Roll Over Beethoven

Frank Zappa said that rock and roll arrived in 1955 with the opening sequence of The Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed on the screen, Bill Haley and the Comets started blasting "one, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock" on the soundtrack. Rock and roll had been around for a few years by then, but as Zappa--who was 15 at the time--pointed out, no one had ever heard it that loud before. It was a qualitative difference. Isn't playing rock and roll this loud in a movie theater against the law? That the movie was about juvenile delinquency made it perfect.

There was a rebellion against the gray-flannel conformism of the Fifties, and rock and roll was a big part of it. The Beats wore black turtlenecks, bebop berets and goatees à la Dizzy. When they weren't dropping bennies and racing across the country for the fun of it, they sat in their coffeehouses talking urgently about Kierkegaard and Zen Buddhism. "What are you rebelling against?" a stupefied resident of the terrorized town asks Hell's Angel Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954). Brando, after a moment of cool, lizard-lidded consideration, replies: "Whaddya got?"

There was another scene in The Blackboard Jungle that spoke to the new direction of popular music: One of the teachers brings in his precious collection of jazz 78s to play for his class full of tough JDs, only to watch in horror as they sail his records around the room, smashing every one--the new barbarians storming the gates and destroying history.

Certainly most jazz fans felt that way about the coming of rock and roll. But jazz had changed since its beginnings back in New Orleans at the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 1940, jazz had always been dance music--but the economy and the beboppers redirected it by the Fifties.

The moving meditations of Miles Davis on Kind of Blue, for example, are no doubt higher on the cosmic musical scale than Sh-Boom by the Chords. But you can dance to Sh-Boom.

Jazz basically sat down in the Fifties. The leading edge--Davis, Stan Kenton, the MJQ, the Jazz Messengers, Dave Brubeck--was becoming chamber music, something to sit and listen to carefully. It was far removed from its New Orleans whorehouse origins, where Jelly Roll Morton played piano and sang sexy songs while the barely dressed working girls danced and drank with their Johns before heading upstairs.

By the early Fifties, most of the big bands that were the mainstay of Thirties and Forties dance music had crashed and burned. Duke Ellington hung in with his, as did Benny Goodman, but in the early Fifties even Count Basie cut back to a smaller aggregation.

This change left what might be called a dance gap. The prevailing glop on the pop charts didn't cut it. The number-one record in 1950, for instance, was Goodnight Irene by the Weavers. Other top-30 hits from this banner year included If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake by Eileen Barton, Patti Page's Tennessee Waltz and Hoop-Dee-Doo by Perry Como. Hoop-dee-doo, indeed.

But there was something else going on, a new postwar style of black urban music called rhythm and blues. As the white audience discovered it, it became rock and roll.

Jazz from the beginning had drunk deeply from the blues. In fact, it was called the blues by early players until in 1917 a newspaperman came up with the name jazz--a black slang term for screwing. Even later, jazzmen such as Charlie Parker and Count Basie called what they played the blues. From the Thirties on, rockin' and rollin' had meant the same thing as jazzing in blues, and then R&B, songs--so there was a certain historical continuity when DJ Alan Freed named the new music rock and roll. Like jazz before it, rhythm and blues or rock and roll was sexy and cheerfully disreputable.

And just as jazz had always done, R&B drew heavily on the blues for inspiration. It was basically the country blues gone urban--as early New Orleans jazz had been at the turn of the century--only this time with electricity added.

As it did in the Twenties with jazz, Chicago in the late Forties and early Fifties figured prominently in the evolution of rhythm and blues. This time, it took sociology and technology to conspire in its creation.

In the Forties, Southern blacks, mainly from Mississippi, began migrating north in search of jobs, and they brought with them the music of the Mississippi Delta (the region between Vicksburg and Memphis--the heart of country blues).

