A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs vol 2: From the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, #2

By Andrew Hickey

In this series of books, based on the hit podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey analyses the history of rock and roll music, from its origins in swing, Western swing, boogie woogie, and gospel, through to the 1990s, grunge, and Britpop. Looking at five hundred representative songs, he tells the story of the musicians who made those records, the society that produced them, and the music they were making. Volume two looks at fifty songs from the origins of rock and roll, starting in 1956 with the Million Dollar Quartet session at Sun Studios, and ending in 1962 with "Love Me Do" by the Beatles. Along the way, it looks at Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Wanda Jackson, the Chantels, Little Richard, and many more of the progenitors of rock and roll.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Hickey
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201471842

Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey is the author of (at the time of writing) over twenty books, ranging from novels of the occult to reference books on 1960s Doctor Who serials. In his spare time he is a musician and perennial third-placed political candidate.

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to the second volume of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. This book is part of a planned ten-book series, which is in turn based on a planned ten-year weekly podcast which you can find at http://500songs.com and which includes a lot of snippets of the songs I talk about here. In this series I plan to chart one version of the history of rock music from its beginnings through to the year 2000, one record at a time.

Those of you who have read volume one will already be familiar with the reason this series exists. As rock and roll music is increasingly relegated to history, as new genres take over in the popular consciousness and the generations for whom rock music was important become older, it’s difficult for many people to appreciate the music as music.

This was brought home to me almost twenty years ago, when I was doing a popular music history course at university, and as part of the course the lecturers played the room some music by Carl Perkins and said, laughingly, Now, obviously, we don’t expect you to listen to Carl Perkins for fun, but you should know about him.

I listened to Carl Perkins for fun.

It’s my belief that the music I’m covering in these volumes has something to offer – that it’s music that can be enjoyed by modern listeners. That people can listen to Carl Perkins, or Jerry Lee Lewis, or the Drifters, or the Chantels, or Del Shannon, or Wanda Jackson for fun. Much of the music I’m covering is music that, to me, is as immediately appealing as any music ever made. But we all come to music with preconceptions, and sometimes the music needs to be put into context for us to hear it with fresh ears. And that’s what I intend to do with these books, and the podcasts on which they’re based.

Previously...

In volume one, I looked at the history of rock music from its prehistory in 1938 through to 1956, the year that Elvis Presley burst on to the international scene and became the biggest star in the world. For those of you who haven’t read the book, or who read it a while ago, I’d better get you up to speed with a brief précis.

The best place to start when looking at rock and roll music is with swing, the music that was most popular immediately prior to the Second World War. Swing was a music that was based on jazz, but which used much bigger bands, usually with very tightly arranged horn sections. Swing was dance music, and the best big bands made music that had a very strong pulse, and was often based on riffing.

The place where the best dance bands played was the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York. Many bands played there, but one that was regarded as the best dance band in the world was Chick Webb’s band, which had the vocalists Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald.

The Savoy was owned by Moe Gale, who was the manager of both those vocalists, and of a vocal group called the Ink Spots, the biggest vocal group of the forties. Gale later also managed the band run by Lucky Millinder, which had vocalists including Wynonie Harris, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Ruth Brown, as well as featuring a young trumpeter called Dizzy Gillespie.

Swing was the dominant musical form in the late thirties and early forties, but it encompassed a wide variety of musics. As well as the most popular bands like those led by Artie Shaw, Kay Kyser, the Dorsey Brothers, and Glenn Miller, who played the mainstream pop of the day, there were (white) groups like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, who combined this music with Western music (this was before Country and Western were considered the same genre). This combination became Western Swing – swing music with guitars, fiddles, and steel guitars as well as the normal horns and drum kit. At the other end of the spectrum were (mostly Black) bands like those led by Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and Chick Webb who played hard-riffing swing music with less emphasis on melody and more emphasis on rhythm. Benny Goodman, the leader of the most popular Swing band of all, brought Black musicians into his band – notably Charlie Christian, the first great electric guitar virtuoso, and Lionel Hampton, who later led one of the most exciting of those Black bands.

