Okay, how
does my choice of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Crazy Man, Crazy” (1953) as the
first rock & roll record look to me after almost two months?
Well, to
begin with, I don’t expect any of my blogposts to have settled the issue once
and for all. Music fans will
continue to dispute at what point the popular music circa the 1950s morphed
into what we now think of as rock & roll. And said fans would probably consider the musings of a
musical neophyte as last on the list of voices to be heeded. So, I’m well aware that my
contemplations on the subject of any possible “first” rock & roll record
carry as much weight as a feather in zero gravity.
Still,
I’m struck by how the issue of race informed my own estimations of what
constitutes rock & roll. And
as I said before, race, for better or worse, plays a very important role in the
formation of rock & roll because the music was the result of a racially segregated
entertainment industry (an entertainment industry that some may still criticize
as racially segregated in a less overt way). Moreover, the rock & roll era is still widely seen as
the moment when large numbers of white teenagers began listening to backbeat-heavy
music by African American artists and by white artists playing music inspired
or written by blacks. So, this
widespread historical perception — which I have adopted in part — has a
built-in racial bias.
In
particular, my criterion of the “first” rock & roll record not being a
rhythm & blues cover, to reflect the music’s adoption by white audiences,
automatically disadvantages a number of would-be candidates by black artists,
since R&B was regarded as upbeat music primarily played by and for
blacks.
 |
| Goree Carter |
If I
wanted to limit my criteria to an (1) upbeat, (2) backbeat-heavy (3) song for
teens (or at least non-adult-oriented song) (4) where no single foundational
style of music — rhythm & blues, country & western, swing, mainstream
pop — stands out from any of the others and (5) played in what is now regarded
as a rock arrangement (in other words, without a non-R&B cover being a
factor), I could just as easily have chosen Texas singer-guitarist Goree Carter’s
“Rock Awhile” from 1949, four years before “Crazy Man, Crazy.” While “Rock Awhile’s” lyrics aren’t
explicitly targeted at teenagers, the 18-year-old Carter singing (in a
non-race-specific context) about his “baby” coming home captures a youthful,
romantic exuberance that would become a rock & roll mainstay.
More
importantly, Carter’s style of electric guitar playing helps to set the stage
for the instrument’s importance to rock.
As Wikipedia puts it: “Carter's electric guitar style was
influenced by Aaron ‘T-Bone’
Walker, but was over-driven and had a
rougher edge which presaged the sound of rock and roll a few years
later. His single-string runs and two-string ‘blue note’ chords anticipated,
and may have influenced, Chuck Berry.” In fact, according to writer Larry Birnbaum, Berry’s
acknowledged influence on his own guitar playing is Carl Hogan’s opening riff
on Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time)” (1946).
All of
this raises another issue: We can confidently say that Bill Haley and the
Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954), influenced by “Crazy Man, Crazy,” was, in turn, very influential on the development of rock
& roll in general because of its enormous popularity. However, while obviously prescient, “Rock Awhile” was not
very successful commercially, nor was the song covered by a better-selling
act. So, we may presume that the
record was not especially influential in its day. In other words, “Rock Awhile” couldn’t have been the spark
that lit the rock & roll fuse.
The song’s prophetic sound without any apparent progeny supports the
idea that the combining of R&B, country, and postwar pop was coming from
many different musical quarters — as Jim Dawson puts it in his numerous writings on rock & roll, “something was
in the air” — making a “first” record of the genre all the more difficult to
pinpoint.
But
that’s only one way to reconsider my choice. Another way would be to go in the opposite direction and
designate the first rock & roll record as being made by a black artist after “Crazy Man, Crazy,” which is what
Michael Campbell comes close to doing in his textbook Rock and Roll: An Introduction (written with James Brody). Because he views rock & roll as an
aggregate of several specific musical elements, Campbell doesn’t argue for a
single “first” rock & roll record, but rather sees a gradual accumulation
of these elements over time. And
the person most responsible for shaping rock & roll, Campbell argues, is
Chuck Berry, particularly in the guitarist’s shaping of the two-beat rock
beat to replace
the four-beat shuffle rhythm.