Even though it offered relatively good-paying work, life in Chicago was tougher than it had been in Mississippi--and you could hear it in the new urban blues called R&B. The South Side clubs where these bluesmen played were loud, smoky joints, and it took an amplified electric guitar and a hard-driving group to cut through the din.

Muddy Waters personified the new style. Born McKinley Morganfield in 1915 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Muddy was one of ten kids in a sharecropper's family. By the age of 17 he had taught himself to play harmonica and acoustic guitar, and he was getting local party gigs around Clarksdale. In 1942 he moved to Chicago, where he drove a truck for an uncle and played his country blues for tips at parties and at the outdoor Sunday-morning Maxwell Street market. In 1945 his uncle gave him an electric guitar, and he began playing South Side lounges. As he succinctly put it, "You can't hear an acoustic in a bar." By 1950 Muddy was recording for Chess Records in the hard new urban style. His landmark song Rollin' Stone of that year was appropriated by a bunch of schoolboy Brits more than ten years later, next as the title of one of Bob Dylan's first electric hits, and then for the name of a rock magazine.

They call him the Killer. When he came on the scene in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis (left) was compared to little Richard. His career as a rocker ended abruptly when he married his 13-year-old cousin, but he went on to make it as a country-and-western star.

Perhaps the grittiest of this new generation of Chicago bluesmen was Chester Burnett--a.k.a. Howlin' Wolf. Born in Mississippi in 1910, he, too, had started out playing country blues, influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and Sonny Boy Williamson. In the mid-Thirties he toured the South with Robert Johnson, the writer of Crossroads. By the late Forties, Howlin' Wolf had gone electric with a vengeance. His gravelly, growling voice appeared on such early-Fifties hits as Moanin' at Midnight, How Many More Years? and Smokestack Lightning--the last taken as a signature tune by the Yardbirds. His singing was somewhere beyond primal, a style improbably influenced in part by white Southern singer Jimmie Rodgers, also from Mississippi, who was billed in the late Twenties as America's Blue Yodeler. Wolf tried to imitate Rodgers' yodeling, but it mutated into those growls and moans instead. There were others, of course, and not all of them lived in Chicago. Guitarist T-Bone Walker called Dallas home. According to blues historian Pete Welding, "Back in the late Thirties, almost alone, he forged the fleet, jazz-based guitar style that has since become the dominant approach to the instrument."

T-Bone came from a musical family. As a ten-year-old he was a lead boy for the seminal blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, helping him get around Central Avenue, where Jefferson would play at various joints with a money cup hanging from his guitar. T-Bone and Charlie Christian--generally considered the first modern jazz guitarist--used to do two-man pass-the-hat street performances, alternating on bass and guitar with a dance routine thrown in. As a teenager, Walker toured Texas with Dr. Breeding's Big B Tonic Medicine Show, and after winning first prize in a Cab Calloway amateur show in 1930, he worked briefly with that band. By the mid-Thirties he was part of the Les Hite Cotton Club Orchestra, and in 1943 and 1944 he was guitarist for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra--whose leader had pretty much invented big-band jazz in the late Twenties. Remarkably, T-Bone's career spanned it all: from country blues to big-band jazz to the electric rhythm and blues that was to lead inevitably to rock and roll.

And while the pop charts snored on in the late Forties--the top four pop hits in 1949 were Riders in the Sky by Vaughn Monroe, Frankie Laine's That Lucky Old Sun, Vic Damone's You're Breaking My Heart and Some Enchanted Evening by Perry Como--black music continued toward rock and roll with the birth of doo-wop.

In the early Forties the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots were the first important black vocal groups, but compared with what followed, they sang in a straight white pop style--like black Andrews Sisters, as critic Ed Ward put it. After the war, the Ravens--with the bass-lead and gospel-influenced sound of their 1949 rhythm-and-blues hit version of Old Man River--inspired all the subsequent bird groups (the Orioles, the Robins--who later became the Coasters--the Meadowlarks, the Crows, even the Penguins).

