Episode 20: “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 20.

Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets.

A quick content note for this one.

It contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote.

Sometimes the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit.

A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records.

It's what everyone wants, and it's what they've been working up to for the whole career.

But what happens then?

Is it a fluke?

Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first?

How do they top that?

These problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit.

Now, imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting.

Imagine that it's a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable.

When your big hit is that big, where do you go from there?

What can you do next?

For a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called Rock Around the Clock.

It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song's two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley's producer, didn't want Haley to record it, to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he'd brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song.

According to John Swenson's biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn't get on, which might be the case.

But it might also just be as simple as Rock Around the Clock being very derivative.

In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynoni Harris's Around the Clock Blues, and indeed, even the title Rock Around the Clock had already been used four years earlier by Hal Singer.

Let's rock.

So, Rock Around the Clock was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller's reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn't like he was missing out on anything special, was it?

After Rock the Joint and Crazy Man Crazy, Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but

nothing happened.

He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren't following up on the clear direction he'd set with those singles.

Instead, he seemed to be flailing around, recording cover versions of recent country hits, or remakes of older songs like Chattanooga ChooChoo.

None of his follow-ups to Crazy Man Crazy did anything at all in the charts, and it looked for a while like he was going to be a one-hit wonder, and getting to number 15 in the charts was going to be his highest achievement.

But then something happened.

Bill Haley quit Essex Records, the label that had led him to become a rockabilly performer in the first place, and signed with Decker.

And there, his producer was Milt Gabler.

Decker was in an interesting position in 1954, one which listeners to this podcast may not quite appreciate.

You might remember that we've mentioned Decca quite a few times over the first few months of this podcast.

And that's because, in the 1940s, Decca was the only major label to sign any of the proto-rock artists we've talked about.

In the late 40s, Decker had Lucky Millander, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, The Inkspot, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosetta Thorpe, Marie Knight and the Mills Brothers, all on its roster.

It also had a number of country artists who contributed a lot to the Hillbilly Boogie sound.

People like Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, and more.

But Decca was the only one of the major labels to sign up acts like this.

The major labels were, as we've discussed, going mostly for a white middle-class market that wanted Doris Day and Tony Bennett.

Not that there's anything wrong with Doris Day or Tony Bennett.

And indeed, Decca had plenty of its own acts like that too, and mostly dealt in that sort of music.

But any artist working in the pre-rock styles that wasn't signed to Decca had to sign to tiny independent labels.

And those independent labels set up their own distribution networks, which went to shops that specialised in the black or hillbilly markets.

And so those speciality shops eventually just started buying from the indie distributors and didn't buy from the major labels at all, since Decca was the only one they'd been buying from anyway before the indies came along.

And this caused problems for a lot of Decca's artists.

The reason that Louis Jordan, say, was so big was that he'd been selling both to the RB market, since he was, after all, an RB artist, one of the best, and to the pop market, because he was on a major label.

You sell to both those markets, and you'd sell to a LOT of people.

The casual record buyer market was much larger than the market for speciality genres, while the speciality genre audience was loyal and would buy everything in the styles it liked.

But if you were only selling to the Doris Day buyers, and not the people who liked honking saxophones and went out of their way to buy them, then your honking saxophone records were not going to do wonderfully in sales.

This change in the distribution model of records is one of the two reasons that all the artists we talked about in the first few episodes had a catastrophic drop in their sales in the early 50s.

We already talked about the other reason in the episode on Crazy Man Crazy, but as a reminder, when the radio stations switched to playing 45s, they threw out their old 78s.

That meant that if you are one of those Decca artists, you simultaneously lost all the radio play for your old singles, because the radio stations had chucked out their copies, and stopped having new hits, because the distribution model had changed under your feet.

And so pretty much all Decca's roster of rhythm and blues or country hit makers had lost their hit potential, all at the same time.

But Decker still had Milt Gabler.

We talked about Milt Gabler right back at the start of this series.

He was the one who produced Lionel Hampton's version of Flying Home, the one with the Illinois Jacquette Sack Solo, and who produced Strange Fruit, and most of Louis Jordan's records, and the Inkspots hits.

He'd been the one who put Sister Rosetta Tharpe together with pianist Sammy Price.

He was largely, almost solely, responsible for the difference between Decker's roster and that of the other major labels, and he still wanted to carry on making records in the styles he loved.

But to do that, he had to find a way to sell them to the pop audience.

And Bill Haley seemed like someone who could appeal to that audience.

Indeed, Haley already had appealed to that audience once, with Crazy Man Crazy, and if he could do it once, he could do it again.

Bill Haley's style was not very like most of the music Milt Gabler had been making.

Gabler was, after all, a serious jazz fanatic.

But over recent months, Haley's style had been drifting closer and closer to the sort of thing Gabler was doing.

