Review: 'Bo Diddley' (Chess/Acoustic Sounds Edition)

He didn't have Chuck's knack for storytelling, Buddy's melodic gifts, Elvis's voice, or Little's sheer excitement, but Bo is still probably my favorite Rock and Roll pioneer. His rhythm defined his work—the "shave-and-a-haircut" groove will always be known as "the Bo Diddley beat"—but the artist formerly known as Ellias McDaniel also deserves credit for his spacey atmosphere. He's really the only major early rocker who prognosticated psychedelia, which is my personal fave genre. He was also damn funny.

Review: 'The Dance Album of Carl Perkins' Vinyl Reissue

Intervention Records has crafted audiophile reissues of records from the very late sixties through the nineties. For their latest release, the label reaches as far back as it ever has to revive one of the key LPs of rock and roll's earliest days. Originally released in 1957, Carl Perkins's Dance Album lined up a superb set of radio classics, knocking the socks off bobby soxers, greasers, and four Liverpudlian history-changers in the process. But it would do Perkins a disservice to suggest his Dance Album's importance is solely due to The Beatles, as a unit and as solo artists, covering nearly everything on it. Perkins's songwriting stands strong alongside the era's best composers, namely Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, his "Blue Suede Shoes" easily being one of rock and roll's defining songs and philosophical statements. He also stands out for the crystalline precision of his singing and six-string twanging. 

Review: Paul McCartney & Wings' 'One Hand Clapping'

After releasing Band on the Run and finally getting a gold star from venomous critics, including the most venomous critic of all (Lennon), Paul McCartney was hot to keep riding that wave of good will. So he rushed into the studio with Wings to follow up with a live-in-the-studio session of covers and songs he'd already recorded and released with his current band, as a solo artist, and with his old band featuring that most venomous critic of all (Lennon).

Psychobabble's 100 Favorite Songs of the Fifties!

Attention, attention: Psychobabble is having a hop tonight, and you and yours are invited. So grease up your D.A. and pull on your boogie shoes. Those soles are gonna get a real work out because we’ve lined up the hottest rockers, hippest jazzbos, and wailingest blues bruisers to make you flip your lid. Get ready to jive and jump to… 

100. “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere)” by Bill Haley & His Comets

The party starts now, so let’s get this shack together, Daddy-O! Nail down the furniture, snap the lock off the liquor cabinet, and for christ’s sake, dim, dim those damn lights… I want some atmosphere. Bill Haley eases us in with one of his smoothest unions of rock and swing, but don’t worry, things are about to get crazy, man, crazy.

99. “Rockin’ Bones” by Ronnie Dawson

Review: 'The Buddy Holly Story' Blu-Ray

As the first of its genre, The Buddy Holly Story was bound to lay out some fundamental Rock bio-pic clichés: the rags-to-riches arc, the landmark recording sessions and gigs, the intra-band politics, the “print the legend” approach to its subject’s life. It also knocked those pins down by having the actors not only perform their own music but having them do it live, on camera. Steve Rash’s movie actually works best as a true-blue concert film. Gary Busey may be way too old to play Holly (at 33, he was a full eleven years older than the singer at the time of his death), he may be too stocky even after having lost 32 pounds for the role, and his guitar playing may have been the only musical element to require overdubbing (by Jerry Zaremba, who plays Eddie Cochran in the movie), but he brings so much wild energy to his musical performances that the movie really comes alive during them. Rash clearly realizes this as he lets so many songs play out in full. The version of “Rock Around with Ollie Vee” that Busey, Charles Martin Smith, and Don Stroud play at a roller rink can stand alongside a lot of the most electrifying live Rock & Roll performances on film; it’s right up there with anything in The Last Waltz or Gimme Shelter (probably not The Kids Are Alright though).

The Buddy Holly Story doesn’t work as well as a biography, lacking drama and glaringly cutting Holly’s manager and producer Norman Petty out of the picture. Petty is not well-loved, because like a lot of guys in his position, he completely ripped off his artist by taking co-writing credit for songs he had nothing to do with and literally stealing royalty dollars. Rumor has it that Petty’s absence had to do with the influence of Holly’s widow, Maria. I understand why she’d still be bitter over Petty’s dirty dealings, but his absence also costs the film a villain that might have heightened the drama a lot. Instead, The Buddy Holly Story is often concerned with race relations, though refreshingly, it is Buddy's whiteness that causes problems in a Rock & Roll world regarded as an African-American domain (the potential problem his whiteness might cause in his romance with a Puerto Rican woman is a mere hiccup though). By turning the focus toward the intimately human instead of the epic, The Buddy Holly Story fells another bio-pic cliché. Even his death is not sensationalized.

