But if this nowadays bizarre practice is overlooked as a quaint archaism, it’s nonetheless quickly forgotten because of the band. It’s actually a bit of a distraction to hear a frontman laboring so intently to cross every verbal “t” and dot every oral “i”. In odd fashion for a rock and roller, Haley pronounces every single syllable of every single word he sings with an actor’s learned precision he never misses a single “O'” in all of his myriad “O’clock”s. Perhaps the main reasons for the sheer exuberance that goes by the name Rock Around the Clock has a little less to do with Bill Haley and owes a little more to “his” Comets. Rock around the Clock is an album that writes its own epitaph: the closing track, “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie” most appropriately opens with the perfect self-description of its record’s contents: “You take a rock / You take a beat / You take a boogie / You make it sweet”. Your foot can’t stop tapping, your head can stop from bobbing, and your fingers will demand to snap with a forceful belligerence. Sure, there’s a little crass consumerism here on Haley’s part - cashing in on the evident and inexplicable mambo craze by calling a jump song “Mambo Rock” or explaining to us all the “Birth of the Boogie” - but what else would you expect with an album released a year after the success of its eponymous lead single? While the songs lack the self-awareness and detached irony that came to pervade rock and roll with the advent of the British invasion, the honesty and humor of the songs is undeniably fun. “Razzle-Dazzle” does just that, while the aforementioned “Two Hound Dogs” keep the party going. Track four is the hilarious H-bomb dream/nightmare, “Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in town)”, a scene so hilarious that it makes Dylan’s “Talkin’ World War III Blues” seem pale in comparison. For as much as all three of those songs are rightful classics, indelibly inscribed in America’s cultural canon, Rock around the Clock real genius sets once you get past the singles. Boogie” is when the band just starts cooking. But by the time you’re done rocking around the clock, have finished with your “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, and have learned your “A.B.C. The call-and-response, the descending guitar slide accents, and the omnipresent wailing sax are direct descendants of the Tympani 5.Īt first, you might suspect that Rock Around the Clock is little more than an album-length single, a product for which the 1950s is most famous. But genre seemed to be of little import to Haley in any fashion other than using its terminology to get his foot in the proverbial door of the listener’s ear: why else would he refer to particularly un-Latin music as “Mambo Rock”, or name his “Two Hound Dogs” rhythm and blues, respectively? In truth, while Haley’s sound, or more properly, the Comets’, is incredibly fresh even after 50 years, it does owe a great deal to the swing and jump tradition that made stars out of Louis Prima and the all-time great, Louis Jordan - it comes as no surprise that Haley’s rise to fame was coincidental with his hiring of A&R man Milt Gabler, handler of Jordan’s career and fame. His magical sound of thumping backbeat, of driving acoustic bass lines, and of tenor saxophone dueling it out with tremolo guitars is referred to as “Boogie” in the title of one third of the original album’s 12 tracks. “Boogie” seems to be what Bill Haley wanted to call it at the time. For as soon as this tidy little remastered disc slipped into my CD player, all those barely academic questions became immediately irrelevant: whatever you choose to call it, the music on Rock Around the Clock is nothing short of pure magic. So it was with a little bit of skepticism that I approached the “Rock ‘N’ Roll 50th Anniversary Edition” of Bill Haley and His Comets‘ classic Rock Around the Clock. Wondering when rock and roll began is almost as fruitless an enterprise as speculating whether or not it has died. In perhaps the most daring feat of musical academia, Nick Tosches has even gone so far as to suggest that rock and roll began a long time ago in the world of the minstrel show, with the famed Emmett Miller. Others trace and blur the origins of this most purely American music back to the iconoclastic attitude and songwriting of Hank Williams. Did rock and roll begin when Elvis Presley released his first record, a thrilling, evocative ride called “That’s All Right, Mama” way back in 1954? Or did this most spectacular and elusive of genres not really arrive until ten years later, during that magical stretch of time between the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and the Stone’s epic “Satisfaction”? Some will argue that rock and roll began with the genius of one Ike Turner and his band’s epoch-making single, “Rocket 88”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |