Bill Haley and the Birth of Rock and Roll

Bill Haley was more dangerous than Elvis and he's even been blamed for the Berlin Wall going up.

We watched One for the Money - The Birth of Rock and Roll a few weeks back and I highly recommend it.  It honors those rock and roll pioneers while giving props to the black musicians who really started it all but couldn't get radio time and had to watch their songs made into hits by white artists like Elvis, Pat Boone and Bill Haley.

Bill Haley:  Bandleader and Country and Western Singer Turned Rock and Roll Pioneer

Bill Haley and his Comets sing Rock around the Clock, the song that opens the 70's sitcom Happy Days.  The show's producers picked that song because many consider Haley the creator of rock and roll and that song the genre's first hit. The silence as the jukebox lays down the record suddenly punctuated by banging drums and Haley's vocals is a metaphor for rock itself bursting upon the scene.

That and other Haley songs provided the soundtrack for the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle, about high school hoodlums.  The movie, and the band's wild antics (jumping around, flopping on the ground, shouting, base player riding his base like a pony...) scared parents across two continents.

Build The Wall

A rump Pink Floyd (really just David Gilmour and his extras) was quick to cash in on The Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 even though their album The Wall, had nothing to do with that wall.  Many other artists joined in the celebration, but no one mentioned the Rock and Roller who perhaps contributed to the wall's construction. 

Bill Haley and the Comets gave a raucous concert in Berlin in October of 1958 that caused some youth rioting, and the wall went up soon after.

After investigating the wild riot at the Sunday night performance of the guitar-strumming singer and his "Comets," the shocked West Berlin senate banned all future rock 'n' roll concerts.

Neues Deutschland, East Germany's official Communist organ, denounced Haley in a front-page editorial for "turning the youth of the land of Bach and Beethoven into raging beasts."

Haley's Berlin show turned into a fist-and-stick battle between 500 youths and police, resulting in four injured policemen, 18 arrests and 50,000 marks ($11,900) damage to the hall.

The Communist Party organ, however, branded Haley an agent of so-called aggressive Western politicians who were seeking to exploit rock 'n' roll to create an atom war psychology among young people. (Stars and Stripes)

... And they did it in suits and ties
The whole phenomenon cracks me up because they were all in suits and ties.  I can only imagine what it did to kids and parents to see such men perform these wild and unexpected antics.  And the music is good, too, with a jazzy, late big band feel.  I'm too young to have experienced that era, but it sure must have been exciting.

So what's with the Spit Curl He was always Sporting? Haley was blind in his left eye, and it didn't always track with the right one.  The curl took attention away.

Here's a rowdy version of Rudy's Rock.  It's tame by today's standards, but these cats were the first to swing it.  Everyone else is just a copycat...