quit that month and formed a short-lived Comets soundalike unit called the Jodimars (taken from parts of their first names), who recorded for Capitol Records. Beecher was taken into the group as a full-time member (though not a partner) and remained with them until 1961, while D'Ambrosio's successor, Rudy Pompilli, became a core member of the band, working with them virtually without interruption for the next 19 years, until his death in 1975. In the late spring of 1956, rock & roll changed again as Elvis Presley, who was younger, leaner, and a more fiercely sexual presence, emerged as a star; he not only made music that was as good as Haley's but he looked the role of a rock & roll star. The differences in their respective images could be summed up by examining the truest scenes in the movies that each did. Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley & His Comets, was a highly fictionalized account of the band and its success, but it did capture something of the spirit of the early days of rock & roll, with some good performance clips; the comparable Elvis Presley movie was Loving You, in which the singer played a fictionalized version of himself, named Deke Rivers. In Loving You, when Deke Rivers performs in front of an audience and sets the girls screaming and swooning, his would-be manager comments, "If he'd gone on any longer, they'd be giving him their door keys." In Rock Around the Clock, by contrast, the single truest scene depicts a would-be promoter driving through rural Pennsylvania and chancing upon a dance where Haley and company are playing; he enters, sees hundreds of kids dancing to the band's music, and asks a woman being lifted up over the head of her partner, "Hey sister, what's that exercise you're getting?" She answers, exuberantly, legs in the air, "It's rock & roll!" Haley's music was the soundtrack to a good time, whether dancing or more private recreation; Presley's music, at least where women were concerned, was an invitation to sexual fantasy about the singer. Nobody except the three Mrs. Haleys could have had sexual fantasies about pudgy, balding, dorky-looking Bill Haley. And, yet, Haley was every bit as outrageous and daring in what he got away with in his music as the worst accusations ever leveled against Presley; even Haley's bowdlerized version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was the most overtly sexual song ever to reach the American Top Ten up to that time, and "Rock Around the Clock" wasn't very far behind. Though Max C. Freedman might've meant his song differently, taken literally in the true meaning of the word "rock" as it was used in 1953-1954, "Rock Around the Clock" was a bouncing, beguiling musical account of 24 hours of sexual activity, and the precursor to such numbers as "Reelin' & Rockin'" by Chuck Berry. Haley might've looked the part of the square trying to be cool once Presley came along, but on those two songs he was as culturally and morally subversive as the worst warnings of the anti-rock & roll zealots intimated. Haley may not have seemed a cutting-edge artist after mid-1956, but he remained a force to be reckoned with in music for another year, cutting good singles -- including "Razzle-Dazzle," "Burn That Candle," and "See You Later Alligator" -- and several surprisingly strong albums. He did gradually lose touch with the teenage audience, and his square persona couldn't possibly compete with the likes of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry, though the group always put on a good show. Additionally, overseas, where any visiting American artist was treated well, Haley was greeted like visiting royalty; he always had large and fiercely loyal audiences in England, France, and Germany, which would turn out in huge numbers to see him. By 1959, Haley was no longer placing either singles or albums anywhere near the top of the charts. His brand of rock & roll, made up of R&B crossed with country boogie and honky tonk, was passé, and a switch to instrumentals didn't solve the problem of falling sales. None of this would have been so bad, except that Haley -- mostly through the horrendous job done by his business manager Jim Ferguson -- had