The Buddy Holly Story is now available for the first time on blu-ray from Twilight Time. The picture generally looks good with a natural grain and very few blemishes, though some shots are a touch blurry. On the audio bonus side, there’s a feature commentary from Rash and Busey ported over from the 2003 Region 2 DVD and Twilight Time’s standard isolated score track, which has never been more welcome than it is on this movie so heavy with terrific music.

Get The Buddy Holly Story blu-ray at screenarchives.com here.

Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest Singles of 1957!

The training wheels were off Rock & Roll for good by 1957. Parents, teachers, priests, and politicians deemed Rock & Roll dangerous enough to inspire its most impassioned defenses. It started developing beyond its blues base into fascinating new territory. And all the founding fathers were in full swing: Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Larry, Jerry Lee, and Little all making some of their definitive records. 1957 is Rock & Roll, and these are 20 of its rockingest rockers.

20. “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers

By 1957, Rock & Roll had its grip on America’s youth sufficiently enough that its supposed detrimental effects had become common knowledge. It made kids horny, violent, disrespectful little criminals. A nation of teenage werewolves. With that came some impassioned defenses from the Rock & Rollers who bashed out this heinous new form of “music.” In the case of “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” by 15-year old Frankie Lymon, it came from an actual teen too. His call for his fellow youngsters to “stay out of trouble” is weepily sincere, but Lymon’s tragic true story told a different tale.


19. “The Monster” by Billy Ford and the Thunderbirds

Frankie Lymon’s doo-wop plea is lovely, but it’s not the most defiant stance. Billy Ford and the Thunderbird’s (soon to transform into the soul duo Billy & Lillie) “The Monster” is another beast entirely. “I’m the monster Rock & Roll” he growls, threatening that everything you moms and dads fear about your kids’ music is true, true, true. The louder the critics complain, the harder he rocks. Try cutting off his head, and two will grow in its place. As his young fans grow up, they’ll still love him and worship him as a king. That every one of Ford’s monstrous assertions would come true shows that parents really did have something to fear in Rock & Roll. Hail, hail the monster!


18. “Pink Champagne” by The Tyrones

Rock & Roll is dumb, inarticulate, a bad influence that appeals to its fans’ basest instincts. Yeah, so what’s your point? Down some booze, whip your hair and hips to the out-of-control, endlessly modulating mania of The Tyrones’ “Pink Champagne”. “Wine! Wine! Wine!” the boys shout in unison to a raunch-o-la sax wail. The track may begin with a list of all the ways pink champagne wrecked the singers’ lives, but their cheery delivery and chug-a-lug chant speaks a lot louder. Get drunk, get crazy. Rock & Roll’s essence served up in long-stemmed crystal.


17. “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors

Holly Hop and Berry Pickin’: Buddy and Chuck and the Invention of Rock & Roll’s Future

The package was completely unexpected: he was white, geeky, gangly, bespectacled. His hair was a little oily-looking, but neatly cropped in contrast to the wild pompadours that Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Little Richard favored. He wore a conservative two-piece suit in contrast to those guys’ baggy trousers and flashy lamé. None of this fit the Rock & Roll image. Nonetheless, Buddy Holly was one of its great innovators. And if Elvis was the face of Rock & Roll, the cat who struck the genre’s most iconic image, Buddy was the guts. He wasn’t gorgeous and groovy; he was the content in the grooves. With Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly revolutionized Rock & Roll music more profoundly than any other artist of his era. And, yes, that does include Elvis.


