Forum; The History of Rock and Roll with Music Critic Ed Ward

熟悉 This week on Forum, the history of rock and roll, the Los Angeles was where it started. The New York area was very conservative because they were more tied into the radio end of things as opposed to the film and the record end of things. And they were very much into class entertainment, in other words, network-type stuff like that.

The Los Angeles was where it started. The New York area was very conservative because they were more tied into the radio end of things as opposed to the film and record end of things. And they were very much into class entertainment, in other words, network-type stuff. Music critic Ed Ward, one of the authors of Rock of Ages, The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll. Today, Forum features a discussion with a writer who has documented a major area of American popular culture. The rural as well as urban black and white roots of rock and roll have become more or less obscured to many of today's young devotees of the hits on the charts, but the trail is nonetheless there to be followed.

Rolling Stone Press gave music critic and freelance writer Ed Ward the opportunity to write a definitive history of the early stages of this ongoing cultural phenomenon. Critic Ed Ward describes how the book came to life. Rolling Stone Press, which existed when the project started, decided they wanted another history of rock and roll. Rolling Stone had a previous history of rock and roll to which I had contributed. It came out in 1976, which is a particularly unfortunate time for it to come out because punk happened about three months after it came out and totally changed both what was happening in the mainstream and what was happening on the fringes. They did revise that The Rolling Stone illustrated history of rock and roll, but that was a collection of essays by individual voices and it tended to be a little contradictory and it clashed. It was a pretty book. Well, it had some great photographs in it, but all in all, it wasn't quite as successful. They wanted a single narrative, something that flowed from one end to the other and this flows from one end to the other and then one end to another and then one end to another because it's three authors. At any rate, they decide they would do this and they got a contract from some of books and then they said about finding people to hire to write it.

This isn't the normal sort of arrangement that authors have. This was a work for hires, it's called. So as a result, the royalties that we all get off of it are very, very, very, very small. Well, your portion of this is the beginning of it all. Is there any place else that you were able to go to that had tracked the history of rock and roll back into those ethnic waters of the early places? No, there are books on blues, there are books on jazz, there are books on country music, but nobody ever thought of it as an organic whole. Most of the rock and roll histories, well, most of them are very poorly researched and very poorly written and most of them start with Elvis. If you try and find out anything at all about Louis Jordan or Winony Harris or Carl Smith, Floyd Tillman or any of the real pioneers, the people, I mean Bob Willes has been well documented, Ernest Tubb, there's been nothing really solid written on. So a lot of the early black and white popular performers are just sort of out there in a limbo and you have to collate a million sources and even then you find that it looks sort of like Swiss cheese.

It holds together, but it's got big, big holes in it. For this, thank heavens for the University of Texas Fine Arts Library and they're absolutely virginal collection of Billboard magazines on microfilm, which I was apparently the first human being ever to touch. Now those are primary sources for you. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Billboard has been a trade magazine starting off of the circus trade in 1898 I believe when it started. And then moving on into other areas of entertainment radio and later the record industry as it grew, it's probably the best place to see the entertainment industry of the 30s, the 40s and the 50s all under one roof. I mean, we have everything from hell car drivers to television stations to weird rhythm and blues performers. They had excellent documentation of country and rhythm and blues. Excellent. I just couldn't believe it. So there were always charts. No, there weren't always charts, but there were always columns and the columns were written by by people who were very, very dedicated.

The rhythm and blues columnists, they had Bill Simon, Ren Gravat, Paul Ackerman, and Bob Rollons. Bob Rollons was the one who was really there during the most crucial formative years when rhythm and blues started moving out of both the big band blues era and moving towards some success in the pop market. In the early 50s when people like the Orioles and the Ravens started actually charting alongside Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra and people like that. When you say rhythm and blues, are you synonymously speaking of those early race records? Well, I mean, it depends on when we're talking about. I see rhythm and blues as essentially coming out of the Ellington Basie tradition. Basie, of course, had Big Joe Turner as a vocalist at one point, and I would think that it would be very hard to make a case for him as being a pure jazz player. He's very definitely a rough and rowdy bluesman who happened to have Pete Johnson as a phenomenal piano accompanist instead of learning to play the guitar or something, which he wouldn't have done anyway, being based in Kansas City, and then he was lucky enough that Basie got stranded there by the orchestra he was working with and built his own orchestra.

