Getting It Straight

Remember back in 1958 when Danny and the Juniors sang with the fervor of true disciples, "Rock and roll will always be/It'll go down in history?" Well, a new book called The Sound of the City (Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, $6.95 hardbound, $2.95 paperbound) is the history they were singing about. There have been other chronicles about the rise of rock, but they have been either too scattershot or too personal. The Sound of the City manages to be both enthusiastic and exact. It is the best history of rock yet published.

Author Charlie Gillett begins his story back in the '40s, when the rhythm-and-blues musicians who sang about "rock and roll" were talking about loving, not music. It took some shrewd record producers and a Cleveland disk jockey named Alan Freed to make the term--and the music itself--acceptable to a larger, white audience. The sound came off the streets and was segregated as carefully as the people who listened to it.

Gillett, who is an Englishman, indulges in some shaky transatlantic sociology while trying to explain how the music transcended the color line and why postwar youth--through its excessive leisure time and readiness to flaunt opposition to the adult world--was eager to accept the rough, driving new sound. Written originally as an M.A. thesis, The Sound of the City sometimes gives off a faint odor of scholarly stuffiness. It is startling to see early greats like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley referred to, in the best tradition of academic criticism, by their surnames. Saying Domino without Fats or Diddley without Bo just seems wrong, somehow.

But Gillett is at his frequent best talking about five basic styles that finally merged into rock: Northern band, New Orleans dance blues, rockabilly from Memphis, Chicago rhythm and blues and vocal group rock. With great skill, he shows how they developed independently of each other, and how gutsy, sexy rhythm-and-blues tunes (mainly black) were homogenized into white rock and roll.

A rhythm-and-blues tune by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters called Work with Me, Annie, for example, made the charts in a much diluted version designed expressly for the white market. In the original, Ballard and his group put it straight, low and mean:

Work with me, Annie

Let's get it while the gitting is good

Annie, please don't cheat

Give me all my meat.

In the version that eventually became a hit, the lyric (rendered by an entirely different vocalist) was diffused into "Dance with me, Henry,/Let's dance while the music rolls on."

After a while, the singers as well as the lyrics were changed. For every funky performer like Chuck Berry, there were a dozen droopy-eyed, ducktailed teen-idol types like Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, Fabian and even Tab Hunter, all of whom threatened to turn rock into lachrymose lullabies for lovelorn girls. It was British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, with their heavy and acknowledged debt to American soul and blues, who revitalized rock by getting back to its roots.

Unlike some rock fans, Gillett also understands that rock, alas, is as much an industry as an art. Today it is easy to forget that back in the early 1950s, a new musical trend had little chance of gathering momentum unless it was supported by a major record company (Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol). Shamelessly, the majors scoured the catalogues of small, regional record companies for top-notch rock and roll songs, then rerecorded them in what the trade calls "cover" versions, using their own stars. Shamefully, most of the radio disk jockeys--with exceptions like Freed --obliged the big companies by playing their issues. In the end, though, both the record companies and the DJs were foiled. "The audience was determined to have the real thing," writes Gillett, "not a synthetic version of the original. Independent companies, sensing this desire, were eager to satisfy it."

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