managed to squander most of what he'd earned during the good years, and owed a crippling tax liability to the government as well. Contrary to the popular perception, he remained an active musician throughout the 1960s, recording for Warner Bros. and a brace of other U.S. labels, and he also found a lucrative performing and recording career in Mexico (where Haley, not Chubby Checker or Hank Ballard, started the "twist" craze). He pursued a music career while avoiding tax liens, and trying to keep a marriage and a collapsing publishing business together. Haley managed to pull it off, getting through the decade with some possessions still in his hands, mostly by juggling a lot of gigs in Mexico and Europe and taking lots of payments in cash. Curiously, during this period Haley himself became something of a rock & roll historian in interviews; perhaps sensitive to his own experience of being shunted aside, when he talked about the twist phenomenon, he went out of his way to credit Hank Ballard as the originator of the song, and always acknowledged his debt to Big Joe Turner for "Shake, Rattle and Roll." By the late '60s, with the advent of the rock & roll revival, Haley suddenly found himself faced for the first time in a decade with major demand for his work in America. It couldn't have happened at a better time, because that same year, for the first time in more than ten years, he didn't owe anything to the government. The Internal Revenue Service had been seizing all of his royalties from Decca Records for a decade, and luckily for him, Decca (possibly thanks to Milt Gabler) had been honest in its accounting; in that time, sales of "Rock Around the Clock" and his other Decca hits, mostly overseas, had wiped out Haley's entire six-figure tax debt. And to top off the good news, Haley not only had a full concert schedule in front of him in the U.S.A., but major record labels interested in recording him; he ended up signing with Buddha/Kama Sutra Records for a pair of live albums. The next few years showed Haley in a triumphant comeback around the world. To top it all off, "Rock Around the Clock" even charted anew in the Top 40 during 1974 when it turned up as the theme music for the hit television series Happy Days during its first season. By the 1970s, however, age and the ravages of time were starting to catch up on all concerned. Saxman Rudy Pompilli, who'd been with him since 1955, died in 1975, and Haley eventually retired from performing. During his final years, Haley developed severe psychological problems that left him delusional at least part of the time. By the time of his death in 1981, the process of reducing his role in the history of rock & roll had already begun, partly a result of ignorance on the part of the writers handling the histories by then, and also, to a degree, as a result of political correctness; he was white, and was perceived as having exploited R&B, and there were enough people like that in the early history who had to be written about but were easier to cast as "rebels." In the years since his death, the surviving members of the Comets, including pianist Johnny Grande guitarist Franny Beecher, saxman Joey D'Ambrosio, bassist Marshall Lytle, and drummer Dick Richards, all in their 70s and 80s, have continued to work together and were still able to perform to sell-out crowds in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, doing Haley's classic repertory. Haley's own reputation has increased somewhat, particularly in the wake of Bear Family Records' release of two boxes covering his career from 1954 through 1969, and Roller Coaster Records' issuing of Haley's Essex Records sides. True, there are perhaps 45 songs on those 12 CDs of material that Haley should not have bothered recording, but there are hundreds more in those same collections, some of it dazzling and all of it constituting a serious body of solid, often inspired rock & roll, interspersed here and there with some good country sides. Perhaps little of the post-1957 stuff could set the whole world on fire, but Haley had already been there and done that, and still had a lot of good music to play. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi


Influenced by: Red Foley, Jimmie Rodgers, Cowboy Copas, Milton Brown & His Brownies, Louis Jordan, The Treniers, Bob Wills, Big Joe Turner, Jackie Brenston, Hank Williams

Inspiration to: Phillip Goodhand-Tait, Rod Argent, The Gisha Brothers, Charlie Gracie, Ray Coleman, The Big Bopper, Flash Cadillac, Cliff Richard, Tommy Roe, The Dave Clark Five

Similar Artists: The Collins Kids, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, Terry Noland, The Everly Brothers, Merrill Moore, Lonnie Donegan, Johnny Burnette

 

[Bub]

Big Joe
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[DocRx]

BOB DYLAN

 

[Dutch]

Here's another read I thought some of you guys might find interesting.

Moon Mullican Biography-

By rights, Moon Mullican should be a legend twice over, in country music and rock & roll. He merged them both -- as well as blues, pop, and honky tonk -- into a seamless whole at the drop of a hat and the ripple of a keyboard, and also managed to play a seminal role in the history of Western swing, all in a recording career that lasted less than 30 years. Instead, for decades he was one of those "lost" musical figures from the '40s and early '50s, whose career paved the way for rock & roll, who was born just a little too early, and who was a little too old to take advantage of what he'd started. He was born Aubrey Mullican in 1909 in Corrigan, TX, a little more than an hour's drive north of Houston, to a family that owned an 87-acre farm that was worked (at least partly) by sharecroppers. It was one of them, a black blues guitarist named Joe Jones, who introduced Mullican to the blues before he was in his teens. This in itself constituted an act of rebellion on his part, because Mullican's family were devout churchgoers -- his father attended three times a week -- and abhorred anything to do with the elements of sun and excess with which the blues and the places where it was usually played were associated. He would spend most of his life attempting to reconcile -- or at least find a livable middle ground between -- these two sides of himself. He got good on the guitar and the bass, but Mullican's instrument of choice was the keyboard: first the family organ, which had been bought so that his sisters could practice playing hymns, and later the piano. By the time he was 14, he was able to make 40 dollars -- a good deal more than a week's wages in 1923 -- for two hours of piano playing at a local cafe. Music was not only something he loved, but it offered a lot more renumeration than farming (or even overseeing land worked by tenant farmers) seemed to; it was also something that his father despised. Mullican had already made a habit of hanging out at the roadhouses in East Texas, taking in the blues and barrelhouse music that poured off of their stages along with the rougher sides of life. Finally, at 16, Mullican left home for the big city of Houston, where he quickly fell in with people that his family would have pegged as "wrong." He made his living playing music and earned the nickname "Moon," short for "Moonshine," which stuck for the rest of his life, and all but trumpeted the direction his life was taking where sin and music were concerned. During the mid-'30s, he joined the Western swing band the Blue Ridge Playboys, and moved from there to playing in Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, as well as recording with the Sunshine Boys and Jimmie Davis in Louisiana, and then returned to working with Bruner for a time in the early '40s. Mullican's talents at the ivories were long established by the end of the '30s -- he played the piano like it was a part of him, and sometimes with surprising flashes of elegance -- but he moved to the lead singer's spot in 1939 when Bruner recorded the pioneering country trucker song, "Truck Driver's Blues." He turned out to be every bit as good a singer as he was a pianist, with a stunningly expressive voice even if it didn't have an overly great range. This recording and the advent of the '40s heralded the busiest phase of Mullican's career, as he juggled a long-term association with Bruner and a stint in the backing band for Jimmie Davis during the latter's successful campaign for governor of Louisiana, and finally put together his own band, the Showboys, known locally as the "band with a beat," an attributed sometimes referred to as "East Texas sock." They quickly became one of the most popular outfits working the Texas/Louisiana border during the mid-'40s, and though they couldn't have known it at the time, that beat, coupled with their mix of country music and Western swing, and Mullican's definite blues-influenced piano and singing (and sometime choice of repertoire) brought them amazingly close to a sound that would later be called rock & roll, and the fact that they were white practically sealed the premonition, at least on some of their repertoire -- Mullican also had a liking for ballads that were definitely more country than R&B in nature and execution. In any event, it was all going over well, and it seemed only a matter of time before Mullican would hit it big on record, he had recorded as a vocalist fronting Bruner's outfit and others for all of the majors -- Decca, RCA Victor, and Columbia Records -- going back to before World War II, and the Showboys were in the studio attempting to make records as early as 1945 for the tiny Gulf label, only to be thwarted by technical problems that made the results unreleasable. It wasn't until the fall of 1946 that someone was able to take advantage of what Mullican and his band could do on record, and that someone was Syd Nathan of Cincinnati, OH, who had lately founded a label called King Records. Those first 16 sides cut at those early King sessions were outstanding, capturing everything that Mullican and company had been delighting local audiences with for the last couple of years -- he went on to cut a decade's worth of superb music for King, including a uniquely stylized version of "New Jole Blon" that was a hit in 1947, and the ballad "Sweeter Than the Flowers" in 1948. It was in the realm of hillbilly boogie, however, that Mullican had his greatest influence, his versions of "Shoot the Moon" and "Don't Ever Take My Picture Down" pre-figuring rock & roll (especially Jerry Lee Lewis' brand of it) in tone and beat, if not youthful subject matter. In particular, the sides that Mullican cut with producer Henry Glover -- otherwise best known as a jazz trumpeter -- at King crossed over easily into R&B, though he was equally comfortable with pop standards, honky tonk, and traditional country. By the end of the '40s, he was a member of the Grand Ole Opry and found a national audience from its radio broadcasts, which helped propel the sales of his biggest hit, "Cherokee