When Rockabilly Rocked The Be-Bop 1950s Night-With Rock And Roll Ruby In Mind

When Rockabilly Rocked The Be-Bop 1950s Night-With Rock And Roll Ruby In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

 

Hey, blame it on Warren Smith and a freshly heard Rock and Roll Ruby via YouTube automatic retro magic. Yeah, Ruby with her dancing slippers on and that beat in her head that she has no way to satisfy except to head out Tex’s Rib House way with Johnny Blaze and over beer and ribs, not necessarily in that order, listen to Tex’s jukebox and when the night air got filmy then jump onto that dance floor and be-bop some moves to beat the band. See Ruby had it bad, had whatever unhappiness or angst that was driving her just then out of control but she had to play it out, get it out of her system. And Johnny was only too proud, at first, to let Ruby do her thing, let Ruby dance to the beat and he could see envy in every gal’s eyes (and lust in every guy’s-with or without a date)  when she moved her dancing slipper feet. Those nights, at first, meant she would come across with a little something for Johnny after Tex’s closed and they headed to Red Rock for exercise of a different kind. Johnny didn’t even mind when one night Ruby took those slippers off and started dancing on the tables and later on top of the bar. Yeah, she came across, came across big time down at old Red Rock, made his ‘49 Hudson jump that night. Then something happened, nothing bad if you thought about it and had had some patience which Johnny had only in short supply. Ruby started going to Tex’s by herself, started dancing after a couple of beers and a few quarters in the jukebox, not looking for company either, Johnny would have raised hell over that but Johnny took a distant second place for long enough for him to see the writing on the wall, see it easier when Louella came sidling up to his car in school one day. Yeah, put Warren Smith down as a candidate, no question.    

 

Hell, blame it on Sonny Burgess burning up the world with Red-headed Woman, yah, now that I think of it blame it on him if you had something going with Ruby, or just thought Warren Smith was cute, too cute to slam. Yeah, Sonny got into something he couldn’t handle, caught a flash red-head, caught Rita. But unlike Ruby who after all was just another high school girl working out her teen angst problems on the dance floor, trying to make her body take the beat and put her in paradise. Rita, well, Rita if you don’t want to be too kind was a tramp, worked the dark light tables at Johnny Dee’s, loved to dance and drink, drink an ocean of whatever you wanted to pay for-beer to whiskey and back. Rita would show you that good time just like Ruby, although nothing as kids’ stuff as the back seat of a ’49 Hudson but under silky sheets (or at least clean linens) at the Last Change Motel (she had an arrangement with the manager there so if you wanted at her, and that red-head and slender snow-white body said you did then the Last Chance was where you went around the world). Yeah Rita would do you fine but damn she would eat up your whole paycheck with her wanting ways, with her oceans of booze appetites. The lonesome cowboys of the world found that out, Sonny Boy found that out quick, when he had a few nights dancing up a storm, drinking the oceans, and working the sheets at the Last Chance, found it out the hard way when he had no dough to bring home to the wife and three kids. Yeah, circle Sonny’s name if you want to, nobody will deny you your right.               

 

Hell, even put a circle around a mad dog middle of the night discussion with kindred Peter Paul Markin rekindled from childhood (or rather budding teen-hood) about who was who in the be-bop rock and roll firmament in the mid-1950s.That discussion held out in Pacifica one night when we heading south to Big Sur in Captain Crunch’s converted yellow brick road school bus which Markin had been on for a while in Frisco. I had hitched out there the summer of 1967 to see what was going on, going on with this summer of love business and run into the bus when it was parked in a small park on Russian Hill and I went up and innocently, well maybe not so innocently, for a joint and Markin was the guy I asked who produced a huge blunt in about twelve seconds. So I stayed with the bus all summer before heading back to hometown Olde Saco up in Maine in order to prepare to enter the state university that fall (in order to keep my ass out of the draft, out of the Army which a student deferment granted me although I had been sorely tempted to stay in the West and taken my chances. Markin had stayed out West rather than going back for junior year at Boston University and wound up facing the draft and Vietnam the next year  so I think I made the right decision).  

