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Let's
begin by taking a look back to  . In the
spring of , most of us were 12 years old and in our first year of
junior
high.
It was
definitely
a trendsetting year ─
and what a
year
it was!
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was the year of the Lawrence Welk Show,
and the year we "met" Marshall Matt Dillon in
the mother of all
TV "adult westerns," Gunsmoke. It
was also the year of the original
big money
TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question, and the year we met the
incomparable Sgt. Bilko
and saw the first
of those 39 timeless classics, the hilarious, stand-alone, half-hour episodes of The
Honeymooners. TV has never, never gotten better
since! |
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the year that
opened, and the year we met Davy Crockett
and Captain Kangaroo (but of course, we were a little old for Captain
Kangaroo).
It  was the year we
lost Albert Einstein and met Ann Landers, Alfred E. Neuman,
Annette, Maybelline, Julie London, and a couple of other gals, one named Sue (who
"knows just what to do") and one named Daisy (who "always
drives me crazy").
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was the year Guys and Dolls made
the move from
Broadway to the silver screen. We also had other great films like Mr. Roberts, The Seven Year Itch
and On the Waterfront. Marty won the
Oscar for Best Picture, but the
definitive film of our generation was
Rebel
Without a Cause, with James Dean, one of our heroes, who died
September 30th
that year
in a tragic accident. Broadway gave us The Diary of Anne
Frank, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Silk Stockings,
Damn Yankees, and Inherit the Wind.
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was the year of beginning construction on the LI
Expressway, the year of the Salk polio vaccine and the year the AFL
union merged with the CIO. It
was the year of the novels, Marjorie Morningstar,
Auntie Mame, Not as a Stranger, No Time for
Sergeants, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. And
it was the year that the colors, pink and gray, became a men's fashion
phenomenon (unlike any before or since). It was the first summer
 we
had little transistor radios so we could take
our music to the beach, and the year the hero
sandwich first appeared in New York.
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When a young black woman, Rosa Parks,
refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and started a
bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama,
became the birth of the
civil rights movement in America.
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It was the year that cars got
really  ,
when Chevy
finally gave us both its first V-8 and
the first cool |
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station
wagon, the
Nomad  ,
it was the year that Ford introduced
the ultra-cool T-bird, |
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And
speaking of music (and that's what this page is really about, isn't it?),
was
the year
of the
likes of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" and "The Yellow Rose
of Texas." But, we were at the
very dawn of our adolescence,
and coincidentally, it was also
the very dawn of the
most far-reaching, long lasting trend in popular culture in the history of the
world ─ rock 'n' roll music ─
our music!
And soon, our music changed the world.
was the year that our music climbed the charts and
swept the
nation
and the year
that comic genius and TV pioneer, the now late
Sid Caesar,
created a
brilliant and classic parody of our brand new music called
The
3 Haircuts (click
here). |
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"All
the music that followed
ours was evolution,
but in 1955, ours was a
revolution!"
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(To hear "Rock Around
the Clock," go to
"Prom Night.") |
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You
want to talk about history? Now,
that
was history. Yes, although it was bubbling in the background, "gestating,"
if you will, out of the spotlight for years before, on August 7th,
1955, a performance of
"Rock Around the Clock" by
Bill Haley and His Comets
became the first rock 'n' roll performance on national TV (on the Ed Sullivan
Show).
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 But
shortly before all that, on March 25th, 1955, Blackboard Jungle hit the big screen in
,
it truly was the birth of rock 'n' roll ─ its most pivotal moment.
When
we went to the movies in the spring of
to see
Blackboard Jungle,
the theater
literally
rocked
when on
the surface of a
blackboard the opening
credits
rolled:
Never before was a movie theater so energized.
Blackboard Jungle
was set in a New York City high school overwrought with juvenile delinquency,
the kind of inner city school our parents wanted to keep us away from when they decided to move to the
suburbs
and buy their first homes. |
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 Although
it was not perfect, and it had its "incidents,"
Oceanside High School
was not at all like the high school portrayed in Blackboard Jungle. Nevertheless,
the rebellious spirit of rock 'n' roll was there with us, too, leading the
teenage revolution of the 1950s just the same. |
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―
Chuck Berry, 1958
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And
even though Mr. Berry somehow neglected to mention it,
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Right after Blackboard
Jungle, rock
'n' roll took hold
─
and it took hold fast and has dominated
popular music ─
and popular culture
─ from that day on. And we quickly
became the first generation of young people
in history to be given our very
own music. And at no time before that of
our youth was the music more socially and culturally important. And what
fantastic music it was!! |
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By early July of
(after "sleeping" for a year after its initial release in 1954),
the record, "Rock Around the Clock,"
by Bill Haley and His Comets
rallied our generation and became its anthem as it was
was propelled by Blackboard Jungle to become the first rock 'n' roll record to go number 1─ it stayed there for 8 weeks
until Labor Day
weekend, selling 6 million copies
by the end of the year
─ and the world has never been the same
since. Just over six months later, on March
21, 1956, the movie, also titled Rock
Around the Clock, opened in theaters all
over the USA. It was the first
full-length movie about rock 'n' roll music and the first of a series of five
such movies that featured our
generation's no. 1, outspoken advocate,
Alan Freed,
playing himself.