In fact, Gabler saw a way to make him even more successful by pushing the similarity to Louis Jordan, which had already been apparent in some of Haley's earlier records.

And so the group were in the studio to record what was intended to be Bill Haley and the Comets' latest hit, Thirteen Women and Only One Man in Town.

Last night I was dreaming,

dreamed about the H-Bomb.

Well, the bomber went off and I was caught.

I was the only man on the ground.

There was a thirteen women and only one man in town.

Thirteen women and only one man in town.

I'm just 20, I said, maybe.

The one and only man in town was me.

With 13 women and me, the only man around.

We haven't talked enough about how much nuclear paranoia was fueling the popular culture of the early 1950s.

Remember, when this record was made, the first atomic bombs had only been dropped eight and a half years earlier, and it had been five years since the Russians had revealed that they too had an atom bomb.

At the time everyone was absolutely convinced that a nuclear war between America and Russia was not only likely but inevitable.

Yet at the same time the development of nuclear weapons was also something to be proud of a great American technological innovation, something that was out of a science fiction film.

Both of these things were true, more or less, as far as the American popular imagination went, and this led to a very odd sort of cognitive dissonance.

And while it's not a good idea to put too much weight on the lyrics of Thirteen Women, which is, after all, just an attempt at having a novelty hit with the Louis Jordan-style song about having thirteen women to oneself, It is notable that it does reflect that ambiguity.

The dream the singer has is that that the hydrogen bomb has been dropped and left only 14 people alive in the whole town, 13 women plus himself.

Now, one might normally think that that was a devastating horrific thought, and that it was a prelude to some sort of threads-esque story of post-apocalyptic terror.

In this case, however, it merely becomes an excuse for a bit of casual sexism.

as the thirteen women become Haley's harem and servants, each with their own specified task.

Obviously, I'm being a little facetious here.

For what it is,

a comedy hillbilly boogie that plays on Haley's genial likability, Thirteen Women is perfectly pleasant, if a little, of its time.

It's very obviously influenced by Louis Jordan, but that makes sense, given that Gabler was Jordan's producer.

Indeed, Gabler was also the one who introduced the H-bomb theme.

The original version of the song, by the blues guitarist Diggy Thompson, makes no mention of the bomb or the dream, just treats it as something that happened to him.

And frankly, Thompson's version is much, much better than Haley's and has some truly great guitar playing.

o' women and only one man in town

And as funny as it may be

The one and only man in town was me With a 13 o' women and only one man in town

But Thompson's record is absolutely a blues record in the same style as people like Guitar Slim or Johnny Guitar Watson.

Haley's record is very different and while Thompson sounds better to modern ears,

or at least to my ears, Haley's was in a style that was massively popular for the time.

But it would probably make an unlikely massive hit, and you certainly wouldn't expect its B-side to become that massive hit.

For the B-side, Haley decided to cut that Rock Around the Clock song that he'd been offered a year earlier.

It might have come back into his mind because two weeks weeks earlier, another group had released their version of it.

Sunny Day and His Night were a band from Virginia who had never made a record before, and who never would again, but who had a regular radio spot.

Rock Around the Clock was their only recorded legacy, and it might have had a chance at being a hit by them with some proper promotion.

Or maybe not, given the

experimental nature of the intro.

So the single did very little, and now Sunny Day and His Nights are a footnote.

But their release may have reminded Haley of the song, and he recorded his new version in two takes.

But the interesting thing is that Haley didn't record the song as it was written, or as the Knights recorded it.

Listen again to the melody that Sunny Day is singing.

Now, let's listen to Bill Haley singing the same bit.

That's a totally different melody.

What Haley has done there is change the melody on the original to a melody that is essentially the standard boogie bass line.

But I think there's a specific reason for that.

Hank Williams's very first big hit, remember, was a comedy western swing song called Move It On Over.

That song has almost exactly the same melody that Haley is singing for the verse of Rock Around the Clock.

We know that Haley knew the song, because he later cut his own version of it, so it's reasonable to assume that this was a very deliberate decision.

What Haley and the Comets have done is take the utterly generic song Rock Around the Clock, and they've used it as an excuse to hang every bit of every other song that they know could be a hit on, to create an arrangement that could encapsulate everything about successful music.

They kept the basic arrangement and structure they'd worked out for Rock the Joint, right down to Danny Sedrone playing the same solo note for note.

Compare Rock the Joint Solo.

with rock around the clocks

For the beginning, they came up with a stop-start intro that emphasized the word rock.

And then, at the end, they used a variant of the riff ending you'd often get in swing songs like Flying Home, which one strongly suspects was Gabler's idea.

The Knights did something similar, but only for a couple of bars in their badly thought-out solo section.