In 1938 the record producer John Hammond, Benny Goodman’s brother-in-law, put on a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall called From Spirituals to Swing and featuring many of the most important Black musicians of the time, including various boogie-woogie pianists and the blues shouter Big Joe Turner (blues shouters were blues singers who sang with big bands and without amplification – they needed enormously powerful voices). Those shows caused boogie-woogie to explode in popularity. 

However, for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, it became unviable to keep big bands going by the late forties, and so swing collapsed as a genre. But while all the major popular bands like the Glenn Miller or Dorsey Brothers bands broke up, the advent of electric amplification allowed smaller, more viable, bands to sound almost as big as a big band, and the Western Swing bands continued in slimmed-down versions, dominated by guitar, bass, drums, steel guitar and fiddle.

At the same time many of the Black groups that played riffing music also slimmed down into groups dominated by piano, drums, and saxophone. Both styles of music also started to emphasise vocals more – the music the Black bands played often involved blues singers, and they became known as jump bands or jump blues bands.

In the late forties, the jump bands started to get categorised as rhythm and blues, and became dominated by blues shouters like Wynonie Harris, who made records like Good Rockin’ Tonight. But the most popular rhythm and blues group was the one fronted by Chick Webb’s old saxophone player, Louis Jordan, who sang witty, knowing lyrics over an incredibly tight band.

Louis Jordan became the model for many, many, other musicians, and in March 1951 a group from Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, made their journey to Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Services in Tennessee after being told by their friend B.B. King that he made his records there. They recorded a track there, Rocket ’88, which was very much in the style of Jordan and his imitators. Phillips leased it to Chess Records, to whom he also leased records by blues musicians like Howlin’ Wolf, and they released it under the name of the track’s lead vocalist, Turner’s sax player Jackie Brenston.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, there was a yodelling singer called Bill Haley who led a Western Swing band called the Saddlemen. He also worked as a DJ, and noticed the popularity of the Louis Jordan-style music on one of the other shows on his station. He started incorporating that style of music into his performances, and three months after Brenston he cut his own version of Rocket ’88, the first of a whole series of recordings Haley would make performing Jordan-style jump blues in a style influenced by Western Swing. There was still a segregation between white and Black music, but it was slowly breaking down – white performers like Haley were listening to Louis Jordan, but also almost every Black performer was listening to country and western musicians, like Hank Williams and Gene Autry.

And things were happening in other parts of the country. In New Orleans an engineer named Cosimo Matassa had opened up a studio which became the centre for a group of musicians who were incorporating Caribbean rhythms and traditional New Orleans style music into rhythm and blues, people like Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, and Lloyd Price.

In Los Angeles, a whole musical scene coalesced around Johnny Otis, a Greek-American jazz drummer and vibraphone player who had chosen to live among the Black community rather than among whites. Otis toured the country and discovered countless talented musicians and singers, such as Hank Ballard, Etta James, the Robins, Jackie Wilson, and Esther Phillips, and produced records by many more, including Johnny Ace, a piano player who got his start working with Sam Phillips in Memphis, and Little Richard, who was at the time a blues performer mostly working for gay audiences, but who soon signed to Specialty Records and started recording with the New Orleans musicians based around Cosimo Matassa’s studio.

Otis produced and played on many classic records, but probably the most important was Hound Dog by Big Mama Thornton, which became the first hit for a young songwriting team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who soon struck up a working relationship with the Robins, and with a singer named Richard Berry.

Around the country, various groups of young Black men were starting to sing together, inspired by the Ink Spots. The two places where this was most prevalent were New York and Los Angeles, and the music those people were making was later given the name doo-wop. In LA, those musicians tended to centre on the Central Avenue music scene, whose major figures were people like Otis, singer/pianist Gaynel Hodge, and record company owner John Dolphin, and groups like the Penguins and the Platters formed from this scene. One of the most important figures in that scene was Jesse Belvin, who inspired Sam Cooke, among others, and co-wrote songs like Earth Angel, before dying tragically young in a car accident.

In New York, on the other hand, they tended to gravitate either towards Atlantic Records, a company that started as a jazz label but soon went R&B and put out records by Big Joe Turner, the Drifters, the Chords, and Ruth Brown, or towards people like producer/songwriter Richie Barrett and record company owner George Goldner, who were part of a music empire controlled by the gangster Morris Levy.