And I think that the people who followed in that tradition, Louis Jordan, of course, is one of the most important, and he's also somebody who came out of a jazz tradition, but was not considered a serious jazz artist, and once again I would have a hard time making a case for him as a serious jazz artist. But I'd say those two in the pre-war era, oh, I guess also T-bone Walker in the pre-war era, would be the people who were playing a sort of rougher, more populist style of black popular music. Then, after the war, that became its own genre. There was Jimmy Rushing singing with Basie, but he was very definitely a jazz artist. Big Joe Turner was working with small bands and playing what became rock and roll, what was rhythm and blues. As I do say in the book, rock and roll started in Los Angeles, simply because there was a great deal of entertainment there because it was Los Angeles, because the war brought a lot of black people there to Watts.

While Watts actually came a little later, but to Central Avenue and the near downtown area, and these people had lots of money, comparatively, to black people in other parts of the country because they were working in San Pedro and other places in the war effort. The War Powers Act stipulated that they had to be paid exactly equal with anybody else, everybody. Because there were a lot of women working in those industries as well, and they had to get parity with the men. A skill is a skill and you get paid for your skill, not for your social standing. This resulted in a lot of musicians coming to Central Avenue and Avalon Avenue to work, and it was just chock-a-block clubs. The first guy, Bob Breco, gave me a tour one night. I picked him up at work. He got off work at the record store where he worked at 11. Then he had to go home and change clothes, and so it was midnight before we jumped in the car.

We drove down to Central, and there are still some blues clubs there. They're really nasty, and they're not, well, it's not a popular music anymore. He knew where all the old theaters were. He knew where all the old night clubs had been. He could point to a vacant lot and say, yeah, that's where Winony Harris used to work every time he came to town. I'm sorry, his name was John Breco. He really knows and loves that stuff, and as a result, I got a real feeling for it. There were record labels out there. The Bahari brothers, who I say were Lebanese. In fact, they were Hungarian. I thought they were all dead, and one of them isn't. He took great exception to what I wrote and wrote me a letter. I'm very happy to say Joe Bahari is still alive. They were there, and there were a lot of fly-by-night types who were in there recording. There were labels like, oh, there was black and white, and there was Aladdin, and that was a Bahari brothers label. They had modern. Art Rupi had specialty. These early labels documented this stuff, and after the war, when the vinyl, it wasn't final, it was shellac, that they pressed the records on and became available again. It didn't cost very much. You didn't pay the artist anything. You brought the guy in there, you paid him 50 bucks, and you sent him on his way, and then it didn't cost a couple hundred bucks to press up enough to see if the market would take it.

If it did, then it didn't cost much to get him repressed, and it was a pretty low overhead business, so a lot of people got into it. I would say Los Angeles was where it started. The New York area was very conservative, because they were more tied into the radio end of things, as opposed to the film and record end of things. They were very much into class entertainment, in other words, network type stuff. That scene in New York was very much dependent upon people like Frank Sinatra, and in terms of the executives, Mitch Miller, who was a sworn foe of rock and roll, and also a sworn foe of Frank Sinatra, evidently from what he made him record. I guess the other place that things started happening pretty quickly was Tennessee, and I don't say Memphis, because it was Memphis and Nashville all at once.