Without question, Elvis Presley deserves more credit for popularizing Rock & Roll than any other artist in the genre’s history. He created a tizzy with his beautiful face, beautiful baritone, and gritty sexuality. Yet his greatest influence on Rock & Roll is the inspirational role he played for a new breed of musicians whose music bore little similarity to his. He may have dazzled Lennon and Jagger and Townshend and Dylan and the rest, but most of those artists appropriated few of his records’ signatures. The 2/4 beat of Elvis’s Sun recordings is evident in much of Dylan’s mid-‘60s electric work, but it was hardly pervasive beyond the ‘50s. On the odd occasion a singer attempted to mimic his baritone—as Dylan did on “Lay Lady Lay” or Robert Plant on “Candy Store Rock”—the results sounded more like parody than tribute. That Elvis was never a songwriter further limits his personal impact. As an icon, he was without peer. As a force that would instigate Rock & Roll’s most radical musical developments, he is overshadowed by a pair of audacious trailblazers.


The music of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly constituted the two main ingredients of Rock & Roll, the bullion in a soup that would brew The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Ronettes, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello, Holly Golightly, The White Stripes, The… well, if they plucked a guitar or crooned into a mic, they likely owe these two guys a tip of the hat and a pint of lager. Berry brought the pace: revved up like a ’57 Thunderbird, gunned along on power chords accelerated with a pinky swing to the sixth. With his limber riffing, Berry took Rock & Roll’s most essential tool and zapped it to life like Dr. Frankenstein. Richards, Clapton, Hendrix, Page, and Beck were listening. He also brought something to Rock & Roll that would crop up in the work of all the followers mentioned above and every other rocker who mattered: literate flair. Berry didn’t spew moon and June clichés; he spun yarns. Saying he loved a girl wasn’t adequate for the duck walker; he needed to convey his frustration about being unable to undo her seatbelt while fumbling in the front seat of his car. He needed to protest being inundated with bills, fast-talking salesmen (you listening, Jagger?), schooling, the military, and all the other monkey business. He needed to create fully fleshed characters: the road-bound daddy distraught because he can’t get a phone call through to his daughter back home, a prehistoric monkey who raises the ire of all the other animals in the jungle, the hot-picking country boy with dreams of being “the leader of a big old band.” Berry’s tall-tales were the seeds that sprouted “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Janie Jones”, too many others.

Buddy Holly was not as fleet-fingered on the frets as Chuck Berry. His lyrics didn’t display as much panache. He was a moon and June guy, not a storyteller. But whereas Berry was content to repeat the same tune, guitar riff, and chord-progression over and over and over again, Buddy was a restless composer and musical innovator. No two Holly songs sound the same, and the same cannot be said of any other rocker of his generation. He made Rock & Roll the one thing its early proponents never expected it could be: eclectic. He could pump out a Bo Diddley beat on “Not Fade Away”. Flip that record over and find the twee pitter-patter of “Everyday” (surely the first Rock & Roll song to feature the celesta!). The fatalistic “That’ll Be the Day” is a soulful swing; “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” is euphoric, finger-snapping pop. Listen to “Words of Love” to hear the invention of jangle-pop, because The Beatles and The Byrds sure did. Listen to “Listen to Me” to hear the invention of Latin-Rock nearly a year before “La Bamba”. Listen to “Well…All Right”. Yes, you are hearing the birth of folk rock. And with the last tracks he recorded, something even more fascinating was taking place. Employing the strings of arranger Dick Jacobs on “True Love Ways”, “Raining in My Heart”, and “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”, Buddy Holly invented the orchestral Rock & Roll that would seem so innovative when The Beatles started using violins and cellos in the mid-‘60s.

Those final tracks also revealed the development of Buddy Holly’s compositional skills. Breaking away from the limitations of the I-IV-V blues progression, he took his music in adult territory that probably still didn’t endear him to late ‘50s adults. Yet he certainly endeared himself to the young writers who would enact the innovations Holly’s untimely death on February 3, 1959, prevented him from doing himself. That maturity is evident in Roy Orbison’s work of the early ‘60s. Formerly a rock-a-billy raver, Orbison expanded his vocabulary of chord-changes and arrangements with “Only the Lonely”, “Running Scared”, and “Crying” that sound like the next logical step after Holly’s late-career work. Incorporating instruments beyond their four-piece line-up was still in The Beatles’ future, but the influence of Holly’s inventive melodies and harmonies are already present in “Please Please Me” (originally conceived as an Orbison-eque torch song), “From Me to You”, “She Loves You”, others.


