Sh-Boom!: The Explosion of Rock 'n' Roll (1953-1968)
344
Sh-Boom!: The Explosion of Rock 'n' Roll (1953-1968)
344Paperback
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Overview
Clay Cole's SH-BOOM! is the pop culture chronicle of that exciting time, 1953-1968, when teenagers created their own music, from swing bands and pop to rhythm and blues, cover records, a cappella, rockabilly, folk-rock, and girl groups; from the British Invasion to the creation of the American Boy Band. He was first to introduce Chubby Checker performing the "Twist;" the first to present the Rolling Stones, Tony Orlando, Dionne Warwick, Neil Diamond, Bobby Vinton, the Rascals, Ronettes, Four Seasons, Dion, and dozens more; the first to introduce music video clips, discotheque, go-go girls and young unknown standup comedians Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Fannie Flagg to a teenage television audience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781600376382 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2009 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
In his youth, he was a juvenile radio and stage actor, recording artist, musical comedy performer and was featured in one Hollywood film, "Twist Around the Clock."
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
1) Youngstown, Ohio 1938 – 1954
"A coincidence is a small miracle, in which God chooses to remain anonymous."
Some people are lucky enough to have been born at the exact moment in time. I was one of them, born on the cusp of rock 'n' roll and ten years before the postwar baby boom. I was a New Year's baby, born Albert Rucker, Jr. and delivered in the early morning hours of January 1, 1938. By an ironic twist of fate, it was a Saturday, a night destined to be my television time-slot in the coming two decades.
"Thanks for the Memory" was the song of the year, winning the Oscar. When Bob Hope sang it in the picture "The Big Broadcast of 1938," a long-standing Hollywood technique was abandoned. When musical numbers are filmed, the songs are prerecorded and the actors lip-synchronize the lyrics to a playback track, to accommodate all the stops and starts. Hope's rendition moved his producers to tears, so Paramount brought an entire orchestra onto the set and Bob Hope sang it live. My entry into television many years later would be lip- synching records. 1938 was also the year that Robert Johnson, considered to be the "Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll," died. He was twenty-seven.
Radio delivered the top seven songs of the week from a "scientific survey" conducted by a tobacco company — the makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Listeners were informed that the weekly "Lucky Strike Hit Parade" survey checked the best-selling sheet music, phonograph records and the songs most played on automatic coin machines. At no time during its twenty-four-year broadcast (1935 to 1955 on radio, and 1950 to 1959 on television) was the exact procedure of this "authentic tabulation" ever revealed.
Radio was also our direct access to wartime news bulletins, miraculously broadcast — in spite of static distortions — live from London. To save money, some folks bought radio kits to assemble themselves. Soon, tabletop models were produced, beginning the golden age of network radio. Grandpa Nash purchased a two-tube, AM deluxe floor model console, as imposing as a Wurlitzer jukebox — furniture that spoke. We would sit on the carpet, in a circle, quietly listening, staring at the illuminated dials.
In the forties, our doors were seldom locked, bicycles were parked unchained, and hitchhiking was an acceptable method of getting from here to there. Our only fear was the ominous possibility of a Japanese kamikaze raid over downtown Hubbard, Ohio. Each night, a curfew signaled a blackout and our air raid warden would pound on Grandpa's front door, admonishing us to dim the lights and close the shades!
Hubbard was a town of about seven thousand, one of those Midwestern towns where everyone knew everyone and most of the men worked in the nearby mill town, at the steel factories of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Youngstown boasted its own symphony orchestra, art museum, and a burlesque house with "Busty" Russell grinding out four a day. The downtown centerpiece was the opulent Warner Theatre, far more lavish than a town of 240,000 deserved, a gift from four hometown boys: Albert, a soap salesman; Harry, a butcher; Sam, a carnival barker; and Jack, a deliveryman — the Warner Brothers.
Youngstown was also a mob town, a hideaway for racketeers, conveniently tucked midway between New York and Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. "The boys" controlled the unions, ran numbers and rigged car bombs; in one year, a record sixteen car bombs were triggered, a violent demolition derby. The Pick- Ohio Hotel was the mobster's gathering place, and as Reader's Digest reported, "In the barbershop, a sign was posted: 'We'll cut your hair and start your car for one dollar.'"