There was a lot of blues activity in Nashville before Memphis got set up, and originally Memphis was sort of a colony of the Baharri brothers. They had a brother named Lester, who was pretty much incompetent. And so they figured, well, if he knew sort of basically how to make records, they would send him to Memphis, where there was more records to be made than anywhere. I mean, he could practically take anybody who came in off the street and record him, and come up with something they could use, and they would come through every couple of months to see what he'd gotten on tape. But he wasn't real bright, and among the people he passed on was Elvis. I mean, he just wouldn't let him record. He was smart enough to get BB King, but not smart enough to get Elvis. In Nashville, there was a label called Bullet, which recorded a lot of sort of off the wall, country music, and a lot of important blues. They were important right after the war, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that Memphis took over in terms of black music, while Nashville continued to record some odd country music. Although it turned out that it was up to Memphis to record the really strange stuff, which was how Elvis, Karl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis managed to get recorded down there, instead of in Nashville, which would have been actually a more logical place for somebody like that to show up.

That story of the Sun label is pretty interesting. Sun is something, I don't know, I mean, it's one of those sort of miraculous stories. It had to have happened, but I guess. But it's still wonderful that it happened the way it did. I mean, to find a Southern man with the intelligence and breadth of experience of Sam Phillips, and then for him to hire people who were as smart as they were. I mean, from his secretary, Marion Keisker, to producers like Jack Clement, who still likes to walk around reciting long passages of Shakespeare. People think he's gone, but he said him down in front of recording console, and he's not gone at all. He's just been somewhere else. That enabled Sam Phillips to make many, many, many odd choices, and to take a lot of risks that I don't think anybody else in the record industry in 1952, 1953 would have even done.

And he was very intent on getting, as he said, the white boy who could sing like a colored guy, or on getting unusual blues performers, unusual country performers. A lot of the people he recorded were not rock and roll. They were very close to country or to blues, but they weren't at all like the people being recorded in Los Angeles or in Nashville. So he was looking for crossovers or the friends. There wasn't such a thing as crossover then. There was no reason to expect that a weird record that you made somewhere would get any success at all, except maybe enough to make back the cost of the session and provide you with a little bit of the rent and the upkeep and pay your employees salaries. But he was real interested in experimenting on sort of a naive level, you know, sort of like if you walked into a chemistry lab and went, gee, I wonder what would happen if I poured this into that.

You know, you might blow the lab up or you might find a cure for cancer. I mean, really, and truly he didn't know what he was doing. He just knew he was doing it. The group phenomenon was primarily an East Coast phenomenon. I would have said Northeast, except for the Orioles who were from Baltimore, and so we have to stretch the definition down to there. Originally, the very greatest of the groups came from the New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia axis. And in fact, that style didn't take over on the West Coast for four or five years after it had taken hold in the Northeast. I think possibly because the big band type of blue shatter was was a more popular item down there. But in New York, it was a lot easier to get people together on a street corner to sing.

You came at the do-up phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, or under a stairwell, which was where we used to do it in my high school. There was one stairwell that sort of was a dead end, and it was very close, but it was all tile too, so it echoed real good. Once the entrepreneurs started working and making small labels in New York, that was the type of act that they were able to attract and talk about your low overhead. Well, that was simpler than anything. Five guys who would be happy to do it for 15 bucks a piece, walk in, you cut three or four sides, you take the publishing, you know, they were usually miners. So then you didn't have to pay them if you didn't want to. Of course, some of those miners got smart and said, well, I was a miner when I signed this contract, so it's not valid, but most of them weren't that smart. Well, a lot of these people that you mentioned earlier were not only still those, but they were also grown-ups. Why was there a switch to these youngsters making music? I don't know that they were all that old. I mean, at one point, yeah, you're right. Why not only Harris, but he wasn't being bought by teenagers initially.

Well, who is the market out there? Well, the market gets younger as the years progress. I'd say if you start in 1946, every year that goes by, the age of the average record buyer, especially for singles, goes down. And I was 78s then. Yeah. And so by about 1956, your average record buyer was 15 or 16. By 1966, she was 13 to 14 and female, definitely, which is a, that's also sort of clicked over in the mid-50s that the dominant singles buyer was female. And then until you get to 1976, when your average, I actually know this figure, your average singles buyer in 1976 was an 11 and a half year old minority female. But then by then, albums are the real minor. Yes, but by then, yes.