Other heavy-duty R&B vocal groups of the early Fifties included the Dominoes, whose 1951 hit Sixty Minute Man remains a sexy anthem of male bragging, and the Drifters, formed in 1953 after Clyde McPhatter left the Dominoes and put together a group using members of the Civitones, a gospel group. (The Drifters' 1954 Honey Love is also up there on the list.) Other groups included the Five Keys, whose 1951 R&B hit Glory of Love might have been recorded in church--as might have the original 1953 A Sunday Kind of Love by the Harptones. As Arnold Shaw says in his excellent history of rhythm and blues, Honkers and Shouters: "The most important source of R&B was gospel music, whose repertoire, form and style (continued on page 130)Jazz & Rock(continued from page 112) left an indelible print." It is impossible to overemphasize the contribution of gospel music to the development of R&B. A quintessential example is Ray Charles' 1955 hit I Got a Woman, which was a secular reworking of an old gospel standard that begins, "I've got a Savior, way over Jordan."

Oddly enough, a moonfaced hillbilly singer with a spit curl in the middle of his forehead had a lot to do with turning white audiences on to a version of black rhythm and blues. Bill Haley's 1952 song Rock-a-Beatin' Boogie included the verse "Rock, rock, rock, everybody/Roll, roll, roll, everybody," which inspired Alan Freed to name the music rock and roll on his late-night radio show in Cleveland.

Freed got the idea for his radio show The Moon Dog Show from Leo Mintz, owner of the Record Rendezvous in Cleveland. Mintz noticed that increasing numbers of white teenagers were buying rhythm-and-blues records made by and for blacks. He told Freed about this and urged him to do a show of all-black music aimed at a white audience, for which the Record Rendezvous would be the main advertiser. The Moon Dog Show debuted in June 1951 and soon developed a devoted underground following among white kids--and not just in Cleveland. WJW was a 50,000-watt clear-channel station that, given the nighttime AM signal bounce, could occasionally be heard as far east as New York and Boston.

Soon Freed was promoting and emceeing his own concerts with black R&B performers. They were immediately popular--"several thousand" kids had to be turned away from an early one in Akron--and the audiences were predominantly white. By 1955 he had a radio show on New York's Wins and was promoting concerts around the area, particularly at the Brooklyn Paramount. It was at one of these that former St. Louis hairdresser Chuck Berry first got national exposure, duck-walking the length of the stage in an iridescent suit, hopping along with his cherry-red Gibson.

The year of 1955 was probably the best one rock and roll has ever had--but in terms of record sales 1954 was the year it made its first dent in mainstream pop music. White kids--the biggest and most affluent market--were still buying Secret Love by Doris Day, but that year they were also picking up Gee by the Crows and Sh-Boom by a New York group called the Chords. Sh-Boom is often considered, based on sales, to be the first rock record, since it was the first R&B single by a black group to make it big on the predominantly white pop charts. A contender from the white side of the street, also based on sales, is Carl Perkins' 1956 Blue Suede Shoes.

The popularity of Sh-Boom encouraged another grand tradition in rock and roll--the bland white cover version of black music. These made fortunes for such talents as Pat Boone and generally left the originators out of the profit picture. In the case of Sh-Boom, it was covered, and beaten in the charts, by a white Canadian group called the Crew Cuts, who made a briefly successful career out of whitebreading R&B hits, including Oop-Shoop, Ko Ko Mo and Earth Angel. But the hipper rock-and-roll fans knew junk when they heard it and listened to the originals.

One true original, then and now, was Little Richard. Life was suddenly different for teenagers in October 1955 when, for the first time, "Womp, bomp, a-loom-a, b-lomp, bomp, bomp" came over the airwaves. Little Richard might have come down from Mars. And like Jelly Roll Morton's brag that he personally invented jazz, Little Richard's immodest claim to be the first rock-and-roller has a lot of truth to it. No one had ever before sounded like him, pounding a piano and warbling like a bird and singing sexy nonsense at breakneck speed.