Alan Freed, a DJ in Cincinnati and then in New York, who was part of Levy’s music empire, started using the term rock and roll to describe the music that was then known as rhythm and blues. The term had been used in various contexts regarding R&B for many years, but Freed popularised it and made it the generic term for the style. Freed also developed a large white audience for this music, which had previously mostly been listened to by Black people.

In mid-1954 these musical changes, which had been happening slowly since the late thirties, started their inexorable march into the mainstream.

In May, Bill Haley and his band, now renamed the Comets, recorded a song called Rock Around the Clock, a generic-seeming jump blues that they stuck out on a B-side. It wouldn’t become a hit until mid-1955, but when it did it became the biggest selling vinyl single in history, and galvanised the entire world.

Sam Phillips in Memphis decided that he would start his own record label, Sun Records, rather than continue licensing his recordings of Black artists to other labels like Chess. He also started looking for a white artist who could popularise Black music with white people, in order to further his long-term project of destroying racism altogether – not, as he would later be misquoted as saying, one who could sing like a Black man, but one who had the same feeling as Black people.

He found the artist he was looking for when a shy young man who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look him in the eye came into the studio. Elvis Presley made his first single, a cover of the Arthur Crudup blues That’s All Right Mama, in July 1954, though he wouldn’t start to have hits for eighteen months, when his new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, got him signed to a major label, and he started working with people like Leiber and Stoller.

The same week that Presley recorded That’s All Right, a British jazz guitarist named Tony Donegan, who changed his name to Lonnie in tribute to Lonnie Johnson, a blues singer who Elvis was also a fan of, recorded a piece of album filler, an acoustic busk through an old Lead Belly song, Rock Island Line. When that was issued as a single a year later, it became a huge hit and created a whole generation of teenage British boys who learned the guitar and old folk and blues songs, and that would have ramifications for the rest of this story.

In Chicago, along with the hard blues records they were issuing, Chess Records started to issue doo-wop songs, like Sincerely by the Moonglows, more rhythmic songs like Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley, and country-influenced R&B records like Maybellene, a rewrite of an old Western Swing song performed by its writer, Chuck Berry. Alan Freed started playing these on his radio show too, partly because he was credited as the co-writer of many of these songs, though he never actually wrote a song in his life.

Little Richard’s songs about gay sex, with the lyrics slightly bowdlerised, became so popular that he had better things to do than play the tiny clubs he had got booked in before he became a success, and so he got an impersonator to go on the road pretending to be him, another Georgia singer named James Brown. Brown was one of several singers, along with Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters and the Atlantic Records piano player Ray Charles, who were starting to bring the influence of Black gospel music into their sound, creating a new sound that we’re going to track throughout this book, which would soon become known as soul.

For a while, the main success for songs originally performed by these Black performers came when white musicians like Pat Boone or the Crew Cuts recorded their own cover versions of them, trying to sound as similar as possible to the originals, but soon DJs like Freed made the Black originals popular among white audiences.

At the same time, even before Elvis Presley started having hits, he galvanised dozens of young men in the Deep South, who saw his live performances with lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black, and thought that they could form their own groups in the same style. Most of these groups made their way towards Sun Records, where Sam Phillips put out the first recordings by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and more.

One group Phillips didn’t record was the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio, consisting of two of Elvis’ neighbours, Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and their guitarist Paul Burlison, who started distorting his guitar on their records, produced by the country producer Owen Bradley in Nashville. Capitol Records decided to get in on the action, too, and they signed their own Elvis soundalike, Gene Vincent, whose rewrite of the Drifters’ Money Honey, titled Be-Bop-A-Lula, became a huge hit in its own right.

In Britain, a young man named Tommy Steele was discovered at a coffee bar called the 2i’s, playing with musicians who had been inspired by Donegan, though Steele was more interested in sounding like Elvis and Carl Perkins. Steele became Britain’s first homegrown rock and roll star, although he soon moved into mainstream showbiz and became a song-and-dance man.

And so the stage is set...