Which they weren't in the 50s. There weren't any albums until the early 50s. I mean, the LP, I don't think even came out till 1953 or 1954 when Columbia debuted at their convention. Was there a parody between female groups and male groups? Oh, no. Oh, no. No, not at all. Most of the singing groups were male, very few of them were female until the early to mid 60s when the so-called girl groups came up. And when Motown also came into being and had their own sort of version of the girl group, but your classic girl group, Redbird Records, Dixie Cups, Shangri-La's kind of thing. That was mostly a Philadelphia phenomenon and that mostly happened in the early 60s. But in the 50s, besides the chantels and the teen queens, I can't think of too many female groups. I met her at the candy store. You turn around and smile at me. You get the picture? Yes, we see. That's when I fell for the leader of the past.

Elvis was what everybody wanted. Elvis was young and sexy and handsome. He had a really great voice. He had a really great collection of country and rhythm and blues records, and he had a very definite idea of how he wanted to sing. Was he patterning himself after anyone? No, no. That's what he told Marion Kysker. She says, well, who do you sound like? He says, man, I don't sound like nobody. He was right. I mean, I think maybe in his deepest dreams, he wanted to be Dean Martin. He said that several times, but he was stuck with being Elvis Presley and that really wasn't the worst thing that happened to him. And he was a big fan. I mean, he would chase the Blackwood brothers around the churches and listen to them sing that Southern White Gospel stuff. He would go down to Bill Street on weekends, and he would hear BB King and Rufus Thomas. All those people remember him because he sort of stuck out in the crowd. He had a cousin he would go down there with.

And just lots of people knew him from around Memphis. He was Mr. Superfan. And yet he also had the talent to turn what he heard into something that was very distinctive. And I think it just came along at exactly the right time when there was a fascination with Black music by White Kids. And yet the whole racial thing right then, I mean 1954, that was that was Brown versus the Port of Education, as well as Elvis's first recording session. So the sort of reaching out between the races, I think just was at a point when something needed to connect and entertainment was a very safe place to make that connection. The Jordan airs always seemed to be a backup group that kind of kept it from going too far over.

Well, they were a white gospel group like the Blackwood brothers. I think Elvis liked them because they reminded him of what he was doing in church. But they were also given to him by RCA records, which was after the really wildest and most unrestrained period of his recording career. Talk about Elvis and television. Well, you know, the response wasn't what people thought. Something I discovered in doing my research was that the first five or six times Elvis was on television. They showed all of him. And he was not that revolutionary. I mean, there were girls screaming on some of those shows, Milton Burrell and Steve Allen and all of that. It wasn't until his third appearance on Ed Sullivan that they shot him from the waist up as, you know, that famous being a censorship. And in fact, the first Sullivan show, there wasn't even much of an audience. And on a lot of those shows, he was just another entertainer. I mean, the full impact, I think, came in people's living rooms when teenagers saw him.

I don't really think that it was happening right there on the stage, although he was certainly doing a very, very good job from the recorded evidence. Did his movie career help promote his record? Before he went in the army, yes, I think, I think, very definitely his presence on the screen. He made his best movies at that point, you know, Gelhaus Rock and loving you. And of course, there was a love me tender, but that way he was just sort of spliced into that. Those early movies, I think, very definitely consolidated him as a major entertainer on the same level as Frank Sinatra. Come on over, baby, pull out of shape, gone on. Just got to come on over, baby, baby, you can't go wrong. Let's talk about some disc jacquies. Fried, Marie de Kay, Dick Clark. How do I log Lawrence?