With the Comets, it's a far more prominent feature of the arrangement.

Again, compare Flying Home.

And rock around the clock.

This was wildly experimental.

They were trying this stuff, not with any thought to listen ability, but to see what worked.

It didn't matter.

no one was going to hear it.

It was something they knocked out in two takes, and the finished version had to be edited together from both of them, because they didn't have time in the studio to get a decent takedown.

This was not a record that was destined to have any great success.

And indeed, it didn't.

Rock Around the Clock made almost no impact on its original release.

It charted, but only in the lower reaches of the chart, and didn't really register on the public's consciousness.

But Haley and his band continued making records in that style, and their next one, a cover of Big Joe Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll, did rather better, and started rising up the charts quite well.

Their version of Shake Rattle and Roll, a song which we talked about a bit in episode two, if you want to go back and refresh your memory, was nowhere near as powerful as Turner's had been.

It cleaned up parts of the lyric, though notably not the filthiest lines, presumably because the innuendo in them completely passed both Haley and Gabler by,

and imposed a much more conventional structure on it.

But while it was a watered-down version of the original song, it was still potent enough that for those who hadn't heard the original, it was working some sort of magic.

and pan.

Well, roll my breakfast, cause I'm a hungry man.

I said, shake, hurry and roll.

I said, shake, hurry and roll.

I said, shake, hurry and roll.

I said, shake, hurry and roll.

Well, you never do nothing to save your dog boy and soul.

Haley was a real fan of Turner, and indeed the two men became close friends in later years, and the Comets were Turner's backing band on One Sixties album.

But he doesn't have the power or gravitas in his vocals that Turner did, and the result is rather lightweight.

Haley's cover was recorded the same week that Turner's version reached number one on the RB charts, and it's easy to think of this as another Shaboom situation, with a white man making a more radio-friendly version of a black musician's hit.

But Haley's version is not just a straight copy, and not just because of the changes to remove some of the more obviously filthy lines.

It's structured differently, and has a whole different feel to it.

This feels to me more like Haley recasting things into his own style than him trying to jump on someone else's bandwagon, though it's a more ambiguous case than some.

Shake Rattle and Roll became Bill Haley's biggest hit so far, going top ten in the pop charts, and both Haley's version and Turner's sold a million copies.

It looked like Haley was on his way to a reasonable career.

Not perhaps a massive stardom, but selling a lot of records and doing well in shows.

But then everything changed, for Bill Haley and for the world.

It was only when a film, The Blackboard Jungle, was being made nearly a year after Rock Around the Clock was recorded that that track became important.

Blackboard Jungle was absolutely not a rock and roll film.

It was a film about teenagers and rebellion and so on, yes.

But in a pivotal scene when a teacher brings his old jazz records in, in order to bond with the kids, and they smash them and play their own.

It's not rock and roll they're playing but modern jazz.

Stan Kenton is the soundtrack to their rebellion.

Not anything more rock.

But in order to make the film up to the minute, the producers of the film borrowed some records from the record collection of Peter Ford, the teenage son of the film star.

They wanted to find out what kind of records teenagers were listening to, and he happened to have a copy of the Bill Haley single.

They made the decision that this was to be the theme tune to the film, and all of a sudden, everything changed.

Everything.

Because the Blackboard Jungle was a sensation.

Probably the best explanation of what it did, and of what Rock Around the Clock did as its theme song, is in this quote from Frank Zapper from 1971.

In my days of flaming youth, I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people.

The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girlfriends and breaking up, etc., was nowhere when I compared it to my high school negro RB heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin Wolf and Willie May Thornton.

Again, when Zappa said this, that word was the accepted polite term for black people.

Language has evolved since.

The quote continues.

But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle.

When the titles flashed up there on the screen, Bill Haley and his comets started blurching one, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock.

It was the loudest rock sound kids had ever heard at the time.

I remember being inspired with awe.

In cruddy little teenage rooms across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players, listening to the dirty music of their lifestyle.

Go in your room if you want to listen to that crap and turn the volume all the way down.

But in the theatre watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down.

I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere.

He was playing the teenage national anthem, and it was so loud I was jumping up and down.

There were reports of riots in the cinemas, with people slicing up seats with knives in a frenzy as the music played.

Rock Around the Clock went to number one on the pop charts, but it did more than that.

It sold, in total, well over twenty-five million copies as a vinyl single, becoming the best-selling vinyl single in history.

When counting compilation albums on which it has appeared, the number of copies of the song that have sold must total in the hundreds of millions.

Bill Haley and the Comets had become the biggest act in the world, and for the next couple of years they would tour constantly, playing to hysterical crowds, and appearing in two films, Rock Around the Clock and Don't Knock the Rock.

They were worldwide superstars, famous at a level beyond anything imaginable before.