By the end of 1956, rock and roll was the exciting new teenage fad in popular music, but many of its biggest stars were still to come. In the pages that follow, we will see the first hits by many of the people who are now thought of as the first wave of rock and roll, people like the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Coasters. We will also see the careers of those artists dip, as they’re replaced by a new wave of rock and roll musicians, people like Roy Orbison, Ben E. King, and the Shirelles, who are often now not even thought of as rock musicians, as at the end of this volume we will see the beginnings of the movements that would in turn replace them in the public’s affections, and would redefine what rock music meant forever.

And so, we now go back to December 1956, to Sun Studios, as we start the journey from the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four...

Matchbox by Carl Perkins

At the end of the first book in this series, we reached the end of 1956 and with it the end of the first wave of rockabilly. By December 1956, only Elvis was left standing as a white rock and roll star from the first wave – Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley had stopped having hits, and Johnny Cash had started to be promoted as a country singer rather than a rock and roller.

But just because someone has stopped having hits doesn’t mean they’ve stopped making good music, and that was certainly the case for Carl Perkins, who spent the rest of 1956 making records that were every bit as good as his one hit, Blue Suede Shoes. After Boppin’ the Blues, the song’s unsuccessful follow-up, he released Dixie Fried, but that was no more successful. Perkins was increasingly dissatisfied with the way Sam Phillips was promoting his work, and like Johnny Cash was strongly considering moving to another label.

But on the fourth of December, 1956, Perkins was still working for Sun, and so he was in the studio with his brothers, recording another single that was destined to do very little. The A-side, Your True Love, charted, but not very high – it went to number thirteen on the country charts and only number sixty-seven on the pop charts. It was a decent country record but not much more than that. The B-side, though, was more interesting.

Matchbox was a song that came from an idea Carl had been given by his father. His father had been sitting around in the session, watching his sons play, and remembered an old song he used to like with the line sitting here wondering will a matchbox hold my clothes/Ain’t got no matches, but I’ve got a long way to go. Carl had never heard the song before, and he wasn’t particularly impressed by the line his dad sang – he thought the line made no sense. His dad also couldn’t remember any of the rest of the song, but Carl took that line and built a new song around it.

Given Carl’s father’s musical tastes, it’s likely that the record he was remembering was Match Box Blues by Roy Newman and His Boys, a country cover of an old blues song by Blind Lemon Jefferson, which was in turn inspired by a Ma Rainey song, Lost Wandering Blues.

In a coincidence which once again shows how interconnected the different musicians we’re looking at are, Jefferson’s song also contained the line Brown ’cross town going to be my teddy bear/Put a string on me, I’ll follow you everywhere – a line which may well have inspired the song (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear, recorded by Perkins’ ex-labelmate Elvis Presley.

But by Perkins’ own account, he never heard the original Match Box Blues, and was just going from his dad’s description. And certainly after the chorus the song diverges totally from Jefferson’s song. Instead, Perkins uses floating lyrics that one can find in all sorts of other blues songs. For example, the verse starting I’m a poor boy and I’m a long way from home comes from the old traditional blues song usually called, fittingly, Poor Boy, Long Way From Home.

Matchbox shows all the signs of having been put together in the studio, largely improvised, as most of Perkins’ songs were. You might remember from the piece on Blue Suede Shoes in the last volume that most of his records were at least semi-improvised. And interviews back this up – it was a throwaway B-side and Perkins was just making anything up to fill out a couple of minutes of vinyl.

But in this case the song, while it’s credited to Carl Perkins, probably deserves at least one more co-author credit. Because the way Perkins told the story, he didn’t come up with the music, somebody else did.

That someone else, surprisingly, wasn’t one of the Perkins Brothers Band. While Carl’s brothers Jay and Clayton, and their drummer Fluke Holland were all there, present and accounted for, there was a fifth musician at the session.

Jerry Lee Lewis was a new piano player who had been discovered by Sam Phillips’ assistant, Cowboy Jack Clement the previous month. He’d cut his first record for Sun a couple of weeks earlier, and it had been released three days before this session. We’ll be talking more about how Jerry Lee started with Sun, and his own early recordings, in a few chapters’ time, but right now he wasn’t there in his capacity as a performer, but as a session musician, trying to earn enough money to buy his parents some Christmas presents by sitting in on the session.

