How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Wald Elijah

Author:Wald, Elijah [Wald, Elijah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

13

ROCK THE JOINT

They’ve called it a lot of things since King Oliver brought it up the Mississippi from New Orleans—this peculiarly American music that moved from the levees to Carnegie Hall. Mostly, I guess, it’s been called jazz, but there were those days of the early 30s when the term was swing. Today they tell me the music of this half-century decade is known as rhythm and blues.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, 1954

On Monday, July 14, 1952, Paul Whiteman was presenting his TV Teen Club, a weekly amateur contest on Philadelphia’s ABC television affiliate. It was more than thirty years since the erstwhile King of Jazz had swept the country with his dance orchestrations, and he had weathered the decades better than most of his peers. He had bailed out of the touring band business toward the end of 1942 and taken over as director of music for NBC’s Blue Network, which shortly became the American Broadcasting Company. In 1947, he became one of the first coast-to-coast disc jockeys as host of the Paul Whiteman Club,1 and in 1948, when ABC expanded into television, he conducted a performance of Rhapsody in Blue on the inaugural telecast, then began hosting the TV Teen Club the following spring.

The Teen Club was a weekly talent contest: One surviving show includes a jazz clarinetist, a kid soloing on ocarina, a tap dancer, a gymnast, and a gangly guitarist in cowboy duds, and the audience picked a winner with the aid of an applause meter. This particular afternoon, after a little banter with his female cohost, Whiteman yielded the stage to a local sixteen-year-old named Charlie Gracie. Gracie played an introductory riff on electric guitar, hit a stop-time chord, and began to sing:

We’re gonna tear down the mailbox, rip up the floor,

Beat down the windows, and knock down the door,

We’re gonna rock, baby, rock this joint!

We’re gonna rock, yes, rock this joint!

We’re gonna rock, we’re gonna rock this joint tonight!2

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