Had Buddy Holly lived, would he have taken those next steps before his students did? Miles from the prude his image implied, he might have led the psychedelic brigade before John and George’s dentist spiked their coffee with LSD in early ‘65. Or maybe he would have put his zeal for instrumental experimentation and studio trickery, such as overdubbing, to use as a producer. Most likely, he would have continued writing and singing and performing and recording. And though he may not have remained consistently at the top of the charts, he would have remained consistently popular and influential. And we don’t need “maybes” or “what ifs” to qualify that last point, because it’s the stone truth. It’s in the hiccups of Ronnie Spector and Joey Ramone. It’s in the thump of Keith Moon’s cardboard kit on “See My Way” and the heavy, black frames on Elvis Costello’s face. It’s in The Everly Brothers’ “True Love Ways”, The Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away”, The Beatles’ “Words of Love”, Blind Faith’s “Well… All Right”, Blondie’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too”, The Raveonettes “Everyday”, and all those tracks on the Rave On Buddy Holly tribute album released just a few months ago. Buddy Holly did not live to experience his own legacy, as his fellow pioneer Chuck Berry did, but it exists and it persists, never to fade away.

Buddy Holly was born 75 years ago today.

Review: 'Rockabilly: The Twang Heard ‘Round the World'

So stylish and vibrant and graphic, how has Rockabilly not been the subject of some sort of illustrated history until now? I don’t know, Daddy-O, but fans will be pleased that one has finally arrived, and it ain’t just pretty pictures. I’ve read several of Voyageur Press’ coffee-table Rock & Roll compendiums, and editor Michael Dregni’s Rockabilly: The Twang Heard ‘Round the World is the one that gets it the rightest. Beautifully written by the likes of Greil Marcus, Craig Morrison, David McGee, and others, this book covers the various corners of that funky fusion of C&W and R&R with greater breadth and insight than one might expect from an illustrated history. Nice biographies of luminaries including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Billy Riley, are joined by explorations of lesser known innovators and decisive moments in the genre’s evolution—often with the help of the folks who made them happen. McGee provides a fascinating history of the creation of “Blue Suede Shoes”. Paul Burlison explains how he got that nasty distortion on “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” in an interview from 1982. Marcus compares Elvis’s faux arrogance to Buddy Holly’s wholly convincing self doubt and speculates winsomely on how the latter’s career may have played out had the music never died. Rockabilly also includes looks at the fashions, guitars, amps, and recording techniques that made the genre come alive, as well as the latter day rockers (Sleepy LaBeef, The Stray Cats, The Cramps, etc.) who gave it life after the ‘50s. Numerous lengthy interviews (Ronnie Hawkins! Wanda Jackson! Sonny Burgess!), oodles of great photos, and a very amusing afterward courtesy of Luc Sante round out the book.

April 27, 2009: The 15 Greatest Singles of 1959

Rock & Roll’s first boom was pretty brief. Although it sent American teens into frenzy and inspired countless future British Invaders; parents, religious types, and other squares saw to it that Rock & Roll didn’t get the radio-time it deserved. As every rock doc ever made has already stated, a slew of controversies and deaths helped hip-check R&R from the spotlight by the end of the ‘50s: the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens; Elvis’s stint in the army; Little Richard’s shunning Rock & Roll in favor of religion; Jerry Lee Lewis getting hitched to his 13-year old cousin; Chuck Berry getting arrested at the end of 1959; and on and on. Regardless, there were still some red hot singles hitting record shop shelves 50 years ago. Here are my 15 favorites:

15. “I’m Ready”- Fats Domino

Fats Domino is one of the few original Rock & Rollers who made it through the ‘50s unscathed, although his hits certainly dried up when the decade was over. “I’m Ready” is one of his last big ones, but its relentless rhythm, good-natured boasting, and breezy piano fills suggest that Fat Man didn’t have a worry in the world.


14. “Forty Days”- Ronnie Hawkins

Rockabilly meets gospel on Ronnie Hawkins’s hit version of Chuck Berry’s “Forty Days” (basically a rewrite of the Berry hit “Thirty Days”). The fiery performance arrives special delivery from Hawkins’s backing band, the Hawks, who would achieve stardom a decade later as the Band.


13. “Mr. Blue”- The Fleetwoods