Lewis was, by every account I’ve ever read, one of the most musically fecund people who ever lived. He was a Louisiana piano player like Fats Domino, but his biggest influence was Moon Mullican – but he’d absorbed everything, every piece of music he’d ever heard, and was desperate to show off and play for people no matter what the song.

And so when Carl Perkins started singing the lines from Match Box Blues, Jerry Lee immediately started playing a boogie piano part. The Perkins brothers fell in with what Lewis was playing, and the result, while Carl’s singing lead, sounds exactly like a Jerry Lee Lewis record – at least up until the guitar solo.

Perkins was hugely impressed by Lewis as a musician, but he was less impressed by him as a person, at least at first. Lewis had got Perkins’ back up after they’d finished recording Your True Love, when he’d said, bluntly, That song ain’t worth a damn. Perkins had also heard him showing off at the piano, singing his new record in a break, and he’d thought that Lewis had no originality. He could hear bits of himself, and bits of Elvis, and bits of Hank Williams, but not a lot that was new.

What Lewis was playing on this new record was great, but Perkins wasn’t going to let the new kid show him up. He decided to up his game as a guitar player, playing a hard-driving riff on the bass strings of his guitar while he was singing, but really letting rip on the guitar solos, which he played on the top three strings on his guitar. As he later said, I took some of my best guitar breaks on that song. Triple string is what I was doing, playing all three strings at the same time with a pick, which is usually done finger-style. But fooling around and practising I knew it would work, and that was the time to try it, because I was shooting at Jerry Lee’s head. It was never rehearsed.

Perkins took two solos because he could tell that Jerry Lee Lewis really wanted to show him exactly what he could do, and Carl Perkins wasn’t going to let him. As he said later, "I thought, No, you smart aleck, I’m going to play both breaks on this guitar. Next time I’m going to try to burn the neck off of it. I knew he was itching for me to holler, ‘Get it, Jerry!’ I kinda wished I had of, I’d like to have seen what he would’ve done, ’cause he was hot that day. He was going after it. I let myself get in the way of probably a phenomenal piano break. He would have shown me how to play a piano. So the world probably missed the greatest piano break Jerry Lee would have ever taken".

But the result was, still, extraordinary – the absolute ultimate definition of rockabilly, with two huge musical egos pushing each other to greater heights. Who knows what would have happened had it not been buried on the B-side to Your True Love?

Because Jerry Lee was right. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Your True Love is not worth a damn, like he said, but I definitely don’t think it’s worth a millionth of Matchbox, and certainly the fact that Matchbox went on to become a rock and roll standard once the Beatles unearthed it and brought it to prominence seems to suggest that it could have been a bigger hit.

But either way, everyone was happy with the second take of the song, and they were listening back to it when Elvis Presley walked into the room.

Elvis had been driving past with a girlfriend, and had been able to tell that there was a session on that day because, as Marion Keisker later put it, it looked like a Cadillac showroom outside. So he’d popped in to see who was playing.

Carl Perkins was astonished to see Elvis there. While the two of them were friendly, he’d not seen Elvis in several months, and his appearance had changed considerably. Elvis was now dyeing his hair, which had previously been a light brown, a dark black. His acne had cleared up so much that he was no longer keeping his collars up to avoid showing his neck. He’d gone from being a spotty, shy, adolescent to being a major sex symbol.

Elvis went over and started noodling on the piano.

This immediately caused Jerry Lee Lewis to start showing off. He went over to Elvis and said I didn’t know you could play.

Elvis responded I can’t, at which point Jerry Lee said, Well then, why don’t you let me sit down?

Elvis just replied Well, I’d like to try, and carried on noodling. At this point Elvis had largely dismissed Lewis; Elvis was not, himself, an arrogant person, and he detested those who were, and Jerry Lee clearly was. Sam Phillips invited Elvis into the control room to listen to Matchbox, and Elvis was duly impressed.

And then everything changed, as the session turned in to a jam session. And it was a jam session that possibly involved a fourth person.

Every single account of what became known as the Million Dollar Quartet session disagrees as to how much, if at all, Johnny Cash participated in the proceedings. Cash always claimed he was the first there and last to leave – that he’d turned up at the session before it had even started, because he’d wanted to watch his friends make their latest record, and he stayed through the whole jam session afterwards.