Boogie," in 1951. Mullican was a star in the world of country music, and may have had more influence there than the sales of his records would lead one to believe. For decades, it was an open secret that he'd co-written "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" with his fellow Grand Ole Opry member Hank Williams, collecting a 50 percent share of the royalties on the sly because of his contractual relationship to King Records. His influence on the country field may not have been as freely acknowledged at the time as the actual level of impact would have justified, because of the peculiarities of his music and persona. The United States was still almost entirely a segregated nation, and in the realm of country music that was true on a cultural level as much as such practicalities as restricted hotels and drinking fountains -- it was case of pure denial, of course, as anyone listening objectively to the work of such popular country figures as Hank Williams or Tennessee Ernie Ford couldn't miss the black influence somewhere in their sound, but it was how audiences and many musicians felt at the time; what's more, a lot of producers and promoters were uncomfortable with the subject, because most localities south of the Mason-Dixon Line had laws prohibiting black and white performers from sharing the same stages, and a white performer who sounded "too black" was pushing an envelope that most moneymen didn't want touched or even acknowledged. Bill Haley and Elvis Presley scaled the wall musically and culturally, as did a lot of young early rock & rollers, whose appeal to young white teenagers troubled some of the most conservative residents of the South. Ironically, it was Chuck Berry who ran right into that wall and probably ended up single-handedly smashing it to bits -- his first hit, "Maybelline," was a rockabilly-style number quite unlike most of his subsequent repertoire, and on it he sounded like a hillbilly. Coupled with the poor-quality publicity photos that Chess Records sent out on him, it was assumed by many promoters in the South that Berry was white, and as he stopped traveling with his own band early on -- as the members increasingly got drunk in their off time -- the promoters were supposed to provide a backing band for him at each contracted gig. And a lot of the time on that first tour, he'd arrive to find a white band waiting to play with him and the county sheriff ready to close the hall and arrest all concerned if he took the stage with them -- and because Berry had fulfilled his obligation to appear, the promoters were obligated to pay him in full for shows he wasn't legally allowed to play. And that hit in the pocketbook, repeated enough times on that first tour of the South by Berry, started the move to rescind those laws restricting interracial performances. But that was in 1955-1956. In the early '50s, Mullican by his very nature, for all of his popularity, challenged the traditions and prejudices of a lot of the listening public and even some of his fellow musicians. He freely acknowledged his debt to black performers and musical styles associated with them, in interviews and the notes to various songbooks, but -- just as an example of what was going on around him -- Jerry Lee Lewis, a generation younger, who was influenced by Mullican about as much as any musician of his generation, has always had a much more difficult time admitting to a direct black influence on his sound. Mullican was a little too open-minded ever to get his real due at the time, and had to content himself with record sales figures and a healthy audience for his performances. By the mid-'50s, he was trying to get out of his King Records deal and onto one of the major labels. It didn't happen for Mullican until the end of the '50s, a point where his star had fallen considerably. Rock & roll had taken a lot of the edge off the sales of country records, effectively stealing the youngest, most active, and most pliable portion of country's audience. Mullican's record sales, ironically, had fallen even as the stars of such stylistic emulators and successors as Jerry Lee Lewis rose. Chuck Berry was enjoying success with such suggestive numbers as "Reelin' and Rockin'," but Mullican was having a harder time with "Seven Nights to Rock," an equally bold number with a compelling beat and a driving performance, cut with Boyd Bennett & His Rockets in an effort to reach the rock & roll audience. In a sense, his timing was off -- if Bill Haley, born nearly two decades later than Mullican (and who didn't have half of Mullican's singing ability) seemed over the hill as soon as his balding, pudgy post-30-ish image became well-known, then Mullican, with his cowboy hat, Western twang in his singing, and 50-ish appearance was definitely not what the kids were buying, no matter what his records sounded like. By the end of the '50s, he'd been released from King but couldn't get another recording deal very easily, as his sales had declined through the middle of the decade. A move to Coral Records led to a toned-down country approach, which managed to intersect with rock & roll, blues, and pop music, but success still eluded him, even when he recut his King Records hits. Mullican entered the '60s as an overlooked figure, apart from country listeners with long memories and those people lucky enough to catch his performances in Texas and around the Southern and border states. A 1962 heart attack on-stage sidelined him into the following year, but he was back performing and recording in 1963, this time locally for the Hall-Way label of Beaumont, TX, where he made his home. He never gave up performing or neglected his love of pleasing an audience. Finally, on New Year's Eve of 1966-1967, he suffered another heart attack, and died early in the morning on January 1, 1967. Two years later, Kapp Records released The Moon Mullican Showcase LP, which included his last sides done in Beaumont more than half a decade earlier. In the decades since, Mullican's name has gradually become known to a generation of listeners attuned to the roots of rock & roll and pre-Nashville country music, and labels like Ace, West Side, and Bear Family have issued compilations of his King, Coral, and Hall-Way sides on CD. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Influenced by: Al Stricklin, Floyd Tillman,

Inspiration to: Red Foley, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Amos Milburn, Asleep at the Wheel, Johnny Horton, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley,

Similar Artists: Tommy Jackson, Rose Maddox, Ole Rasmussen, Speedy West, Hardrock Gunter, Bill Nettles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Boyd Bennett, Merrill Moore,

 

[Doc Manhattan]

Hey Dutch, where's that article from?