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Soon the first singer-songwriter and the greatest lyricist of the genre,
Chuck Berry,
(whom we also
first
"met" on record in
, along with
Little Richard and
Fats
Domino) would be shouting this familiar rebellious challenge, the teenage
declaration of independence, to the adult establishment,
"Roll
over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikowski the news."
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 In
1957,
Chuck Berry's
autobiographical "Johnny B. Goode"
all but assured that the electric guitar would forever dominate our music;
nevertheless, the true
heart and soul of
early rock 'n' roll will always be in
its passionate saxophone solos, many by virtually unknown musicians.
Our music was everywhere. It came at us from the big
screen and the little
screen
in our living
rooms (on "American Bandstand" and
its many imitators), from the stages at the Fox and Paramount theatres
and from the school gyms, from the juke boxes
in bars and diners 
and little 45-rpm record players at basement parties. But first and
foremost, the
rock 'n' roll revolution was on the radio, and it was led by a new
group of heroes
─ the mighty
DJs. We listened to them in the privacy
of our bedrooms , in
our basements, at
the beach,
and from the dashboards of our
cars 
while we were  . |
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 Although for many kids in the more remote parts of
our country, that trip to the movies to see Blackboard Jungle was the
first time they ever heard anything like "Rock Around the
Clock," we were lucky enough to be only 25 miles from the one and
only New York City. There,
Alan Freed
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the
first and most important of our new DJ heroes
and a true champion of our generation, was at 1010 WINS New
York spinning rock 'n' roll records
for us on the radio
 every night,
and sometimes every afternoon after school, since his New York debut on September 7, 1954
(the day before we started the
7th grade
at Oceanside Jr. High School).
He accompanied
the music by ringing a cowbell and pounding to the "Big Beat" on a Manhattan telephone
directory, and he supplemented it with his rapid-fire recitations of endless
dedications (which you can hear again by clicking
here).
Yes, over
six months before
anyone
ever saw
Blackboard
Jungle
or heard "Maybelline," "Tutti-Frutti" or
"Ain't That a Shame"
─
and over a year before any of us up
north ever heard of Elvis Presley
(his
first national hit, "Heartbreak Hotel" was in early 1956), Freed was playing unforgettable songs for us
on New York Radio in 1954, songs that many of us still listen to
often, songs like "Sh'boom," "Shake, Rattle and Roll,"
"Earth Angel" and, of course, even "Rock Around the
Clock." |
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 And from the beginning,
Alan Freed was giving us live
stage shows featuring our favorite rock 'n' roll performers several times a year,
practically right next door in Brooklyn and in Manhattan, and movies like Rock Around the
Clock. He was
the undisputed father of rock 'n' roll music, more than anyone, the
man
responsible for the wide and rapid spread of this popular
musical phenomenon, and we, the teenagers, were his target audience.
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So where did this fresh new music come from?
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 Alan Freed
described
our music in late 1956, with incredible perspective for the time, in the
 movie, Rock, Rock, Rock
(which, incidentally,
introduced a 16-year old Tuesday Weld almost three
years
before her memorable
role as Thalia Menninger in
"The
Many Loves of Doby Gillis,"
one of the first TV
shows in which all the main characters were teenagers.
Freed's
description went like this: |
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"Rock 'n' roll is a river
of music, which has absorbed many streams: rhythm and blues, jazz,
ragtime, cowboy songs, country songs, folk songs. All have contributed
greatly to the 'Big Beat'."
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Like the melting pot that American society itself was supposed to be, it was a mixture of many older
American musical forms originating from every corner of our nation. With incredible speed, the doo-wop harmonies of urban blacks and whites shot
like bullets out
of the blues clubs of Chicago and from the street corners of Philadelphia and
our own New York, some of
it becoming "rockabilly" as it blended with southern and southwestern country styles,
and some of it taking on the rolling rhythms of New Orleans. In
fact, you might say that, more than anyone else, Fats Domino (who rolled his body as he played the
piano) put the "roll" in "rock 'n' roll."
