Present At The Creation-Who Put The Rock In Rock And Roll -LaVern Baker’s Tweddle Dee (1955)

Present At The Creation-Who Put The Rock In Rock And Roll-LaVern Baker’s Tweddle Dee (1955)

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Deep in the dark red scare Cold War night, still brewing then even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square drunken stupor one night and never came back, so yeah still brewing after he kissed off in his vast red earth, still brewing as a child remembered in dark back of school dreams about Soviet nightmares under Uncle Joe wondering how the kids got through it, and still brewing too when Miss Winot in her pristine glory told each and every one of her fourth grade charges, us, that come that Russkie madness, come the Apocalypse, come the big bad ass mega-bombs (of course being pristine and proper she did not dig down to such terms as “big bad ass” but let’s face it that is what she meant) that each and every one of her charges shall come that thundering god-awful air raid siren call duck, quickly and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or his hands, also quickly and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head, a small breeze was coming to the land.

Maybe nobody saw it coming although the more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those supposedly in the know about such times, those who are supposed to catch the breezes before they move beyond their power to curtain them. Take guys like my older brother Franklin and his friends, Benny and Jimmy, who were playing some be-bop stuff up in his room. (Ma refused to let him play his songs on the family record player down center stage in the living room or flip the dial on the kitchen radio away from her tunes of the roaring 1940s, her and my father’s coming of age time, so up his room like some mad monk doing who knows what because I was busy worrying about riding bicycles or something). Here’s the real tip-off though he and his boys would go out Friday nights to Jack Slack’s bowling alleys not to bowl, although that was the cover story to questioning mothers, but to hang around Freddie O’Toole’s car complete with turned on amped up radio (station unknown then but later found to be WMEX) and dance, dance with girls, get it, to stuff like Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (a great song tribute to a great automobile which nobody in our neighborhood could come close to affording so reduced to cheapjack Fords and Plymouths), and guys who even today I don’t know the names of despite YouTube archival vaults giving everybody with every kind of musical inclination a blast to the past ticket. Or, how about the times we, the family would go up to Boston for some Catholic thing in the South End at Holy Cross Cathedral and smack across from the church was the later famous Red Hat Club where guys were blasting away at pianos, on guitars and on big ass sexy saxes and it was not the big band sound my folks listened to or cool, cool be-bop jazz either but music from jump street, etched in the back of my brain because remember I’m still fussing over bikes and stuff like that. Or how about every time we went down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston as the sun went down, the “Negro” part before Huntington Avenue (an area that Malcolm X knew well a decade before) and we stopped at the ten billion lights and all you would hear is this bouncing beat coming from taverns, from the old time townhouse apartments and black guys dressed “to the nines,” all flash dancing on the streets with dressed “to the nines” good-looking black girls. Memory bank.            

So some guys knew, gals too don’t forget after all they had to dig the beat, dig the guys who dug the beat, the beat of  out of some Africa breeze mixed with forbidden sweated Southern lusts if the thing was going to work out. And it wasn’t all dead-ass “white negro” hipsters either eulogized by Norman Mailer (or maybe mocked you never knew with him but he sensed something was in the breeze even if he was tied more closely to an earlier sensibility) or break-out “beats” tired of the cool cold jazz that was turning in on itself, getting too technical and losing the search for the high white note or lumpens of all descriptions who whiled away the nights searching their radio dials for something that they while away the nights searching their radio dials for something that they could swing to while reefer high or codeine low. If you, via hail YouTube, look at the Jacks and Jills dancing they mostly look like very proper well-dressed middle class kids who are trying to break out of the cookie-cutter existence they found themselves but they still looked   pretty well-fed and well-heeled so yeah, some guys and gals and it wasn’t always who you might suspect that got hip, got that back-beat and those piano riffs etched into their brains.