There was also a mob-controlled, illegal roadhouse, the Jungle Inn, on the outskirts of Hubbard, where a young Dean Martin worked as a dealer.
Big events in Hubbard were the annual soapbox derby down Liberty Hill, the Friday night football games, and the Memorial Day parade, when my Great Uncle proudly marched as the lone veteran of the Spanish-American War.
Jack O'Brian, the television critic for the New York Journal-American, once chastised me in print for opening one holiday show with "Happy Memorial Day": "that's like wishing his viewers a Happy Yom Kippur." What the smart-assed, big-city Mr. O'Brian didn't realize is that Memorial Day is a small-town thing, a parade with strutting drum majorettes, the high school band (a final march for senior class band members), the ladies' auxiliaries, and battalions of hometown veterans marching up Liberty Hill to the cemetery. The wide front porches of Hubbard were draped in red, white, and blue bunting and the Stars and Stripes fluttered from flagpoles up and down Mackey Street.
At 122 Mackey Street, a backyard picnic was part of the tradition, with aunts and uncles and cousins arriving with giant ceramic Fiesta bowls of potato salad and quivering ambrosia molds. (The colorful ceramic Fiestaware that was all the rage was created by two pottery-makers, the Laughlin brothers, in East Liverpool, Ohio, just down the road a-piece.) Meanwhile, Grandpa Nash presided over the flaming red brick grill he had assembled in our backyard. A Memorial Day picnic was just one ingredient in the secret recipe of a successful television personality.
The coming of television created a new job description, "The Personality," a person with charm but no discernable talent. If radio was a hot medium — with disc jockeys shrieking like used car salesmen, fearing that dreaded two seconds of silence — then television was a cool medium, folksy and down-home. This is the low-key television style perfected by Dave Garroway, Perry Como, Arthur Godfrey, even Edward R. Morrow — they spoke to that one viewer sitting at home alone. Sammy Davis, Jr., Jerry Lewis, and Chevy Chase may be great entertainers, but they failed as television hosts. It's that Memorial Day factor — they needed warm and fuzzy flannel under that shiny mohair suit. Andy Williams got it, Steve Lawrence ain't. Johnny Carson had his slice of "American Pie" growing up in Nebraska, and then topped it off with a dollop of New York sophistication, before becoming the urbane Hollywood host. A Midwestern Memorial Day picnic is one ingredient that prepared me to become an agreeable television host.
Dad and Mom and I shared a seven-bedroom, two-family house with her parents and two brothers, who spoiled me rotten. I was the firstborn, the first grandchild: "This kid will never have to walk!" My Uncle Bud and Uncle Sherm were still teenagers; Sherm was fourteen when I was born. It was like having two big brothers; they were my heroes. Mom's sister Louise had left the home to study nursing. Grandpa Nash purchased the family a brand-new, bright yellow Buick convertible with a rumble seat and a powerful radio ($3500 in 1940) and we would sing along to "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "Elmer's Tune," "Rum and Coca-Cola," and all the latest swing band favorites. Mom's three teenage cousins, Margaret, Bea and Ruth, who lived just across the street, introduced me to strange new music, unlike anything I had heard before — "Golden Earrings," "Nature Boy," "Mona Lisa" — songs with poetic images that haunted my imagination. In our family, music was everywhere.
Mom always said Dad looked exactly like Errol Flynn, but I couldn't see the resemblance. I hadn't seen Flynn in anything but "Robin Hood," and I just couldn't imagine Dad swinging from the trees of Sherwood Forest — in green, wool tights. Dad had gained quite a reputation on the basketball court, playing on the many church leagues that were all the rage at that time. He once won three games on three courts in three different divisions, all in one day. He quickly converted from Baptist to Methodist to Catholic simply by changing his shirt. It was through basketball that he met Mom.
Mom (Evelyn) was thin and fragile with worry-lines permanently etched into her forehead. She could still accomplish a split, perfected as a high school cheerleader, and had the uncanny ability to pluck handfuls of four-leaf clovers from our sprawling lawns. Mom, as well as most married women, proudly identified herself as "housekeeper" on my birth certificate. In 1938 you were a nurse, a typist, or a housewife. Popular radio hosts like Art Linkletter were guaranteed a round of applause whenever they proclaimed "homemaker" as "the most important job in America!" If you happened to be a homemaker from Brooklyn, the audience went berserk. (A "Brooklyn housewife" was a double-whammy to a radio host.)