 

That Pacifica night, stoned out of our minds we had heard on the Captain’s state of the art stereo system (with its own generator system working off the bus battery or something very neat we all thought) Carl Perkin’s Blue Suede Shoes, although Markin later insisted that it was Elvis on the speakers and we got into how we went crazy for that stuff when we heard it even though we were about ten years old at the time. He, as was his habit, argued that some guy named Jimmy Smith had recorded the first rockabilly record at Sam Phillips’ Sun Record studio, Rocking Shakedown, and I, as was my habit then in order not to get gobbled up by Markin’s two thousand at-hand even when stoned facts had argued for Big Red Sims’ Boulder Break-down. Memories of that night had got me thinking about the whole genre and thus this little sketch. (Markin proved right that night, as he did many times before Vietnam and the drugs made him weird which led to his tragic fate a few years later down in Sonora, Mexico, when I later found out that Jimmy Smith had recorded that song, had made it a hit, a one-record wonder hit and so you have it).          

 

Damn, blame it Warren Smith, Sonny Burgess, Markin, or on the retro-fueled Stray Cats but under no circumstances blame it on me for lighting up cyberspace with a bag full of rockabilly gumbo.       

 

The last time that I discussed rockabilly music in this space was a couple of years ago when I was mulling over the work of artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, when they were young and hungry, from hunger really, and fed into our jailbreak hunger after years of listening to parent Sinatra, Como, Page and the Ink Spots ad infinitum, who got their start at Sam Phillips’ famed Sun Records studio in Memphis. Part of the reason for those thoughts was my effort to trace the roots of rock and roll, the music of my coming of age, and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Clearly rockabilly was, along with country and city blues from the likes of Robert Johnson, Skip James , Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and pre-Tina Ike Turner (think Rocket 88 among other be-bop stuff) and rhythm and blues from the likes of Big Joe Turner (think, big think and don’t spare anything, Shake, Rattle and Roll) a part of that formative process. The question then, and the question once again today, is which strand dominated the push to rock and roll, if one strand in fact did dominate.

 

I have gone back and forth on that question over the years. That couple of years ago mentioned above I was clearly under the influence of Big Joe Turner and Howlin’ Wolf and so I took every opportunity to stress the bluesy nature of rock. Recently though I have been listening, and listening very intently, to early Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis and I am hearing more of that be-bop rockabilly rhythm flowing into the rock night. Let me give a comparison. A ton of people have done Big Joe Turner’s classic rhythm and bluish Shake, Rattle, and Roll, including Bill Haley, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee. When I listen to that song as performed in their more rockabilly style those versions seem closer to what evolved into rock. So for today, and today only, yes Big Joe is the big daddy, max daddy father of rock but Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Carl are the very pushy sons.

 

And that brings us to the treasure trove of rockabilly music that I think you should listen to, the stuff the big boys came and gave us, gave us at all back forty barns dances, high school last chance dances, and country fair jamborees, the stuff the big boys listened to too to get an idea or two, and maybe helped to create.  I have already done enough writing in praise of the work of Sam Phillips and Sun Records to bring that good old boy rockabilly sound out of the white southern countryside. I noted that for the most part those who succeeded in rockabilly in say 1954, or 55 had to move on to rock to stay current with the youth wave (the disposable income/allowance post- World War II youth wave, mainly girls, who bought those luscious 45 RPM records and put those nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes and, and, sometimes, pretty please sometimes, let the likes of  cash-lite Josh Breslin up in Olde Saco and P.P. Markin in North Adamsville help them make their selections, okay) and so the rockabilly sound was somewhat transient except for those who consciously decided to stay with that sound.

 

The best example of that, other than those mentioned above, is Red Hot by Bill Riley and His Little Green Men, an extremely hot example by the way. If you listen to his other later material it stays very much in that rockabilly vein. In contrast, take High School Confidential by Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee might have started out in rockabilly down in that Cajun mishmash Louisiana swamp but this number (and others) is nothing but the heart and soul of rock (and a song, by the way, we all prayed would be played at our junior high school dances to get things, you know what things, going). Case closed.

 

Other stick-outs included Ooby Dooby, Roy Orbison (although he has a ton of better songs later like Moving On); Blue Suede Shoes (the teeth-cutting, max daddy of rockabilly songs), Carl Perkins; Susie-Q (right at that place where rockabilly and blues meet to form rock and a classic come hither song), Dale Hawkins; Party Doll (another great junior high school dance song), Buddy Knox;  Come On, Let’s Go (bringing just a touch of Tex-Mex into the rockabilly mix), Ritchie Valens; and, the national anthem, Summertime Blues by the great and underrated Eddie Cochran.  Enough said