Other accounts have Cash turning up part way through the session in order to pick up a royalty cheque that Sam Phillips had for him and singing a couple of songs with the others before the tape machine started running, but having to go off and do some Christmas shopping before everything really got going. And yet other accounts have Sam Phillips realising that he had a good opportunity for publicity here, calling Cash, who was at the time by far the biggest act on Sun, at the same time he called journalists and photographers, and Cash just turning up for a photo and then immediately leaving again.

Whatever the truth, it’s definitely not easy to hear Cash on the tapes of the jam session, which finally got released in the 1980s. It was recorded on a single microphone – Phillips just started recording after they’d already started jamming, realising he may never have another chance to record these people together – and Cash always said that he was there, just the furthest from the microphone, and that he was singing in a higher register than normal because he was trying to sing in the keys that were comfortable for the other three.

Either way, the legendary Million Dollar Quartet recordings are completely dominated by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, with Carl Perkins a distant third.

When they start out, there are other musicians – Perkins’ backing band play on the early tracks, before giving up – but the majority of the recording consists of Elvis on acoustic guitar or piano, Jerry Lee on piano when Elvis isn’t playing it, and them all singing together, with Elvis or Jerry Lee taking most of the lead vocals. Various other people join in at different points, but this is really two immense talents, both trying to size each other up, outdo each other, and also at the same time share in their joy at making music together.

The interesting thing about the music they play is how little of it is actually rock and roll. There’s some, of course – they’re all hugely impressed with Chuck Berry’s Brown-Eyed Handsome Man and have several goes at playing it, and they talk about Too Much Monkey Business, though Elvis was less impressed by that one than Brown-Eyed Handsome Man. Elvis also sings a single line of Little Richard’s Rip it Up, but otherwise what they’re playing is either pure country music or what’s euphemistically called Southern Gospel – the gospel music performed primarily by white people from the Deep South, rather than the gospel music primarily performed by Black people.

Both Elvis and Jerry Lee were brought up in the Assembly of God, a Pentecostal holy roller church, which we’ll talk more about when we get to the chapters on Jerry Lee himself, but that meant they shared even more of a religious culture than they did with Cash or Perkins, both of whom were deeply religious men but neither of whom were brought up in that particular tradition.

Most interesting is their take on Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley. Even though it’s a call-and-response song and starts with Elvis taking the lead and Jerry Lee doing the responses, by the first verse Jerry Lee has already taken over the lead and left Elvis echoing him, rather than vice versa. You can hear there exactly how this friendly rivalry was already working. Remember, at this time, Jerry Lee Lewis was nobody at all, someone who had one single which had been out a matter of days. But here he is duetting with the King of Rock and Roll, and seeing himself as the person who should naturally be taking the lead. When we get to Jerry Lee’s work, you’ll see just how completely in character this is.

It was also completely in character for Elvis , at least at this time, to defer to another musician, even though he was the biggest star around. One of the most fascinating elements of the Million Dollar Quartet session is Elvis talking of his experience in Las Vegas, watching Billy Ward and the Dominoes sing Elvis’ own hit, Don’t Be Cruel.

In these recordings, he keeps talking about a Yankee singer, one of the Dominoes, who he’s convinced did the song better than he did. This was Jackie Wilson, who was at the time the lead singer for the Dominoes, before striking out as a solo singer. You can hear just how influenced Elvis was by Wilson’s performance, and that Yankee pronunciation telly-phone that he makes fun of, by listening to his performance of the song on the Ed Sullivan show a few weeks later, where he pronounces the word the same way [1] .

It’s worth seeking out the video of that. as just seeing the expression on Elvis’ face when he sings that line is priceless.

But listening to him talk about Jackie Wilson’s performance, he keeps talking about how much better Wilson did the song, and the others keep insisting that he couldn’t have been that much better than Elvis, but Elvis insists.

For the first part of the session, Elvis is on the piano and, while he claimed to not be able to play, he actually does a perfectly decent job. But when Jerry Lee Lewis took over the piano, things would kick up a notch, as Lewis was desperate to show off. And when Elvis was called into the control room again, towards the end of the jam session, Jerry Lee took over completely, just playing by himself and showing off what he could do.