Born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia--also the hometown of James Brown and Otis Redding--Little Richard was washing dishes at the Macon bus station in 1955 when Art Rupe of Los Angeles' Specialty Records listened to a tape Richard had sent and signed him up. Little Richard had a number of conflicting desires--being both homosexual (mostly) and religious (also mostly) in the secular world of rock and roll, and, for a time, being overly interested in drugs. His career took off on a string of hits (quickly covered and sanitized by whitebread performers, including, of course, Elvis), beginning with Tutti-Frutti in 1955 and including Long Tall Sally, Slippin' and Slidin', Rip it Up, Ready Teddy and The Girl Can't Help it. But in 1957 another Specialty artist, Joe Lutcher, convinced him that this music was evil. Blues singers since Robert Johnson (including Little Richard's great white counterpart, crazy piano pounder Jerry Lee Lewis) have felt that blues, R&B and rock and roll are corruptions of church music. They believe that God listens to gospel and the devil plays the blues. But luckily for audiences, if not for churchgoers, Richard landed on the showbiz side of things. He even turned out an excellent Beatles-influenced album in 1970, called The Rill Thing.

The other progenitor of true rock and roll, also still going strong in his mid-60s, is Chuck Berry. John Lennon once said, "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." Neither the Beatles nor the Stones (nor 7 million other groups) could have existed without him. He was born in 1926 in St. Louis, where he grew up listening both to the blues and to white hillbilly music.

In 1955 Berry and some of his buddies took a road trip to Chicago--in Chuck's spanking-new 1955 Ford--to check out the scene. They made the rounds of the South Side clubs, hearing Elmore James and Howlin' Wolf, and then saw a sign at the Palladium on Wabash announcing Muddy Waters Tonight. At the end of the night Chuck bashfully approached him, told him what a fan he was and blurted out that he'd like to make a record himself. Did Muddy know how he could do that? Muddy said, "Yeah, go see Leonard Chess, Chess Records over on 47th and Cottage." Chuck was there first thing Monday morning, and Leonard Chess said he'd be happy to listen to a tape of Chuck's material--and that it would be better if the songs were originals. Chuck hurried back to St. Louis, got a group together and taped several songs he had written, and was back in Chicago before the end of the week. Of the batch, Chess most liked a hillbilly original Chuck had adapted from a country standard called Ida Red but hadn't changed the title of. Chess wanted the name changed because the title was in the public domain and nobody could collect royalties that way. In another of rock and roll's most famous stories, Chuck thought for a bit and remembered the name of a cow in a story he had read in third grade, and Ida Red became Maybellene. By August 1955 Maybellene was the number-one R&B hit in the country.

Along with his ring-like-a-bell guitar playing, Chuck was also one of the best short-story writers on earth--a talent he translated into three-minute songs better than anyone else since Cole Porter. He sang the story of chasing (continued on page 240)Jazz & Rock(continued from page 130) Maybellene in his Ford, and of the pains of school in School Days, and told Beethoven to roll over and dig these rhythm and blues. His consummate celebration of a guitar-playing rocker whose mother had told him--as Chuck's mother really had--that "maybe some day your name will be in lights" came on Johnny B. Goode, in 1958.

By 1956 several forms of rock and roll had been established. Charlie Gillett, in his landmark history, The Sound of the City, identifies five distinct styles: northern band rock and roll (exemplified by Bill Haley), the New Orleans dance blues (Fats Domino, Lloyd Price), Memphis country-rock (Carl Perkins, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis), Chicago rhythm and blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James) and vocal group rock and roll (the Meadowlarks, the Flamingoes). As he points out, "All five styles, and the variants associated with each of them, depended for their dance beat on contemporary Negro dance rhythms."

And while, just as in jazz, the bottom line was the blues, several of these styles owed more than a little to white country music--a form of popular music that never intruded much on jazz. But this new collision in the late Forties and early Fifties of white country and black rhythm and blues--in terms both of music and sales--was like atomic fusion, with rock and roll as the H-bomb result.

Between the beginning of World War Two and the late Fifties, technology was changing even faster than the music. Electric instruments--which could be played louder--were elbowing aside traditional ones. The saxophone, lead instrument in jazz and R&B, gradually gave way to the electric guitar. By the mid-Fifties, it was becoming the preferred lead instrument in rock and roll. In 1951 the Fender company introduced the electric bass, popularized on Link Wray's Rumble from 1958. Wray's song was a simple but enjoyably ominous instrumental featuring the new Fender bass, which revolutionized the bottom on rock songs, quickly making the fat old standup acoustic obsolete.

Along with developing the jet engine and the unmanned rocket in World War Two, the Germans came up with cellophane recording tape, which was far superior to the wire recorders developed in the U.S. Until then masters had been cut on acetates, which pretty much required the performers to get it perfect in a single take or start all over again--though the performances could be spliced crudely. But with tape, fidelity was better and splicing was a relative breeze. Overdubbing was not far away--in fact, it was first popularized in the early Fifties by guitarist Les Paul and his wife, singer Mary Ford.

They made pop hits such as 1950's Tennessee Waltz and Mockin' Bird Hill, on which Paul sounded like half a dozen guitarists playing at once; and he developed the reverb-echo sound that's been used ever since, reaching its zenith in the work of Phil Spector in the early Sixties. Les Paul also designed electric guitars that are still collector's items among rockers who can afford them. A good guitarist in the mold of jazz and country, Chet Atkins style, Les Paul was never a rocker himself. But his technical innovations profoundly influenced the sound of rock and roll to come.

The technology had been there for a few years, but in 1948 Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record, which moved at 33-1/3 rpm instead of at 78.

Until 1955 long-playing albums were chiefly aimed at the adult pop market, on the presumption that teenagers couldn't afford either the price of an album or the new equipment needed to play it on--even though Webcor put out a cheap three-speed portable that was in a lot of teenagers' bedrooms. The Fifties were also the beginning of the hi-fi mania that continues today. Stereo was introduced in 1957.

The first rock-and-roll album on a major label wasn't released until 1956, when Decca put out Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock. But later that year rock albums by Elvis, the Platters and others were making the charts.

Meanwhile, Columbia's rival RCA had come up with another technical innovation aimed at teenagers--the 45 single, along with its inexpensive loss-leader RCA player with a fat plastic stump of a spindle that played only 45s.

For a while, 45s and 78s slugged it out in record stores, with most companies putting out singles in both formats. The 45s were clearly superior--plastic, practically indestructible, smaller and novel. But it took a while from their introduction in 1949 for them to send the 78 the way of the Edison cylinder.

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Elvis, for better or worse, is the king of rock and roll--in terms of sales and popularity at any rate. But without Sam Phillips, he might never have been crowned.

Sam Phillips was a white Memphis radio engineer who in the early Fifties started a little recording studio called Sun and began recording black R&B artists. In the years before Elvis came bopping in to record a song for his mama's birthday--as in the now threadbare story--Phillips had recorded Howlin' Wolf (selling the masters for distribution to Chess Records in Chicago), Elmore James (with that distinctive raw slide-guitar style best known on his Dust My Broom) and James Cotton. All of them are now more associated with the Chicago blues scene of the early Fifties than with Sun Records.

Like Alan Freed, Phillips began thinking about the growing white audience for this black music. If only he could find someone white who sounded black--or close to it.

Enter Elvis. The sides he cut for Sun Records before moving on in 1956 to RCA are the sound of rockabilly being born. The music had that country feel, but was bluesier, less stiff than Haley's. It was a sound that inspired generations of rockers.