Maybe though the guys in the White House were too busy worrying about what Uncle Joe’s progeny were doing out in the missile silos of Minsk, maybe the professional television talkers on Meet The Press wanted to discuss the latest turn in national and international politics for a candid world to hear and missed what was happening out in the cookie-cutter neighborhoods, and maybe the academic sociologists and professional criminologists were too wrapped up in figuring out why Marlon Brando was sulking in his corner boy kingdom (and wreaking havoc on a fearful small town world when he and the boys broke out), why  Johnny Spain had that “shiv” ready to do murder and mayhem to the next midnight passer-by, and why well-groomed and fed James Dean was brooding in the “golden age” land of plenty but the breeze was coming.

(And you could add in the same brother Franklin who as I was worrying about bikes, the two pedal two kind getting “from hunger” to get a Brando bike, a varoom bike, so this girl, Wendy, from school, would take his bait, a girl that my mother fretted was from the wrong side of town, her way of saying a tramp but she was smart as hell once I found out about her a few years later after she, they had left town on some big ass Norton but that is after the creation so I will let it go for now.)               

And then it came, came to us in our turn, came like some Kansas whirlwind, came like the ocean churning up the big waves crashing to a defenseless shoreline, came if the truth be known like the “second coming” long predicted and the brethren, us,  were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting all our short spell lives. Came in a funny form, or rather ironically funny forms, as it turned out.

Came one time, came big as 1954 turned to 1955 and a guy, get this, dressed not in sackcloth or hair-shirt but in a sport’s jacket, a Robert Hall sport’s jacket from the off the rack look of it when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers before on the low life circuit, a little on the heavy side with a little boy’s regular curl in his hair and blasted the whole blessed world to smithereens. Blasted every living breathing teenager, boy or girl, out of his or her lethargy, got the blood flowing. The guy Bill Haley, goddam an old lounge lizard band guy who decided to move the beat forward from cool ass be-bop jazz and sweet romance popular music and make everybody, every kid jump, yeah Big Bill Haley and his Comets, the song Rock Around The Clock.         

Came a little more hep cat too, came all duck walk and sex moves, feet moving faster than Robert Hall-clad Bill could ever do, came out of Saint Loo, came out with a crazy beat. Came out in suit and tie all swagger. Came out with a big baby girl guitar that twisted up the chords something fierce and declared to the candid world, us, that Maybelline was his woman. But get this, because what did we know of “color” back then when we lived in an all-white Irish Catholic neighborhoods and since we heard what we heard of rock and rock mostly on the radio we were shocked when we found out the first time that he was a “Negro” to use the parlance of the times, a black man making us go to “jump street.” And we bought into it, bought into the beat, and joined him in saying Mister Beethoven you and your brethren best move over.   

 

Came sometimes in slo-mo, hey remember this rock and roll was an ice-breaker with a beat you didn’t  have to dance close to with your partner and get all tied up in knots forgetting when to twirl, when to whirl, when to do a split but kind of free form for the guys (or gals but mainly guys) with two left feet like me could survive, maybe not survive the big one if the Russkies decided to go over the top with the bomb, but that school dance and for your free-form efforts maybe that she your eyeballs were getting sore over would consent to the last chance  last dance that you waited around for in case she was so impressed she might want to go with you some place later. But before that “some place later” you had to negotiate and the only way to do was to bust up a slow one, a dreamy one to get her in the mood and hence people have been singing songs from time immemorial to get people in the mood, this time Earth Angel would do the trick. Do the trick as long as you navigated those toes of hers, left her with two feet and standing. Dance slow, very slow brother.   

Came sometimes in very slo-mo if you could believe my older brother Franklin and the stories that he would tell us younger guys, not in 1955 remember we were worried about two-wheel bikes then but later when we came of age and were salaciously curious about the girl scene, what made them tick, about how he scored with this or that girl, put the moves on this way or that on some other one and some girl’s panties came tumbling down as if by magic. Although I should have been a little suspicion of Franklin’s big sky talk because when my time came the problem of garter belts and girdles would make that quick panties coming down a little suspect, no, very suspect when I had a hard enough and cumbersome enough time unhooking some silly training bra. Jesus.