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In
the immortal words of the late
Mr. Domino, "the
music makes people
happy," spoken
during a television interview in 1956. And after all these years
─ it still does. For
us,
"[e]very sha-la-la-la, every wo-o,
wo-o still shines."
And as I said when I
addressed our 20-year reunion in 1980,
"Most of our music made us
happy; some made us cry; all of it made us dance. It still does all
of these things
─ and it's all our own."
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And as Bob Seeger said in his 1978 tribute to our music, which he called "old time rock 'n' roll,"
"Today's
music ain't got the same soul."
(Click
to listen.)
In fact,
we should be grateful that our rock 'n' roll music changed when it did, for if it were to be
indistinguishable from all that followed, it wouldn't be so special
─ and it wouldn't really be only
our music, would
it? |
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Jerry Seinfeld once said,
"In China, Chinese food is just called food."
Well, the songs we now lovingly call "golden oldies" would just be called
"songs" if they werent so special
─ if they
didnt have that special way of taking us back in time, making us remember, and
making us feel so good. |
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"No wonder the music ... resonated in
our time
the messages (poetry) in the music pieces are timeless,"
said one of our classmates, Mike Blumenthal. Our music was created just for, and embraced by,
young people (us), but it seems that the older we get, the more we enjoy and
appreciate it
─ and the more we appreciate how lucky we were, as kids, to be
given such an extraordinary gift that would enrich our entire lives as it has
for all these years. We loved our music when it was new, but in many ways, as
kids generally do, we took it for granted. How could we have known then how much
joy it would give us over
half a century later?
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Often, when we hear a
recording by Jerry Lee Lewis,
Chuck Berry,
Little
Richard or
Buddy Holly,
we think, how blessed
were we
to be just the right
age when this music came on the scene! Truly the treasure of our time and the jewel of our generation, our
music was incredibly central to our teenage lives and culture, like
no time before. It was originally made to be, it always was and once
again, in the poetry of one Mr.
Chuck Berry,
"any ol' way you choose it," it always will be
─ our music.
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Isn't it
amazing how the songs we now
call
"oldies" make us feel so young again? |
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Some people think our music died in a 1959 plane crash in an Iowa cornfield
─
but it didn't.
For us, our music lives
─
and in a special and very
effective way, it takes us back and keeps us forever young.
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─
Danny & the Juniors, 1958
Click on
the blue panel above to listen
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AND NOW FOR
SOMETHING REALLY SPECIAL, SAILORS: |
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The
Class of 1960 was born on
September 8, 1954, when most of us entered
Oceanside Jr. High School.
Just the night before, Alan Freed
first picked up a microphone at WINS AM radio in New York, and started a
musical and cultural revolution of unprecedented and as yet unsurpassed significance. Thus,
like a twin, the birth of our great class has been inexorably associated
with the dawn of rock n roll.
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Click
here
for the story of
that beginning in an
original 13-minute video documentary
that, like this page, is
entitled The Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll, 1954-'59. It was made
especially for us in conjunction with our
50-Year Grand
Reunion Gala and is now available online for viewing by everyone.
Click
here to view an
excellent, more extensive, professionally-produced 58-minute,
historical documentary on YouTube
called
Early
Days of Rock n Roll. |
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After you
have enjoyed both reading the thumbnail history presented above and
viewing the videos, then the next logical
place for you to visit would be our
"Rock 'n' Roll Radio"
page where you will be able to read more about your favorite New
York DJs of the 1950s, the people who gave
us our music and who, in doing so, changed the world forever,
Alan Freed,
Murray the K (the "Grand
Kook") and, of course, the incomparable
Jocko, the
"Ace from Outer Space." Click on the
foregoing links to individual pages for each of them that
will allow you to view their photos and, once again, hear
─ yes, hear
─ rare audio of their familiar voices recorded when we were young and listening every day. |
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Explore the following
links, and the countless others they will lead you to,
to learn more about (or to hear some of) our early rock
'n' roll music and its great pioneers who were heroes to
our generation. But once again, dont
forget to come back.
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__________
Click here to see our
Rock 'n' Roll Pioneer Memorial Tributes page.
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To read
more about, and to view photos of, this famous
"Subway Series"
of
, click
here
(or on the Brooklyn Dodgers' World Series poster, above).
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Copyright © 2000-2022 by Howard B. Levy and
1960 Sailors
Association Inc.
All rights reserved.
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