Presley's 1954 Sun recording of Milk Cow Blues Boogie is a brief lesson in the evolution from country to rockabilly. He starts out doing the old country standard in the traditional leisurely acoustic style, but after a couple of bars abruptly cuts it off, saying, "No, let's get real gone for a change!"--whereupon the tempo doubles into jump blues, the electric combo kicks in swinging and Presley turns the old tune into something else entirely--country rock.

Not too long afterward, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash were also recording for Sun. There was the famous Million Dollar Quartet improv session, where these three plus Elvis jammed for the fun of it in the studio while Phillips kept the tapes rolling.

But while the other three remained true to their school, Elvis--unfortunately, many feel--went on to other things.

Up until 1955 he'd been a regional hit, appearing on TV's Louisiana Hay-ride, with his records selling mostly in the South--his Mystery Train was climbing the country charts at the same time Maybellene was becoming a hit. During a swing through Texas he played a club in Lubbock where Buddy Holly was in the audience, and they talked between sets. Holly gigged around Lubbock playing Western swing and current R&B and country tunes--including some of Elvis' Sun hits. The next day both Holly's group and Elvis played the opening of a Pontiac dealership in Lubbock, no doubt the most musically auspicious Pontiac dealership opening on record--and a sign of Elvis' relative obscurity at the time, despite his modest hits on Sun.

The major labels had done their best to ignore all forms of this new teenage music. Decca, however, was an exception and had signed Bill Haley away from his small independent label. In late 1955 RCA paid Elvis the unheard-of sum of $35,000--with a new Cadillac thrown in--to sign with them. The deal included the rights to everything he had recorded on Sun.

With the RCA release of Heartbreak Hotel early in 1956--which went on to become the number-one best-selling pop record of the year--Elvis became a national phenomenon the likes of which hadn't been seen since the early Forties, when a young Frank Sinatra made an entire generation swoon.

But Hound Dog and its flip side, Don't Be Cruel, which wound up as the number-two pop record of the year--a costly miscalculation for RCA, which could have released them as two separate 45s and doubled its money--were the beginning of the end of Elvis as a true rocker. Many hits followed, but few caught the unconstrained spirit of his Sun sides--largely because Sam Phillips basically gave the musicians free rein and let the tapes roll. But at RCA, producers ran things--and Elvis soon had a corny backup group called the Jordanaires and was singing sentimental nonsense such as Love Me Tender and Old Shep. He developed such a huge, loyal following that in the early Sixties even dreck like Rock-a-Hula Baby, Bossa Nova Baby and Viva Las Vegas became hits.

By 1957 much of what passed for rock and roll was also sliding downhill into pop with electric guitars. That year Elvis, already on his way to being a pop musician, had a number-one album called Elvis' Christmas Album. The original raw wildness of the music between 1954 and 1956 was blanched out as the major labels took over the form and pushed most of the indies out of the picture.

The standard reading on the years between 1957 and 1962 is that rock and roll went into a decline--with certain magnificent exceptions, of course--and bottomed out in 1959 or 1960. It was saved from certain death in 1964 by the Beatles and then the Stones--Brits who rediscovered the excitement of the first rock and roll--mainly Chuck Berry in the Beatles' case, and mainly the Fifties Chicago bluesmen in the case of the Rolling Stones.

The notion that rock languished between 1957 and 1962 ignores the occasional interesting single that appeared during that time--even during the most fallow period between 1960 and 1962. But the notion is persistent because it's almost true. As people realized how much money was to be made in this African-American music done by white people, they jumped on the bandwagon--or should we say Bandstand? The result could only be a degradation of rock's essential energy and integrity.

From wild and crazy Alan Freed pounding on a phone book and slugging Scotch in the radio studio late at night, we went to clean, decent, soft-spoken Dick Clark in a suit on afternoon television. True, Clark always had the hottest new groups on his show--those that were selling, no matter how good or awful--but he was also responsible for a number of rock-Frankenstein creations, as epitomized by Fabian, a handsome 16-year-old from Philadelphia who had no observable talent or feel for the music, but whose lamentable Turn Me Loose and Tiger were both big hits in 1959.