A
guitarist with the eclectic St. Louis ensemble the Johnnie Johnson Trio (headed
by its namesake, a boogie-woogie pianist), Berry made his way north to Chicago
and a contract with Chess Records in 1955. Music historians agree that Berry was an uncommon figure
because he was an African American artist who showed a genuine affinity for
Euro-American country music, and since he played in a band specializing in
boogie-woogie, Berry combined the two styles of music in his own way. In fact, his first record, “Maybellene”
(1955), was a reworking of the country record “Ida Red” (1938) by Bob Wills and
the Texas Playboys.
In Rock
and Roll: An Introduction, here is how Campbell describes the elements that form rock &
roll in Berry’s “Maybellene”:
An
Aggressive Guitar Sound [:] The song [“Maybellene”] begins with an unaccompanied guitar
riff. There are two features of
the riff that stand out. One is
the edge to the sound — not as distorted as [Willie] Kizart’s guitar in “Rocket 88” [1951; see Part V] but far from mellow. It is a much more aggressive sound than that heard in pop,
country, or even most rhythm and blues.
The exception, of course, is electric blues; Berry’s sound is closer to
the guitar style of electric blues guitarists like T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters than any other guitar style of the era. This is one important area of influence.
The other
is a Berry trademark: the use of double notes. When Berry plays two notes simultaneously, it makes the
sound thicker, which in turn gives it more impact. His way of blending the notes (heard here mainly in the
guitar solo) is reminiscent of the slide (or bottleneck) guitar styles of blues
guitarists.
A Full
Rhythm Section
[:] Almost immediately, the other instruments enter: piano, [upright] string
bass, drums, maracas…. Maracas
aside, this is, with Berry, the instrumentation of the fifties electric blues
band: full rhythm section but with no saxophone. And as in the electric blues band, the electric guitar is
the most prominent instrument.
That the recording would feature blues-band instrumentation is not
surprising: Berry brought pianist Johnny [sic] Johnson, his longtime associate, with
him from St. Louis; bassist Willie Dixon, who wrote Waters’ “(I’m Your’) Hoochie Coochie Man,” and drummer Fred Bellow were Chess house musicians during
the fifties.
A
Souped-Up Honky-Tonk Beat [:] “Maybellene” features Berry’s two-beat rhythm used in honky
tonk. Except for the guitar solo,
where the band shifts into a four-beat swing rhythm, the song features a
two-beat rhythm. The difference
between Berry’s version of a two-beat rhythm and the one in general use is
mainly in the backbeat, which is far stronger than in a pop or country two
beat. With both Berry and the
drummer emphasizing it, it is more prominent than the beat. It stands out more in the two-beat
sections than it does in the swing beat sections because it is in opposition to
the beat, rather than in addition to the beat. The heavy backbeat would be one component of Berry’s revolutionary
rock beat.
Verse/Chorus
Blues Form [:]
The title-phrase refrain frames several episodes in Berry’s humorous account of
a car chase. The refrain is a
straightforward 12-bar blues. The
verses are also twelve bars in length, but the accompaniment stays on one chord
throughout. Almost all of Berry’s
fifties hits use some kind of blues form.
Teen-Themed
Lyrics [:] The
refrain of “Maybellene” seems to set up a story about lost love. However, the verses are strictly car
talk. We learn much more about the
two cars — a Coupe de Ville Cadillac and a V8 Ford — than we do about their
drivers, and we never do find out what happens when Berry finally catches
Maybellene. [pp. 110-11]
In
Campbell’s view, Berry began shaping the rock beat with “Maybellene,” — often
thereafter with his backing musicians still playing in a four-beat shuffle
rhythm — but he continued to refine this new beat through such records as “Roll Over, Beethoven” (1956) and “Rock & Roll Music” (1957) before finally
perfecting it with “Johnny B. Goode” (1958).