But here is the big truth, the skinny. See Franklin was not, most guys were not including me, very honest about sex and about sexual conquests when guys got together on the corners at Jack Slack’s or Doc’s Drugstore or in the guy’s gym locker room or in the school’s boys’ lav Monday morning. No guy wanted to seem to be “light on his feet” one of the kinder expressions we used for gay guys in the days when “fag-baiting” was something of a rite of passage so guys would lie like hell about this or that score. Later when you would find yourself doing the very same thing you would find that about sixty to seventy percent, maybe more, of what guys said about conquests was b.s.

In any case one time Franklin was hot after this girl, Betsy Sanders, who even when I wasn’t that into girls (before I came of age, not that “light on my feet” if that is what you are thinking) was “hot,” definitely pretty and smart and just plain nice. She had a reputation, according to Franklin, of being an “ice queen,” no go, but he said that only made him want to go after her more. One high school dance night, maybe the Spring Frolic of 1955, Franklin went stag, although stag with six or seven other guys, as did a lot of guys because that kind of dance was set up by the school to have everybody mix and mingle unlike the prom let’s say which was strictly couples or stay home and wait by the midnight phone for some lost Janey or Jack. Of course Betsy was there, with a few of whatever they call a cohort of single girls, looking at hot as hell, all flouncy full length dress and some smell to drive a man wild, jasmine Franklin thought.

These school dance things like I said were held occasionally by the school to keep an eye on what was happening to their charges with this rock and roll craze beginning to stir up concerns (the churches also held them for the same reason). Basically a “containment” policy of “if you can’t fight them, keep two eyes on each and every one of them” copied I presume from the Cold War foreign policy wonks like George Kennan who ran the anti-Soviet establishment in Washington. So the thing was chaperoned unto death, had some frilly crèche paper decorations to spice up the woe begotten gym which didn’t really work, some refreshments to cool out the tranced dancers periodically, and a lame DJ, a young goof teacher recruited because he could “relate” to the kids who “spun” the platters (records for the unknowing) on a dinky turntable with an equally woeful sound system. None of that meant a thing because all that mattered was that there were boys and girls there, maybe somebody for you and music, music to dance to. Yeah.        

Now as Franklin weaved his story it seems that the usually reserved Betsy was in high form (according to Franklin she looked like maybe she had had a couple of drinks before the dance not unheard of but usually that was guys but we will let that pass), dancing to every fast dance with lots of guys, not hanging with any one in particular, getting more and more into the dancing as the night went on. Franklin approached her after intermission to dance Bill Haley’s latest big one, Rock Around The Clock, the one that everybody went to the Strand Theater up the Square to see that really lame movie about J.D.s, Blackboard Jungle, just to see him and the Comets blast away and she accepted. Danced very provocatively from what Franklin said, gave moves only the “fast” girls, the known school tramps threw into the mix and that was that until the end of the night when last chance last dance time came.   

This last chance last dance as I know from personal experience is a very dicey thing, especially if you have been eying a girl all night and she says “no”-end of evening. See this was a slow one so you could maybe make a last minute pitch or negotiate what was what after the dance. Franklin said he went up to Betsy and asked her for that dance when Mister Miles, that lame DJ I told you about already, announced that the Moonglows’ Sincerely a song he really liked. Here’s her answer-“Yes.” And so they danced and while dancing she allegedly wondered out loud why he had not asked her to dance other dances that night, she expected him to do since she had heard through the super-reliable “grapevine” that he was interested in her. Bingo. The rest of the dance consisted of negotiations about her getting her cloak, about giving the guys and gals they respectively came with the heave-ho and heading toward old Adamsville Beach in Franklin’s Hudson, really our father’s car borrowed for the evening. Down there while he did not go into all the juicy details about what they did, or didn’t do, she let him have his way with her (that “panties came tumbling down” business). Of course that kind of stuff happened all the time with good boys and girls, and bad but when Franklin asked Betsy what stirred her up she said the music and dancing got her going, made her all loose and everything she couldn’t explain it all but she got all warm. Enough, okay.     