All the men in our family, and in most families, worked for one company for their entire lives. The men in the Nash family worked at Republic Rubber, where Grandpa Nash was a highly paid executive; Dad was employed at the G-F (The General Fireproofing Company), a fabricator of high-end office furniture molded from a new, lightweight metal called aluminum. The G-F was his first and only employer, starting as a teenage time clerk at forty cents an hour, eventually working his way up through the ranks to superintendent of the chair division and eventually his own factory. (This would require a move to North Carolina, to supervise the construction of the plant; his assembly-line innovations eventually saved his company millions.) At night, Dad would sit at the kitchen table practicing the Palmer Method to improve his handwriting skills; his perfect penmanship was one of the gifts he passed on to me.
On those notoriously dreary Ohio winter nights, Grandpa Nash would host a Saturday night shindig, dinner and a show, meatballs and spaghetti prepared from his secret recipe. After a few highballs, the show would begin with Uncle Sherm behind his prized mother-of-pearl drum set, providing drum rolls and rim-shots. I've been told that Uncle Sherm was such a good drummer that he considered becoming a professional, until he learned that his idol Gene Krupa was seriously addicted to drugs. He never played the drums again. The show was staged by the men under the proscenium archway leading into the kitchen, the rest of us taking our positions on the dining room floor. The men ad-libbed their way through an evening of skits, impressions and send-ups of popular radio shows. Costumes and props magically materialized — a rubber nose for Jimmy Durante, a mustache for Jerry Colonna, a cap and gown for "Professor" Kay Kyser. The grand finale was always Uncle Sherm's impression of Hitler in hilarious guttural German doubletalk, and we would respond with the required "Sieg Heil!" One night, Grandma Nash, in a fit of laughter, launched a full set of dentures across the dining room. Many years later, as a student at Northwestern University (in a drama class, which included future film stars Jeffrey Hunter and Charlton Heston), Uncle Sherm was asked to perform his Hitler routine as the centerpiece of a football halftime show.
Our summertime ritual was two-weeks at Lake Erie in one of those rustic beach cottages, with its musty-damp smell, mix-and-match furniture, lumpy beds, and screened-in porch. To this day, whenever I hear a screen door slam, I am snapped back to those nostalgic summers at the Lake.
Family life revolved around the Baptist Church, where Grandpa Nash and my Great (Spanish American War) Uncle were deacons. At thirteen I was baptized – immersed into the water tank conveniently tucked under the choir loft behind the altar. I was president of the B.Y.P.U. (Baptist Young Peoples Union), and sang in the choir. The congregation is still reeling from my top-of-the-pops, boy-soprano rendering of "I Believe" – the Frankie Laine version. For a brief moment, I aspired to become a man of the cloth; a preacher or an interior decorator, I wasn't sure.
The good times ended on December 7, 1941 when America entered the war. Uncle Bud and Uncle Sherm joined the Army, while Aunt Louise (Mom's older sister) married and became a nurse. Dad was deferred from the draft because he held an essential job, supervising the making of fighter planes for the war department. In wartime, aluminum was the material of choice for the Army Air Force, a lightweight but sturdy component of the Thunderbolt, a war department favorite. Overnight, the G-F factory was converted to war production, working round the clock, in three eight-hour shifts. I seldom saw my father, except on payday; he would take mom and me into Youngstown for broiled scallops at the Nimrod Inn. There was tension in the air between my mother and father. I was too young to understand what was happening in our home, but I sensed unhappiness.
One unforgettable day, I came home from kindergarten to find my mother in tears, sobbing much more than usual. She rushed upstairs and threw herself across the bed. I scampered up the steps after her, to comfort her.
"Some day," she wailed, "some day, you and your father will come home and find me gone. Then maybe you'll appreciate me."
Psychiatrists will tell you, a child's worst fear is abandonment from parents. Fifteen years later, my "shrink" had a field day with that one. He reasoned, "Why didn't your mother simply say, 'someday your father will come home to find us both gone'? Why was she so willing to abandon you and leave you alone with your father?" I had a distant relationship with my father. He just never tossed me the ball.