In the
long nights at the Cosmopolitan Club [where the Johnnie Johnson Trio played],
Berry must have heard hours and hours of Johnny [sic] Johnson’s boogie-woogie
[piano]. What Berry did was
transfer boogie-woogie left-hand patterns, similar to the ones heard in [Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson’s] “Roll ’Em, Pete” [1938], to the guitar. The repetitive boogie-woogie patterns
became, in Berry’s adaptation, the first authentic rock-based rhythm guitar
style; even in medium-tempo songs, he typically divides the beat into two equal
parts. In “Roll Over, Beethoven,”
this pattern is very much in the background. In “Rock-and-Roll Music,” it is more prominent, but there is
no lead guitar.
Finally,
in “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), Berry … puts the whole package together: great
solo breaks, plus the boogie pattern prominent under both lead guitar and vocal
lines. This recording brings
together some of the essential features of rock style: backbeat; the eight-beat
rhythm, completely purged of any swing influence; strong rhythm guitar; and
assertive lead guitar. It was this
sound, above all, that would inspire the next generation of rockers. [p. 112]
So, would
Campbell consider “Johnny B. Goode” to be the true first rock & roll
record? Again, Campbell doesn’t
designate a first rock & roll record because he sees the music developing
in several quarters. Another
contributor to the shaping of rock rhythm, in Campbell’s view, was
pianist-screamer Little Richard.
After a series of unremarkable discs for other labels, Little Richard
broke out in a big way with his first platter for Specialty Records, the wild,
chaotic “Tutti Fruitti” (1955), a reworking of a bawdy nightclub foot-stomper,
commanded by the singer’s raucous, falsetto-whooping voice. Little Richard’s subsequent records,
such as “Long Tall Sally” (1956) and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” (1958), followed
in the same anarchic roller-coaster ride.
As Campbell describes the style:
The
[subtle] changes in Little Richard’s music [over the years] are due mainly to
the musicians behind him. Unlike
Chuck Berry’s backup band, they quickly adapted to Little Richard’s new
rhythm. In his first hits, such as
“Tutti Fruitti,” the band plays in a rhythm-and-blues style: walking bass,
heavy backbeat on the drums, and so on.
However, in some later hits, such as “Lucille” (1957), the entire band
is thinking and playing rock rhythm.
Bass, guitar, and sax play a repetitive riff in a low register, while
Little Richard hammers away [on his piano], and the drummer taps out a rock
beat and a strong backbeat. The
contrast with Berry’s songs from the same year is clear: Berry is
single-handedly trying to establish a new beat; in songs like “Lucille,” the
entire band is on the same page as Little Richard. [p. 116]
The
arguments against my choice of “Crazy Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley and the Comets
as the first rock & roll record go on and on, like an all-night jam
session. So, when it comes to
disputes regarding the identity of the “first” rock & roll record, the
caterwauling among the music critics will continue. I have no illusions about putting an end to the
discussion. And I have just
undermined my own argument for “Crazy Man, Crazy” by presenting some other
possibilities. But my hunt for a
deserving candidate has been a fun look back to an intriguing moment for
American popular music that’s too often overlooked by our current listening
culture’s preoccupation with post-Beatles “rock,” music which is often
over-produced in the mixing booth.
Looking
back, I’m struck by how the emergence of rock & roll was marked by a burst
of energy and desperation that was instantly seized by a young audience
discontented, often in an inchoate way, with the adult society around
them. When it broke out, rock
& roll’s most recognizable feature — the unignorable drum beat throughout
the songs — acted as a kind of propulsive agitator against the everyday, a
pulsating spur that goaded its young audience to seize the moment. It’s no wonder that rock music fueled
the counterculture of the 1960s that protested the Vietnam War.