Enough except what always bothered me about what parents, the authorities, hell, even older guys on the street, thought about rock and roll as the devil’s music came to mind. Some communist plot to “brainwash” the youth of America and make them Kremlin stooges was hard to figure when a girl like Betsy, an All-American girl if there ever was one, who later in life ran for Congress, unsuccessfully, as a Republican, got all warm when the drums started rolling the intro and the guitars built up that back-beat. Hard to make sense of the idea that maybe the Moonglows should have been brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the times or something for singing a doo wop classic like Sincerely, a last chance last dance song. Yeah, that has always bothered me.   

Came in very, very slo-mo for some guys, guys like me who even with big brothers to guide the way were after all is said and done rather clumsy picking up the first few tips (well “half guide the way” since a lot of what Franklin said about the ease of girl conquests was so much hot air, same with other guys but worse, worse than the hot air was the bad, plain wrong information about sex, sexual activity, which he, they had learned like everybody else from the streets, certainly not out of up-tight “asexual” parents who were not telling us anything, nor the churches and definitely not at school although some teachers would allude to stuff but you had to be pretty slick to pick it up. All this information, misinformation really, was far more dangerous that just plain ignorance as Franklin, and I, almost learned the hard way, very closely indeed).

Who knows when you get that first inkling, you know the exact date, when those last year’s girls who were nothing but sticks (that was our dividing line then, “sticks” and “shapes”) and bothered you endlessly when you were just trying to ride your bike or something, maybe reading a book in school turned into being well kind of interesting and had something to say after all. It wasn’t necessarily coming of age time, puberty, but close when all the confusion started, all the little social graces began to count. So, yeah, in fifth grade, toward the end of the year, I was smitten, smitten by Theresa Wallace, my first flamed out flame. So Theresa and rock and roll kind of go hand in hand in my mind since around that time I also started getting that rock beat in my head that Franklin kept telling me that would come at some point.

Naturally with no social graces to speak of the whole heart-throbbing thing with Theresa was a source of endless confusion. Of course as probably is true of half the guys and gals in the world I kept my feelings to myself, would moon, pine, twist, turn, and whatever else a smitten person does without quite knowing what to do about the feelings. Except to kind of be surly toward her in class, and, and, endlessly walk by her house at all hours, all kid hours, in the hopes that I might see her and she might wave, or something. Yeah, no social graces. Then one day the logjam broke, she spoke to me, asked me if I wanted to go to her birthday party the next week. Yes. Although the abruptness going from nowhere to being invited to her house kind of startled me (later I had heard that Slim Jackson, a friend of mine, whom I casually mentioned to that Theresa seemed nice told some girl that fact and it eventually got through the super-speed teen grapevine that I “liked” her).

And so the party was be held in the family room down in the basement of her house (which in the specific case of her house also served as the air raid shelter with signs, supplies, and defense materials which made me realize that I would rather take my chances above ground when I saw that included in the supplies were a record player and records of Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the crowd, yeah, I would definitely take my chances above ground with that scenario) and was to be unchaperoned meaning no adults would be in the room (although present, very present upstairs). I don’t know about now, about the customs of the young in these matters now, but then these pre-teen parties were called “petting parties” where somehow the first fresh bout of serious kisses were to be bestowed, or at least the first few innocent kisses. I was scared, scared two ways first that I would not be able to do the “deed” and secondly that if I was close to a girl how my grooming fit in, how I smelled and looked, something like that before we all got wise to mouthwash, deodorant and hair oil.

See it wasn’t only in sex matters that my parents were deficient but grooming and health matters as well what with five growing boys and nothing going my mother just didn’t give us the word. I know one guy at school said I smelled funny one day. And I probably did although I don’t know the why of it, maybe not washing under my underarms or something. So one of the things that Franklin was straight on was hygiene which he got from a friend of his when he was my age who had told him that he smelled and hipped him to what guys had to do to keep from being rogues. He clued me in on showering (really just an attached hose to the bathtub in our house), a little deodorant (nobody told me I smelled after that), a little Listerine (although the first time I used it I almost threw up since I used about half a bottle) and Wild Root Crème Oil for my always cowlick-driven unruly hair. I was off, thanks that one time Franklin (there would be other later times when I lent him money, cars, and other stuff that I never got back when I would curse his name, still do)                  

If you think that party of Theresa’s was some big Mayfair swell debutante affair well you know right now you are wrong but it was okay. About a dozen or fifteen kids, a couple more girls than boys but that was alright then (maybe now too), all dressed up and clean smelling presided over by Theresa who had a pretty dress on and who when she greeted me (and everybody else so don’t make a big deal out of it) smelled like I don’t know what, not perfume I don’t think but some exotic bath soap. Nice. The party itself was the standard music, guys and girls dancing (sometimes two girls dancing together but never guys remember that ‘light on your feet” jab), a little nice food, party food, kid party food, finger food and of course the cake, the birthday cake and Happy Birthday song. What was different, at least for me were these two little remembrances as this. Every few records when people were not dancing the lights would go out. That was the cue, although at first I was clueless, for everybody to grab somebody of the opposite sex to give a kiss to, an innocent kiss okay. Some girl, and I still am not sure who but it was not Theresa of the exotic bath soap smells, gave me my first official opposite sex boy-girl kiss. I bridled a little at first since I didn’t realize that was what was going on but it was okay, yeah, okay. So that was one thing. The other was toward the end of the party Theresa came up to me and a little coquettishly (although I didn’t know such a word or what it meant then) asked me to save the last dance for her. No problem. And the last dance, well you know what it was if you have paid attention to the title of this piece The Platters’ Only You. Only You and the lights went out during the song and Theresa planted a long kiss on my chaste lips, yeah, nice. We were an “item” for a while, maybe a month a long time as such things went then and then a new guy came into town, some tow-headed kid that all the girls went crazy over and I was reduced to sitting by the lonely midnight phone waiting in vain for some call to come my way.

Came in, well how should I put it, in awkward ways, ways around the way the world whirled, the American world in that cold, cold war night where lots of things were hidden from view. Things like race, class gender that are upfront and talked about in a usually rational manner today. Here’s what I mean as race, maybe class too, intersects with rock and roll, with who put the rock in rock and roll. And that is not a rhetorical question, or not only a rhetorical question because sixty years out it is still relevant as least in an historical perspective. We found out the hard way, or my best friend, Steve Malloy, in elementary school down in the Carver projects where we grew up at least until we came of age found out the hard way. And I learned my lesson from him. 

See when that rock beat got into our heads, got in like my older brother Franklin said in one of the few times he was absolutely right about something, something important, it came in our heads listening to the radio, car, family living room (although not much in my family since Ma forbade it and I, we, would only play the radio, WMEX, of course when she and Pa were out), later, have mercy on our private up-in-our-rooms transistor radios so what we heard was what we knew about. The sounds all had a classic beat, at least the serious rock beat one, whoever was singing played to. I don’t know that we were all that curious about what the singers looked like at that point, except maybe Elvis who we did know what he looked like from seeing him on the Ed Sullivan Show (a variety acts show popular on Sunday nights then). I don’t think so, it was really the music that moved our souls.       

In any case lots of guys, guys who could sing, not me, guys like Steve Malloy were always crooning away, always trying to sing like one, or more of the voices that we heard on the radio. Steve was particularly interested in those imitations because he really did have a great voice and if you closed your eyes you could almost heard the similarities. He was also like the rest of us in the projects, from hunger. He, once he got the Elvis rags-to-riches story down (and lots of girls too), was driven by the idea that he would be the next big thing in rock, or if not the next big thing then soon.

And that idea was not as fantastic as it sounded because in those days a lot of record companies and radio stations were sponsoring rock talent shows like they did back in the 1920s when they were looking for new talent to fill the airwaves. So one night WJDA, the local rock station (at least they played one show for four hours in the afternoon with DJ Tommy Swirl spinning the platters), staged a talent show up in the center of town looking for the next best thing that maybe they could latch onto, or at least expand their listening audience to the young in order to sell soda, soap, and sundries. So Steve was pumped, thought this would be the first break-through minute for him. But what to sing, whose style to project. He, even I knew this, that there would for guy singers be a ton of Elvis-imitators, and since he didn’t particular like Elvis at that moment since he had lost a girl to a guy who that girl said looked all dreamy like Elvis he decided on Bo Diddley who was all the craze with his song Bo Diddley that had this great beat to it.

