Yeh-Heh-Heh-Hes, Baby

In Boston Roman Catholic leaders urged that the offensive music be boycotted. In Hartford city officials considered revoking the State Theater's license after several audiences got too rowdy during a musical stage show. In Washington the police chief recommended banning such shows from the National Guard Armory after brawls in which several people were injured. In Minneapolis a theater manager withdrew a film featuring the music after a gang of youngsters left the theater, snake-danced around town and smashed windows. In Birmingham champions of white supremacy decried it as part of a Negro plot against the whites. At a wild concert in Atlanta's baseball park one night, fists and beer bottles were thrown, four youngsters were arrested.

The object of all this attention is a musical style known as "rock 'n' roll," which has captivated U.S. adolescents as swing captivated prewar teen-agers and ragtime vibrated those of the '20s. It does for music what a motorcycle club at full throttle does for a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Rock 'n' roll is based on Negro blues, but in a self-conscious style which underlines the primitive qualities of the blues with malice, aforethought. Characteristics: an unrelenting, socking syncopation that sounds like a bull whip; a choleric saxophone honking mating-call sounds; an electric guitar turned up so loud that its sound shatters and splits; a vocal group that shudders and exercises violently to the beat while roughly chanting either a near-nonsense phrase or a moronic lyric in hillbilly idiom.

Samples:

My love is so hot

My love is hotter than a hot-rod

My love is hotter than that

My love is hotter than a pistol Cause, Baby, I've got you.

or

Long tall Sally has a lot on the ball Nobody cares if she's long and tall

Oh, Baby! Yeh-heh-heh-hes, Baby Whoooooooo,

Baby! I'm havin' me some fun tonight, yeah.

Obsessive Beat. The fad began to flame a couple of years ago, when pop music was so languid and soupy that kids could no longer dance to it--and jazz headed farther out. Rock 'n' roll got its name, as it got some of its lyrics, from Negro popular music, which used "rock" and "roll" as sexy euphemisms. It caught on with the small record companies, e.g., Dot, King, Sun, that flourish in the Southern, Central and Western states, and soon it grew too big for the majors to ignore. Strangely enough, a group of nonmusicians became the objects of teen-age adulation--the rock-'n'-roll disk jockeys such as Manhattan's Alan Freed, Boston's Bill Marlowe, Los Angeles' Gene Norman.

When their names appear on theater and dance-hall marquees announcing a stage show or "record hop," the stampede is on. The theater is jammed with adolescents from the 9 a.m. curtain to closing, and it rings and shrieks like the jungle-bird house at the zoo. If one of the current heroes is announced--groups such as Bill Haley and His Comets or The Platters, or a soloist such as Elvis Presley--the shrieks become deafening. The tumult completely drowns the sound of the spastically gyrating performers despite fully powered amplification. Only the obsessive beat pounds through, stimulating the crowd to such rhythmical movements as clapping in tempo and jumping and dancing in the aisles. Sometimes the place vibrates with the beat of music and stamping feet, and not infrequently kids have been moved to charging the stage, rushing ushers and theater guards.

Suggestive as Swing. There is no denying that rock 'n' roll evokes a physical response from even its most reluctant listeners, for that giant pulse matches the rhythmical operations of the human body, and the performers are all too willing to specify it. Said an Oakland, Calif, policeman, after watching Elvis ("The Pelvis") Presley (TIME, May 14) last week: "If he did that in the street, we'd arrest him." On the other hand, the fans' dances are far from intimate--the wiggling 12-and 13-year-olds (and up) barely touch hands and appear oblivious of one another. Psychologists feel that rock 'n' roll's deepest appeal is to the teeners' need to belong; the results bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings.

Does rock-'n'-roll music itself encourage any form of juvenile delinquency? Illinois' Cook County Sheriff Joseph D. Lohman, who was a professional sociologist and criminologist before becoming sheriff, says: "I don't think there's any correlation between juvenile delinquency and rock 'n' roll, but rock 'n' roll is a symptom of a condition that can produce delinquency." Even Boston's fired-up anti-r. & r. campaigners concede that "it is a fad that has been adopted by the hoodium element, and that's where the trouble starts." A Bridgeport, Conn, mental hygiene expert with a long memory feels that the music is no more suggestive than swing, and that the youthful dances are no more dangerous than the Charleston. Pop Record Maker Mitch Miller, no rock 'n' roller, sums up for the defense: "You can't call any music immoral. If anything is wrong with rock 'n' roll, it is that it makes a virtue out of monotony." For the prosecution, the best comment comes indirectly from Actress Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday: It's just not couth, that's all.

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