From 1957 on, we entered the era of the manufactured star, created in hopes of pleasing those unpredictably strange but profitable teen tastes in music.

The Coasters were a manufactured group, but a great one. They were put together by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a songwriting team that had a knack for teen songs--they had written Hound Dog back in 1952--who had moved on to producing records on their own label, Spark. In 1955 they raided one of their own groups, the Robins, and created the Coasters--so named because they'd all met on the West Coast--and signed them to the new Atco label with themselves as independent producers, one of the first such deals ever cut. The Coasters had a remarkable string of hits in just five years, starting with 1957's two-sided wonder, Searchin' and Young Blood, and continuing through Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Poison Ivy, Shoppin' for Clothes and 1961's Little Egypt.

But if the top 100 singles of 1960 were studded with Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Paul Anka, Freddy Cannon, Bobby Vee, Brian Hyland and Neil Sedaka, as well as Chubby Checker doing The Twist--and while the number-one record of the year was Percy Faith's Theme from a Summer Place--there were also hits by the Everly Brothers, Jimmy Jones' Handy Man, Roy Orbison's Only the Lonely, Finger Poppin' Time by Hank Ballard, Fats Domino doing Walking to New Orleans and others fit to listen to. There were also the beginnings of new sounds.

Near the bottom of 1960's top 100 was Barrett Strong's Money, which had been co-written by Berry Gordy, Jr., and was the beginning of what would become Gordy's Motown empire during the Sixties.

But perhaps the most enduring rock between 1960 and 1963 was the girl-group sound, the best of which still sounds fresh today. Phil Spector was responsible for some of the best. A group he molded called the Crystals defined the form with their hits He's a Rebel, He's Sure the Boy I Love, Da Doo Ron Ron and Then He Kissed Me. Another of his groups, the Ronettes, had a 1963 hit with Be My Baby. There were also the Shirelles, the Cookies, the Orlons, the Marvelettes (a Berry Gordy group), Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (whose 1963 Heat Wave is all-time) and of course the most shining example of all, the Supremes, who were around in the early Sixties but whose biggest hits didn't start coming until 1964.

The California sound was coming, too. From January 1962, with the primitive Surfin' Safari, until the end of 1964, the Beach Boys registered ten hits.

So things weren't quite as bad as they were supposed to be in rock between 1960 and 1964, even if, in general, they were pretty dismal.

But early in 1964, there was a bright spot on the horizon. The Beatles were coming, and boy did we need them. Starting in January 1964, they had an unparalleled string of hits. The early ones were directly influenced by classic American rock, or were reworkings of the new standards--including their own March 1964 hit version of Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven and Carl Perkins' Matchbox from September 1964. But even those first singles--beginning with I Want to Hold Your Hand--had a special quality, a newness. The band's reception on The Ed Sullivan Show recalled that of Elvis, turned up several notches. Audiences at their stadium shows during their first American tour simply went berserk. Perhaps most remarkable about them was their swift evolution. Within two years of their American debut, they went from innocence to experience--from 1964's I Want to Hold Your Hand to 1965's Yesterday and 1966's Eleanor Rigby. The next year brought Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Few could dispute that the Beatles had ushered in the modern era.

"That'll be the day / That you make me cry / That'll be the day / That you make me sigh / you say you're gonna leave me / but you know it's a lie / that'll be the day that I die." --Buddy Holly

"You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain / Too much lovin' drives a man insane / You broke my will / But what a thrill / Goodness gracious, great balls of fire." --Jerry Lee Lewis

I Love Paul

"Yeah, you got that something / I think you'll understand / When I feel that something / I wanna hold your hand / I wanna hold your hand / I wanna hold your hand." the Beatles

"Life was suddenly different for teenagers in October 1955 when 'Tutti-Frutti' came over the airwaves."

"If only Sam Phillips could find someone white who sounded black--or close to it. Enter Elvis."