So the night of the talent show Steve and maybe twenty other guys and maybe fifteen girls of all ages, all young ages, showed up to perform with a few obviously looking like Elvis imitators what with the long sideburns and slick backed hair in his style.  Steve told me as we walked in that he felt pretty good about his chances and that he was glad he chose Bo to separate himself out. Steve was about number eight on the list and so we fidgeted through the first seven acts, a few pretty good but most awful. Then it was Steve’s turn, Steve dressed in his best (and only) sport’s jacket looking like any teenage kid from Carver in those days, and he started to sing Bo’s song. About half way through though, Jack Kelly, an older guy from the projects, who was known as nothing but a hoodlum yelled out “Hey the kid is trying to sing a n----r jungle voodoo song.” That broke the whole mood, Steve barely finished.              

Needless to say Steve did not win (and probably would not have as three sisters stole the show with some Connie Francis cover) but after that he “got back in line” doing Elvis stuff since he knew Elvis was white. But his heart was no longer in it, and a while later his voice changed and he lost whatever rock energy he had. But he, we learned the hard way about the vagaries of race, learned the very hard way how important the black sound that even Elvis was stealing from was to what put the rock in rock and roll.    

 

 

Came in different flavors too, had different root as we would call it now all messed together to give a different beat. You had the rhythm and blues which drove a lot of the early stuff you know the Ike Turner Rocket 88 stuff, Big Joe Turner swinging and swaying that big ass of his to beat the band on Shake, Rattle and Roll, had guys like Jimmy Preston way back in the late 1940s putting in a bid to go into history as the “first rock and roll” song although you can see stuff going all the way back, going back to certain riffs (not whole songs I would say) in the 1920s with Furry Lewis, Lonnie Johnson guys like that who latter guys, Elvis (think Tomorrow Night, That’s When Your Heartache Begins) especially would cover with their own twists and step up the beat for the whole song.

Or take something like Rockabilly which a whole lot of good old boys, white boys okay, from places like Tennessee and Mississippi from hunger farm boys and small town kids would speed up some Les Paul riffs throw a few Saturday night barroom brawl Sunday morning confess all to Preacher Jack and get the girls to come around, come close if they looked good and has some sassy ass licks in and some Rock and Roll Ruby was born. So those big time sounds mixed and mended together to give a great new sound.

But get this, there were other sounds that mixed and matched, Bo Diddley of slurred memory mentioned above down in my growing up town with a definite Afro-Carib thing that bounced a little showing some other possibilities. Cajun too. Down in sweat filled Lafayette and Lake Charles where another of my high school friends, corner boys really, Rene Dubois, was born, where he learned to say pretty things like Jolie Blon in blasphemous crooked French and the girls down there, the cheris’ he called them went wild over him. (Not so in old Carver where his father had been transferred to as an oilrig guy when Nantucket Sound was being fished for oil exploration and Rene was taken for a redneck, a good old boy from the sticks, this in a town where half the population one way or the other was connected to the cranberry bog for which it was known, boggers for crying out loud and rednecks there were as thick as thieves). But Rene was not just into the Cajun stuff because his father, since he had spent a great deal of time fishing for oil in the Gulf of Mexico would take Rene with him when he went to New Orleans. Would take him to the joints down in Frenchtown, down on the avenue.

One time and this is where the spread of rock among the youth really started to take off, get people, young people of course on jump street Rene’s father took him to Lenny’s down by Jackson Square. Lenny’s was great because it had an open air front so Rene could sit out in the café chairs for hours. One late afternoon when it was starting to get dark so it was winter time but there is, or was no such thing as winter in funky, sweaty, steamy New Orleans a guy, a fat guy, maybe not fat but definitely heavy set came to the small stage over by the bar and sat down at the piano. Started playing some very fast boogie-woogie that got people dancing, played a lot of left-hand variations very smoothly creating a rock-like beat, a beat he thought had a Cajun flavor too. But get this, get this straight from me because I checked it out after Rene had told different guys the story about six different ways. When the fat man, the man named Jack Reed, who would go on on later to take the stage name, Fats Domino, played a song, Ain’t That A Shame this foxy girl, smooth dark skin, mulatto, high yellas they call them down there maybe seventeen, eighteen came over and asked him to dance. Of course he did, and of course he told the story that they got along, she invited him to her place up on Bourbon Street a few blocks away and “took him to paradise.”