From that moment on, I conspired never to leave the house. I had to keep an eye on Mom, for fear she might run away. I devised all sorts of schemes to be sent home from school. I feigned stomach aches and the flu. When I ran low on illnesses and diseases, I would go to the boy's room and rip the seam at the seat of my pants or pee in my underwear, anything to be sent home, to keep an eye on Mom. I once pretended to faint and lay motionless in spite of a prolonged tickling from the school nurse. Although I am extremely ticklish, I didn't stir; my first understanding that the mind is more powerful than the physical body. I also developed unprovoked nose bleeds – bright red drops would suddenly splatter on my school desk, sending me straightaway to the nurse for a home pass. I couldn't explain that one. Was my brain in cahoots with my body to get me home to Mom? It was beyond me.
I became the target of the school bully, a mean-spirited classmate named Raymond Nadjim whose father was an eye doctor and maintained his practice in his home, which was halfway between my house and school. In his window, Dr. Nadjim displayed one ominous oversized eyeball, which seemed to say to me: "I've got my eye on you boy." I walked three blocks out of my way every school day to avoid his wrath and ridicule.
So, without playmates and with a tenuous mother, I kept company with Grandma Nash, as she stood vigil, peering out between the slats of her Venetian blinds, as if she might see her boys coming home from overseas. As all war mothers had done, she proudly placed a banner with two stars in her window, signaling to passerby's that she had two sons in service. Grandma Nash was my secret source of pocket money for all the essentials in life, like marbles, a Klondike bar or hand puppets. She purchased all the correct breakfast cereals so that we could mail box tops off to that exotic sounding Battle Creek, Michigan and then patiently wait for the postman to deliver my "secret decoder ring" or my Little Beaver headband. Grandma sent so much money to Battle Creek that surely somewhere up in Michigan, there must be a Helen Nash Highway.
Grandma Nash also bankrolled my many trips uptown to the Palace Theatre, where the movies were double bills that changed three times a week. It was here, sitting alone in the dark, that my notions of Manhattan were formed. It seemed that every New Yorker lived in an all-white apartment, with shiny-shiny floors, and a wraparound terrace overlooking the 59 Street Bridge. In Manhattan, a man's wardrobe consisted entirely of tuxedoes, smoking jackets and broad-shouldered bathrobes. "One day," I thought, "I too will own an ascot."
The first movie I remember was "Bambi," a film that so traumatized me that Mom and Dad had to drag me kicking and screaming from under my seat and out and into the street. When Bambi loses his mother in the forest fire and starts crying, "Mother! Mother," I lost it. Not losing my own mother had become my life-mission.
Mickey Rooney devised a life-saving solution to all of Judy Garland's problems, "I know! We'll put on a show!" That became the solution to my problems as well. The movies inspired me to create my own little backyard productions – puppet shows, Wild West pageants and vaudeville shows. I would write the script, stage direct my little cast of troopers and provide the costumes. I was six when my brother Jim was born, and we briefly moved into Youngstown to be closer to Dad's factory, in a townhouse owned by the G-F. Dad could walk the half-block to the main gate. I quickly found a whole new gang of troopers for my backyard shows.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sh-Boom!: The Explosion of Rock 'N' Roll 1953 – 1968"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Clay Cole.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction by David Hinckley,
Overture,
1) Youngstown, Ohio 1938 – 1954,
2) Chicago/Cumberland Gap – 1954,
3) Ohio to NYC, 1955 – 1957,
4) NBC to Channel 13, 1957 – 1959,
5) Channel 13, NYC – 1959,
6) Payola Scandal – 1959,
7) Copacabana,
8) Palisades Amusement Park – 1960,
9) Twist – 1961,
10) Apollo,
11) Brooklyn Paramount Theatre,
12) WPIX-TV,
13) Channel 11 – 1963,
14) Family Matters,
15) Girl Groups,
16) British Invasion,
17) Clay Cole's Happening Place,
18) Motown,
19) American Boy Bands,
20) The Party's Over,
Coda,
Here, There and Everywhere,
Index,
About the Author,