But at the same time that everything was going right for Rock Around the Clock's sales, things were going horribly wrong for everything else in Haley's life.

Ten days after the session for Shake Rattle and Roll, at the end of June 1954, Danny Sedrone, the session guitarist who had played on all Haley's records and a close friend of Haley, fell down the stairs and broke his neck, dying instantly.

At the end of July, Haley's baby daughter died suddenly of cot death.

And

there was no follow-up to rock around the clock.

You can't follow up anything that big.

There's nothing to follow it up with.

And Haley's normal attitude of scientifically assessing what the kids liked didn't work any more either.

The kids were screaming at everything because he was the biggest star in the world.

The next few records all hit the pop charts and all got in the top 20 or 30.

They were big hits by most standards, but they weren't rock around the clock big.

And then, in 1955, the band's bass player, saxophone player, and drummer quit the band, forming their own group, the Jodymars.

If you like this,

then we just can't miss.

Do you dig my glance?

Do you like to dance?

Won't you take a chance

on a little romance?

I'm not a Roman Romeo.

I'm nasty, bloomin' battle.

My baby, if you dig me,

here's what it's gonna be, Secretary Coates.

Haley soldiered on, however, and the new lineup of the band had another top ten hit in December 1955, their first in over a year, with See You Later, Alligator.

my baby walking

with another man today,

when I asked her what's the matter,

this is what I heard her say.

See you later, I'll again get it

out of walk like a die.

See you later, I'll get it.

After walking out,

can't you see you're in my way now?

While that was no rock around the clock, it did sell a million copies, but it was a false dawn.

The singles after that made the lower reaches of the top 30, and then the lower reaches of the top 100, and then stopped charting altogether.

They had one final top 30 hit in 1958, with the rather fabulous Skinny Mini.

Weller do I love her?

Does a boy love I?

Well, she is the apple

of my eye.

Skinny Minnie,

she's skinny,

she's tall.

That's an obvious attempt to copy Larry Williams as Boney Maroney, but also it's a really good record.

But the follow-up, Lean Gene, only reached number 60, and that was it for Bill Haley and the Comets on the US charts.

And that's usually where people leave the story, assuming Haley was a total failure after this.

But that shows the America-centric nature of most rock criticism.

In fact...

Bill Haley moved to Mexico in 1960.

The IRS were after Haley's money, and he'd found that he could make money from a Mexican record label, and if it stayed in Mexico, he didn't have to give his new income to them.

He was going through a divorce, and he'd met a Mexican woman who was to become his third wife, and so it just made sense for him to move.

And in Mexico, Bill Haley became king of the twist.

Florida Twist went to number one in Mexico, as did the album of the same name.

Indeed, Florida Twist, by Bill Haley Isus Cometas, became the biggest selling single ever up to that point in Mexico.

The Comets had their own TV show in Mexico, Orfeon Agogo, and made three Spanish-language films in the 60s.

They had a string of hits there, and Mexico wasn't the only place they were having hits.

Their Chick Safari went to number one in India.

India.

A warning before this bit, it's got a bit of the comedy racism that you would find at the time in too many records.

I said, Dr.

Livingston, what's with this hermit kick?

He said, Jim, I'm in a swim.

Somebody stole my chick.

I'm jungle Jim, and I'm out on a chick safari.

I'm

And even after his success as a recording artist finally dried up, in the late 60s, not the late 50s, like most articles on him assume, Haley and the Comets were still a huge live draw across the world.

At a rock revival show in the late 60s at Madison Square Garden, Haley got an eight and a half minute standing ovation before playing a song.

He played Wembley Stadium in 1972 and the Royal Variety Performance in 1979.

Haley's last few years weren't happy ones.

He started behaving erratically shortly after Rudy Pompeli, his best friend and saxophone player for over 20 years, died in 1976.

He gave up performing for a couple of years.

He and Pompey had always said that if one of them died the other wouldn't carry on.

And when he came back he seemed to be behaving oddly, and people usually put this down to his alcoholism, and blamed that on his resentment at his so-called lack of success, forgetting that he had a brain tumour, and that just perhaps that might have led to some of the erraticness.

But people let that cast a shadow back over his career, and let his appearance a bit fat, not in the first flush of youth, convince them that because he didn't fit with later standards of cool, he was forgotten and overlooked.

Bill Haley died in 1981, just over a year after touring Britain and playing the Royal Variety Performance, a televised event which would regularly get upwards of 20 million viewers.

I haven't been able to find the figures for the 1979 show, but the Royal Variety Performance regularly hit the top of the ratings for the year

in the 70s and 80s.

Bill Haley was gone, yes, but he hadn't been forgotten.

And as long as Rock Around the Clock is played, he won't be.

A history of rock music in 500 Songs is written, produced, and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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