The last few songs in the jam session are essentially Lewis playing by himself, singing Crazy Arms and Gene Autry’s You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven, and playing the old Jelly Roll Morton piano piece Black Bottom Stomp. Right at the end we hear Elvis leaving, and him saying goodbye to someone called Johnny, which suggests that Cash was right when he said that he was there all along.

The Million Dollar Quartet session might well have been the making of Jerry Lee Lewis, even though the recordings weren’t released until decades later. Sam Phillips took the opportunity to publicise his stars far and wide. and that publicity placed the four of them on the same level. Jerry Lee, by virtue of being at the session, was an equal with Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash.

The Million Dollar Quartet tape isn’t great music, except at odd moments. It’s an interesting historical document, rather than anything else. But those odd moments when it does become great are frankly electrifying, as a group of musicians at the height of their powers just play for each other for the sheer pleasure of playing.

To me, the very best moment in the whole session comes near the end, when Elvis plays a solo version of That’s When Your Heartaches Begin, the Ink Spots song he had performed three years earlier, when he had first walked into that studio to record himself for his mother. Hearing how much his voice had matured, and how much his performance had improved, in the three years between his first and last recordings in that Memphis studio, sends shivers down my spine.

There were a couple of attempts at Million Dollar Quartet reunions over the years, as the session became legendary among rockabilly fans. None, however, featured the quartet’s full line-up, as they happened after Elvis’ death.

The first, and the one that was more in the spirit of the original sessions, was a live performance released as The Survivors, when on the twenty-third of April 1981 Perkins and Lewis joined Cash on stage in Stuttgart for an impromptu performance. All three of them ran through their biggest hits. But again, a substantial proportion of the show was taken up with the old gospel and country songs they all knew, with them trading off vocals on I’ll Fly Away, I Saw the Light, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, and one song they’d performed at the earlier session, which they dedicated to Elvis, Peace in the Valley.

Four years later they would get together again, for a studio album recorded at Sun Studios, with Roy Orbison filling in for Elvis. Class of ’55 has its moments, but isn’t a highlight of any of those men’s discographies.

This is the point that Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins leave our story, at least as main players, though they will of course turn up as background figures in other people’s stories. They both moved increasingly towards country music, and away from rockabilly. The fourth of December 1956, is as good a date as any, then, to nominate as the border between periods in rock and roll history; the last point at which rock and roll, rockabilly, gospel, and country music could all be considered as the same kind of thing, before rock and roll became the dominant genre, and before the rise to prominence of artists like Jerry Lee Lewis who started their career after rock and roll was already established.

The world of music had changed irreparably in the year since Elvis had last been in the Sun studios, and it was going to keep on changing.

Twenty Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran

To tell the story of rock music, it’s important to tell the story of the music’s impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything: TV, film, clothing and more. So let’s take a look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music.

Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be from Oklahoma. His parents were from Oklahoma, but they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, moved to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies.

Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends – Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they’re quite astonishing. Cochran’s guitar playing sounds like the work of a seasoned professional despite him being only fourteen years old at the time.

Cochran played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually he hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name The Cochran Brothers.

The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. They started out doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song called Two Blue Singing Stars, a rather maudlin song about the deaths of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.

But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences.

Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn’t sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player.

He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter whom the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single called Walkin’ Stick Boogie. The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on.

But while he was doing this, he still hadn’t got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label, a rockabilly song titled Skinny Jim.

Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran’s collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. I don’t know how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn’t working on, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day.

Many, many rock and roll films were made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis’ early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today – everyone went to the cinema.

And when you went to the cinema, you didn’t go just to see one film. There’d be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, many of the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from.

And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and this quick turnaround could cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958, there were several dozen cheap rock and roll films, with titles like Rock! Rock! Rock!, Don’t Knock the Rock and so on.

In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives even though they had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists).

Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. In volume one of this series, in the chapter on Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, we talked about the film Rock! Rock! Rock! which Chuck Berry appeared in – that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was.

The film in which Cochran was signed to appear, which was soon renamed The Girl Can’t Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, dialogue and acting. While the film isn’t a masterpiece, it is a proper film.

