graynation: YouTube's window to the birth of rock

I am starting to let YouTube consume far too much of my time, but I can't stop my brain from popping up with thoughts like, "I bet I can find 'Party Doll' on YouTube."

After that, what can a man do, but find out? And, of course, there it is. Then there's that menu of associated clips, and it includes "Searchin'," "Whispering Bells," and "Poor Little Fool." And "Click Clack!" I bet I haven't thought about "Click Clack" since the 20th century ended. But there they were, Dicky Doo and the Don'ts, and the acclaimed chorus: "And the wheels go oom-ba-la-la-la click clack, oom-ba-la-la-la shoo! Oom-ba-la-la-la every click clack brings me closer to you!"

And there goes an hour I could have been working on peace in our time.

I am going to blame my parents. They contrived to bring me into the world just at the right time to make me 12 years old when rock and roll came in and blew away the Perry Como Era. One spring night in 1955, a couple hundred junior high and high school kids sauntered into the Paramount Theater (tickets were 25 cents), as we always did on Friday nights, and we took our seats in our usual sections, our Paramount "turf."

The movie this Friday night was “Blackboard Jungle,” starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis. Also in the cast were two young actors, Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. None of the kids in the theater knew anything about the movie; we were there because it was Friday night. First there was the black-and-white newsreel, then the cartoon, then the curtain fell in preamble to the feature. The effect was to set up anticipation, and in fact the crowd became quiet. There were two or three moments of relative calm. Then:

“One two three o’clock four o’clock ROCK!
“Five six seven o’clock eight o’clock ROCK!
“Nine ten eleven o’clock twelve o’clock ROCK!
“We’re gonna ROCK around the CLOCK tonight!”

It was music, very loud and urgent, and it thundered on into its first verse – “When the clock strikes one, join me hon” – but the kids in the Paramount Theater sat rock-still, stunned, staring at the rising curtain, transfixed by the energy blasting at them from Bill Haley and the Comets.

We knew there was something happening to music out there somewhere. We could catch snatches of it on local stations KRBC and KWKC, but we had better luck if we searched for stations in New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Nashville, that came in sometimes with remarkable clarity through a still-uncluttered sky. This was high-energy music that came from people with exotic names like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it didn’t sound at all like what we were accustomed to hearing from Gisele MacKenzie, Mitch Miller, Les Baxter, Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.

We were intrigued by the new music, but it had come from somewhere else far away across the sky. Now we sat in our very own Paramount, with its big speakers and this high-speed music rocketing at us, and for several seconds we were frozen by it. Then we reacted. We jumped up and yelled and the cooler ones got into the aisles and danced in frenzy. It was a before-and-after moment that no one there would ever forget.

The title of the song was “Rock Around the Clock,” and it came to Abilene and all the other cities as a nice example of cross-media marketing. In the 1950s, the recording industry’s principal marketing outlet was radio. Listeners who heard a song on the radio might then go buy it at a record store.

But there were only 24 hours available in a day, and not many radio stations. In 1955, Abilene had only two, meaning there were only 48 music marketing hours available in any given day. Worse, the stations used much of their time to broadcast soap operas, news, and shows like “Farm Roundup,” “Mixing Bowl,” and “Arthur Godfrey.” Their music playlists leaned to proven artists and songs like “Hard to Get,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” It would be years before enough radio stations existed to develop what came to be called “narrowcasting.” In 1955, on KRBC and KWKC, you took what you got, in a very mixed bag.

So “Rock Around the Clock” rode a movie into town, and the results were instructive to future students of cross-media marketing. “Rock Around the Clock” became the first example of this new music to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Magazine rating charts, and it did so very quickly, reaching No. 1 in June.

The movie was electrifying, too, about gangs in schools not only challenging, but intimidating and literally attacking authority. The teacher, Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford, wins in the end, the punk Vic Morrow is hauled away, and Sidney Poitier (a black kid!) leaves the bad guys and becomes a good one. The movie was so controversial that many communities would not allow it to be shown, including, of all places, Memphis, Tennessee.

But Abilene did, and kids who came out of the Paramount that night weren’t the same kids who went in. They came out in possession of a new kind of music, and they knew a new word: “daddio.” It was the first night in Abilene of a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. It tickles me, talking to my kids and grandkids, and all my students, who now think of this culture as their own, to tell them I was there the night it was born. My God, I sound like one of the Three Wise Men.