Grover Boy. These are businessmen, basically. No. Well, some of the ones you named are, some of the ones aren't. Definitely by the mid-50s, when you get your Dick Clark and Marie de Kay types, they were investing in everything from Dick Clark's case, pressing plants to recording studios to publishing companies, and they would own a piece of the publishing on a record that they made into a hit, and you know, it was really sort of dodgy, but in the early days, I would say that people like Handog Lawrence and, oh, that guy out there in Los Angeles. I can't remember his name. Was he the one that shrieked and screamed over the air? No, no, that was, no, that was Fried pounding on the book and yelling and screaming. Yeah, I mean, Alan Fried was definitely a fan. At first, he started at a sort of a cynical business move, but the minute he did his first show and all those kids showed up, and they behaved, and he saw what they were into, and how they were reacting, but that definitely changed his life.

And one of the reasons I think that he went down in the paella hearings, and Clark didn't, was because he believed in rock and roll, and Dick Clark believed in cutting his losses. At what point did rock and roll seem to take over commercial radio? There used to be something called an MOR format. They would have had your Frank Sinatra as your Dean Martin. No, not at all. No, MOR is an invention of the 60s. Before that, there was pop radio, and there was non-pop radio. Some pop stations had a rock and roll policy. Some of them preferred to put country in western, in, you know, I would say probably in the Midwest and in the south, you'd be more likely to add something from the country charts to your playlist, along with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day and things like that.

Rock and roll made its first inroads in the mid-50s, and then pretty much became the dominant form of popular music as the number of teenagers grew. I mean, they voted with their pocketbooks. They bought the records. The more records they bought, the more records went on the radio. I mean, that really is the way the charts work. You know, Frank Sinatra's never been off the radio. I used to listen to Murray the K in the mornings on W-I-S in New York, and he would play rock and roll, and he would play Frank Sinatra. I think that's why my mother let me play the radio in the mornings, because she knew that there would be some Sinatra along after all the screaming and shouting and pounding. Well, are these kinds of formats still around, or have- Oh, no, no. No, no. Sinatra and company get weeded out. Well, they got weeded out the same way a lot of, well, a lot of black music's been weeded out. So-called research has narrowed radio formats into really unbreakable straight jackets. And the idea that a radio station has any autonomy, whatever, in what it plays, is by and large ridiculous,

especially with, I mean, particularly commercial radio, that's just not the way it works. Radio in this country now is divided into many little, minutely defined formats. And you just don't break the format. I mentioned some groups and some particular numbers that were either exciting, phenomenal, revolutionary, or whatever. Oh, Hank Ballard in the Midnighters, because they had those dirty records, the Annie records, they sold an incredible amount under the counter. And I think did a whole lot to wake up white teenagers to what black music was about, because, in addition to having fairly lascivious content, they were also very well sung and well played. The Orioles, going back even further to 1948, were the first black harmony group, as we think of them, you know, the so-called duops, to break onto pop radio. It's too soon to know that it was written by their manager,

Deborah Chessler, who was an 18-year-old Jewish girl from Baltimore. Richard Barry in the pharaohs, Richard Barry recorded Louis Louis in 1956 or 1957, but he also was as a songwriter and as an unnamed co-conspirator. He was responsible for a lot of really strange and funny records, right in cell block number nine. He's on there. And just some of the crazy ideas he had, I think, shattered some of the preconceived ideas about what a harmony group song would be about. And this belongs to that category called novelty record? It may have been a novelty record to start with, but the idea of, I don't know, sort of loosening things up. You know, once again Chuck Barry as a songwriter showed that the subject matter of a popular song had all kinds of different possibilities. And a little Richard too.

Well, Louis Richard actually is a fairly conventional songwriter, not a very conventional performer, but as a songwriter, he's actually, he could be seen as being in the blues, shatter tradition, just a little crazier than most of them. Rock of Ages, the Rolling Stone history of rock and roll, was written by our guest, Music Critic Edward, along with Jeffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker. The book is available through Summit Books. Music If you have a comment or wish to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write to Forum, the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, 78712. Our technical producer is David Alvarez. Our production assistant is Christine Drawer. I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. Forum is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin,

and is not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin, or this station. Music This is the Longhorn Radio Network.