I don’t think the story held up from what I was able to gather (for one Fats name was not Jack Reed and depending on when he said he had been there Lenny’s would not have been open)   by the time he changed it about sixteen times. But if it did happen then thanks Fats, thanks for the big ass piano addition to rock, our homeland rock and roll. And sorry about how Katrina took all your archives down the river.                  

Came in funny ways too. You know, like I said about my boyhood friend Steve Malloy and his wake-up call trying to imitate Bo Diddley, guys, young guys like us, me, were always trying to imitate whoever we saw or heard about, even though my voice then was too reedy and I had no basic sense of rhythm (which hurt later when I discovered the blues, straight blues and tried to play them on guitar to no avail, sounded like some third rate white bread boy from nowhere). 

Still as little invested as I was in success as a way to get out of the projects, get out of cheap street, Steve wasn’t the only one who tried to cover somebody’s song, tried for the brass ring, or maybe more correctly get an in with the girls who seemed a lot more interesting than before the rock storm blew in (maybe the wiggle and gyrations evoked some primitive sexual tom-tom but that is too much speculation some sixty years out. I tried too, a little, in the period before Steve’s fatal stab at fame mentioned above. Like I said in those days some radio station, locally WJDA no question, some record company, some independent company like Ducca or the Chestnut labels, were sponsoring talent shows to see if they could latch onto the need big thing coming down the rock pipeline.

In my case though it was the town fathers who were sponsoring the talent show, for their own nefarious reasons as I found out later when I got the political bug and such details interested me. See those harried town fathers (and it was mosyly male then) were as concerned as the guys in the White House, as J. Edgar Hoover over in FBI, that rock and roll was getting out of hand and that it softened up America against the hard-boiled red menace, or worse, made their own kids, made their own daughters susceptible to the “s-x” word and so they sponsored weekly dances, usually on Saturday nights at the town hall auditorium to, like the schools and churches, keep an eye or three on the doings of the young. One of the town fathers came up with the idea of the talent show as a way to draw crowds to the dances and keep the kids occupied during intermission. Furthermore, the draw to entry for money hungry “from hunger” kids who probably never had seen so much dough at one time was a prize of fifty dollars and, more importantly, especially to guys like Steve but the idea filtered down to the rest of us, that you would get to sing a few songs as the feature at the next dance, or an upcoming one. So a lot of kids, me, signed up for the thing and put out our stuff for prizes and glory.

For some reason that year I had been waylaid when I heard Miss La Verne Baker doing her Tweddle Dee, a tune that was a big hit for her in 1955 but which I had only hear later as I picked the rock bug properly. That song in her version had been very jumped up and also was great to dance to. More to the point that I had in my head constantly during that time. Plus, get this for teen insight, I figured that since I was covering a female singer on a song that really either sex could sing (later I heard both Big Walter Sidney and Manny Gold do great versions of the song with a little slower tempo) I would get some points for novelty.

The night of the dance/talent show I am talking about I was ready after several hours of practice and some coaching by Steve (who really did have a great native music sense and if thing had turned out better, if he had played his musical hand out instead of getting into that crime time scene he might have blossomed into something). I wanted to look good too for my big first show and in those days that meant wearing a sports jacket and shirt and tie. I was okay on the shirt and tie since that is what I wore to Mass each Sunday morning but our family being poor as church mice, maybe poorer, I didn’t have a sports jacket since we had with five boys a tradition of brother hand-me-downs and I was not big enough then to fix into any older brother’s jacket without looking like a hobo. I moaned and groaned to Ma, and after she said “no” I even moaned and groaned to Pa and you didn’t moan and groan to him unless it was a big deal.               

