Rock ‘n’ Roll: Return of the Big Beat

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

A long-gone folk hero often leaves behind the legend that someday he will return to his people. Barbarossa still sleeps, and the horn of Roland has not sounded again, but Elvis Presley is appearing in the flesh before an audience for the first time in nine years.

He stepped onstage in front of a gold lamé curtain at Las Vegas’ new International Hotel, coordinated his pelvic girdle and his phallic guitar, closed his eyes, tossed his head and sent a solar wind of nostalgia over the 2,000 middle-aged record executives, hotel guests and show folk assembled for the opening night. It was like being back in the innocent ’50s with Blue Suede Shoes, Love Me Tender, Jailhouse Rock, Don’t Be Cruel, Heartbreak Hotel, All Shook Up—and of course, the mangy Hound Dog (“cryin’ all the time”). But things weren’t quite the same. The audience was too grown up to scream and squeal. They clapped instead and called “Bravo!” and “More, more!” And Elvis—with longer sideburns and the grease out of his hair—was gently kidding the old songs and himself. After an especially rabid Hound Dog that ended with a split-kick jump, he was so winded that he reached for a glass of water, telling the audience: “You just look at me a couple of minutes while I get my breath back.”

Comeback Bid. Presley’s backup sound is much fuller now than it used to be, and more electronic; he has a soulful quartet called the Sweet Inspirations, a 35-piece orchestra loud with drums and guitars and a couple of Beatles songs (Yesterday and Hey Jude) plus Ray Charles’ What’d I Say. But the newest thing about the new Elvis is social consciousness. Recently released as a single, his version of In the Ghetto, a mawkish ditty about big-city slum life, came close to the top of the pop music charts.

The return of Elvis at 34 is a characteristically careful piece of timing by the canny “Colonel” Tom Parker, his manager since the days when Presley was nothing but a sexy-looking young truck driver with a guitar. For the last 13 years Parker has kept his charge virtually invisible to live audiences—limiting him to records, movies, one TV special and no interviews. Now is the time, the Colonel senses, for the comeback bid. Teen-agers seem to be tiring of bloodless electronic experimentation and intellectualism, and may be ready to discover for themselves the simplistic, hard-driving Big Beat—as the ’50s generation discovered it after the cool complexities of bop and progressive jazz.

The Colonel could be right. Radio stations around the country are trying “rockumentary” programs of “oldie but goodie” rock ‘n’ roll sounds of the ’50s. These draw a surprising response from teen-agers as well as the late-twenties and over-thirties at whom they were originally angled.

No Quagmires. Not only that, but many of the new groups are reaching back into the past for their material. Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys’ Good Old Rock ‘n’ Roll is on the charts. Creedence Clearwater Revival (TIME, June 27) has recut Screaming Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You and Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly, and Bobby Vinton is redoing To Know Him Is to Love Him, Phil Specter’s first hit, recorded originally in 1958 by the Teddy Bears.

A new group calling itself Ruben & the Jets (which is really Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) has cut an album which re-creates the sounds of the ’50s. Says the album’s liner blurb: “This is an album of greasy love songs and cretin simplicity. We made it because we really like this kind of music.”

It is hard to believe that popular music will ever stumble back into such poetic quagmires as “Who put the bomp in the bomp-ba bomp-pa bomp? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam a-ding-dong?” or the 50-odd repetitions of sha-da-da-da-da in the song called Get a Job. Boston Disk Jockey Steve Seagull thinks that the new interest is a short-time summer thing that has something to do with this primitivism. According to Seagull, “Rock ‘n’ roll is perfect beach music—like it just says ‘pizza stand, convertible and soft summer nights.’ It’s nice simple music and people sometimes like that. It talks about an age before Viet Nam, race problems, Nixon and our other hang-ups.”

Cry for Primitivism. Others, however, see the trend as deeper and longer-lasting. Says Pete Johnson, former rock-music critic for the Los Angeles Times: “With Sgt. Pepper, records got really artsy-craftsy—more cerebral than gut. You had 15-minute rock symphonies and huge, long, pretentious albums that you had to listen to 20 times to understand. It got so you couldn’t tell anything from this mill of sounds made by these esthetes of rock. Then there came a cry for primitivism, and you started hearing rock ‘n’ roll—a name that had been unfashionable—as opposed to rock, which had the stigma of art music.”

Whether the Big Beat is really back, or just filling in the decibels until the next musical mode comes along, many of the stars of 15 years ago are getting into the money again. A few of them:

> Chuck Berry, 41, is keeping up a steady working pace—four two-day engagements this month and an English tour in September—performing his famous Mabellene and 117 other numbers he wrote.

> The Everly Brothers, Don (32) and Phil (30), whose tight harmonies and sharp rhythms in big sellers such as Wake Up, Little Susie influenced the early Beatles, seemed to be washed up by 1960. Since January, though, their bookings have picked up handsomely. They have performed at the Newport Folk Festival and the Fillmore West, and will tour Europe next month.

> Fats Domino, 41, who claims to have had 19 gold records (sales of more than a million) in the ’50s—most of which he wrote as well as sang—was signed last year by Warner Reprise and assigned to young (27) Richard Perry, who produces Tiny Tim’s records.

> Little Richard, 34, who powed them in ’55 with his “Wop bop a loo bop ba lop bop bop—Tutti Frutti,” is doing it all over again—notably last week in Manhattan’s Central Park, where he ended up sharing most of his clothes with his admirers.

> Jerry Lee Lewis, 33, who was riding high in 1957 with Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On and Great Balls of Fire, was riding low a year later when, on a tour of England, the press discovered that he had married his 13-year-old cousin—fully five months before divorcing his second wife. After that, and some other calamities, he plugged along until about a year and a half ago, when his records caught on big in the Country & Western field. At an appearance last spring at The Scene in Manhattan, where he received a standing ovation, tears were seen welling in his eyes. “I think it was sweat,” says Jerry Lee. “But it was a great feeling. They really went wild. Maybe it was tears.”