And it’s made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can’t Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the one point three million dollars spent on The Girl Can’t Help It.

Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it’s responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken in The Girl Can’t Help It to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield, doing her usual Marilyn Monroe impersonation.

Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars – he’d discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals’ jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters.

Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named Fatso to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song Make Someone Happy.

Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named Fats, and the two of them working together to make the mobster’s young girlfriend into a singing star.

I’ve seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can’t Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn’t credited as being based on Kanin’s novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn’t sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point.

The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin’s next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based.

Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers’ work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can’t Help Itbut she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can’t Help It.

They then, once The Girl Can’t Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield’s character.

While The Girl Can’t Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there’s a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero, after having been told that his girlfriend can’t sing and then seeing Eddie Cochran on the TV. But in that scene, what’s interesting is what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that Cochran can’t sing, merely that he ain’t got a trained voice. The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerri Jordan, Mansfield’s character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can’t sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous.

Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars – although stars is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), as well as less well-known people, like the Treniers – a jump band who’d been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment, singing about a Cinnamon sinner telling lollipop lies.

And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called Twenty Flight Rock, written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild.

TThere has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran’s surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal songwriting contributor.

We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like Freddie the Little Fir Tree don’t especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote Twenty Flight Rock. As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song’s writing.

The original version of Twenty Flight Rock, as featured in the film, was little more than a demo – it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film. But the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original, which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film’s soundtrack.

The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit Blue Monday, but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I’m sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard’s label, but not Domino’s).

As a result, Domino’s role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three – the title song, written by Troup, Ready Teddy by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and She’s Got It.

We’ve mentioned before that John Marascalco’s writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and She’s Got It is one record that tends to bear that out. She’s Got It has Marascalco as the sole credited writer, but is musically identical and lyrically very similar to I Got It, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer.

The Girl Can’t Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. But in France it was a different story. There’s a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinéma, the most important film magazine in France by a long way – the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory – absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list – The Girl Can’t Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? at number two. By comparison, the other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet.

Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin’s other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that’s where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later.

Tashlin wasn’t actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn’t one of the better directors for Warners, and didn’t direct any of the classics people remember from the studio – he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator’s sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks.

And so The Girl Can’t Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal.

According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can’t Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film – and London was by some way Liberty’s biggest star. Not only that, but London’s husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film.

But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, Twenty Flight Rock wasn’t immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie van Doren – another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield – on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself.

Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran’s backing on van Doren’s recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including one, Ooh Ba La Baby, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart.

It had originally been planned to release Twenty Flight Rock as Cochran’s first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film’s release. But it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release Sittin’ in the Balcony instead.

That song had been written and originally recorded by John D. Loudermilk. Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk’s record, but he hadn’t been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead.

Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist – and the guitar solo on Sittin’ in the Balcony was the one thing about Cochran’s record which distinguished it from Loudermilk’s original – and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran’s good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone.

Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks – the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin’ to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran’s better work.

(And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway – one of the few tracks on there that is in Cochran’s rock and roll style is a song called Mean When I’m Mad, which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I’ve heard quite a lot – it’s basically an outright rape threat. So if that’s something that will upset you, please steer clear, while knowing you’re missing little artistically.)

Twenty Flight Rock was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can’t Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn’t chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn’t chart doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impression, and we’ll see in the last chapter of this book how it helped bring together two teenagers named John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

That’s the impact that The Girl Can’t Help It had, and the impact that Twenty Flight Rock had. But Eddie Cochran’s career was just starting, and we’ll see more of him in future chapters…

I Put A Spell on You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Before we get into the story of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, I like to acknowledge when I’ve relied heavily on a single source for a chapter, and in this case the source I’m relying on most is Steve Bergsman’s book I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. If you like this chapter, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman’s book, which has a lot more information. I will also point out here that this chapter deals with a misogynist and abuser, who was worse and more open about it than many of those we have covered. If you might get upset by that, please skip to the next chapter.

There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there’s a Sam and the Womp or Simon Park Orchestra.

But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson.

It’s hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months.

According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you read here is provisional.

What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his