He said, which was true, that we did not have money for a sports coat for a one night gig, or maybe for any reason, I forget, but he would spring for material at the cheap-jack Bargain Center, the local Wal-Mart of its day, if my mother would make one. Now my mother was no seamstress but she agreed to do so and that Saturday night I had a presentable sports jacket on although I couldn’t say much for the beige color. I had tried it on as she was working  on the material and earlier that night and the fit seemed okay.  

I was number six on the list and so like all performers I was sitting there fretting during the first set of DJ record shuffling waiting impatiently for the intermission to arrive to strut my stuff. I felt pretty good even though I knew that Steve, who was on at number two, would do much better that me, which he did doing a nice version of a song that I forget what it was, some ballad, maybe Love Me Tender. Then in my turn I got up, went to the make-shift stage and started to sing and the crowd when they realized what the song was started chapping along. Then the other shoe fell off. This is what I found out later when I asked my mother about the jacket. She had gotten busy doing some family things and so only quickly sewed the sleeves to the body of the jacket figuring that would be good enough. Like I said before the jacket looked and felt good enough to me so there was no reason to say anything or ask any questions about it. That night though about half way through my act as I was making some motions, some odd-ball gyrations, responding to the crowd’s clapping one of the sleeves came off, then a few minutes later the other came off. They flew right into the crowd, mostly to the girls in front. The place went wild. They all figured that this stunt was part of the act. Well I finished, barely, and was finished. A girl singing some Fontaine Sisters’ song, maybe Sincerely I was so fluttered I just kind of head my head down to avoid dealing with reality, won, Steve second and my career was over. Over because of what happened that night which I had no desire to repeat but over also because like Steve not too long after my voice changed and it was not a good change for singing even if it did sound more manly.

Get this though, at school the next week, Monday  the girls, including one of the girls who caught one of the sleeves, were all around me, thinking my act had been cool, and for a time I was basking in that glory. Ah, wasn’t that a time.        

 

Despite all these great hits that came our way that first big rock and roll year when it kind of came out from the underground here is the funny thing, funny since we were present at the creation, present in spite of every command uttered by Miss Winot against it, declaring the music worse than that Russkie threat if you believed her (a few kids, girls mainly, did whether to suck up to her since she would take their entreaties although boys were strictly “no go” and I know having spent many a missed sunny afternoon doing some silly “punishment” for her). We were just too young to deeply imbibe the full measure of what we were hearing. See this music, music we started calling rock and roll once somebody gave it a name (super DJ impresario Alan Freed as we found out later after we had already become “children of rock and roll”) was meant, was blessedly meant to be danced to which meant in that boy-girl age we who didn’t even like the opposite sex as things stood then were just hanging by our thumbs.

Yeah, was meant to be danced to at “petting parties” in dank family room basements by barely teenage boys and girls. Was meant to be danced to at teenage dance clubs where everybody was getting caught up on learning the newest dance moves and the latest “cool” outfits to go along with that new freedom. Was meant to serve as a backdrop at Doc’s Drugstore’s soda fountain where Doc had installed a jukebox complete with all the latest tunes as boys and girls shared a Coke sipping slowly with two straws hanging out in one frosted glass. Was meant to be listened to by corner boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley where Jack eventually had set up a small dance floor so kids could dance while waiting for lanes to open (otherwise everybody would be still dancing out in front of O’Toole’s “boss” car complete with amped-up radio not to Jack’s profit). Was meant to be listened to as the sun went down in the west at the local drive-in while the hamburgers and fries were cooking and everybody was waiting for darkness to fall so the real night could begin, the night of dancing in dark corner and exploring the mysteries of the universe, or at least of Miss Sarah Brown.  Was even meant to be listened to on fugitive transistor radios in the that secluded off-limits to adults and little kids (us) where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night (and would stutter some nonsense to questioning parents who wanted to know the plot of the movies, what movies, Ma).              

Yeah, we were just a little too young even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we will catch up, catch up with a vengeance.