yk portrayed a Poland in which students were ‘shut off in textbooks without windows’ and where the language had been ‘reduced to thirty magic formulas’. In its most famous verse, Wayk wrote that:I wear blue jeans and dig rock ’n’ roll. I am not a delinquent.
ROSEMARY CALDWELL, letter to Time magazine, 9 July 1956
This kind of music is excessively stimulating only to the maladjusted or to people of a primitive type.
HARLEY STREET PSYCHIATRIST, Daily Express, 12 September 1956
On Saturday 7 July 1956, a Fats Domino concert at San Jose’s Palomar Gardens erupted into a full-scale riot. The black, white and Latino teenagers who made up the audience had been jostling since 9 p.m. as they waited for the headline act. Just before midnight, the New Orleans pianist Antoine ‘Fats’ Domino – whose exuberant style and southern drawl would help make him America’s most successful black rock ’n’ roll star – finally made his way through the crowd and onto the stage. During his opening number, first beer bottles and then a string of firecrackers were thrown onto the dance floor. The Palomar’s owner, Charles Silvia, described how, in the ensuing chaos, ‘everybody was at each other. Boys fought boys, and even girls. Girls were slugging boys and scratching one another.’ Some girls attempted to flee via a restroom window. Dozens of tables and chairs were broken, and as many as a thousand bottles were smashed. Thirty police officers – who had, by complete chance, been attending the annual policemen’s ball a few blocks away – rushed to the scene to offer their assistance (thereby missing an eagerly anticipated appearance by Joan Beckett, the recently crowned Miss California); it took the authorities an hour to restore order. Ten youths were arrested, and two policemen and a number of revellers required medical attention. Although the local police chief blamed excessive alcohol consumption for the trouble, the newspapers lost no time in pointing the finger at the ‘pulsating rhythms’ of Domino’s music: the Palomar had become the site of America’s first official ‘rock ’n’ roll riot’.1
San Jose was no one-off. In September, for example, a riot at the naval station club in Newport, Rhode Island, prompted the base commander, Rear Admiral Ralph D. Earle, Jr, to ban rock ’n’ roll for at least a month, and that November two people were stabbed at another boisterous Fats Domino concert, this time in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The authorities in Boston, Jersey City and other cities cracked down – banning rock ’n’ roll concerts, refusing to co-operate with promoters and even ordering the removal of the offensive records from local jukeboxes.2 Nor was the trouble restricted to the United States: in March, fans of the American singer Johnnie Ray had smashed windows and attempted to storm onto the tarmac at Brisbane airport as their hero touched down for the latest leg of his Australian tour, while screenings of the hit film Rock Around the Clock prompted teenage riots in towns and cities all over western Europe, as well as in Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland.3 On the evening of Monday 11 September, for example, hundreds of raucous teenagers and ‘Teddy boys’ took to the streets of Elephant and Castle, in the London borough of Southwark, hurling bottles and attacking parked cars following a screening of the movie, while in Oslo three consecutive nights of rioting led to dozens of arrests.4 Little wonder that some local officials attempted to head off any possible trouble: in the United Kingdom, some eighty councils – including Brighton, Birmingham and Belfast – banned the film outright.5
There was actually very little in Rock Around the Clock that could be considered at all incendiary. The seventy-seven-minute musical, distributed by Columbia Pictures, told the story of a small-time dance band manager who, after stumbling across a local rock ’n’ roll band at a teenage dance, decides to promote the new music as the ‘next big thing’. The movie – the world’s first film targeted at the teenage market to prove a box-office hit – grossed $2.4 million worldwide, eight times its production costs. It featured Bill Haley and the Comets, whose 1954 record ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’ had sold two million copies by the end of 1955 and become an anthem of youth rebellion.6 Yet the thirty-four-year-old Haley, with his ‘chipmunk cheeks and a spit curl plastered on his forehead’, and his strict edicts to band members prohibiting drinking or dating while on tour, was an unlikely rebel.7
In fact, the disorder sparked by the movie may well have been overstated. In Britain, the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association complained bitterly about the local authority bans – which they blamed on excitable chief constables, irresponsible journalists and council leaders who had not even bothered to watch the ‘innocuous’ movie for themselves. As they pointed out, the film had been shown in hundreds of cinemas with ‘very little trouble’ and, although the audiences at some venues had ‘exhibited high spirits’, the accounts in the press of rioting youth had been greatly overdone. They even suggested that members of the press had stoked up the trouble in the first place, encouraging teenagers to put on a show for the cameras and then making sensationalist claims that encouraged ‘copy-cat’ incidents.8
Nevertheless, a succession of sociologists, psychiatrists and ‘experts’ were soon lining up to denounce this latest musical ‘fad’. Rock ’n’ roll, with its innovative blend of African American and white musical traditions – notably rhythm and blues, country and pop – and its powerful, repetitive beat, had emerged in the mid-1950s, thanks to the talents of innovative record producers (such as Sam Phillips in Memphis), the entrepreneurial spirit of independent record labels, the influence of pioneering disc jockeys (including the legendary Alan Freed), and the enormous power and popularity of local radio stations – whose executives, aware that adults were increasingly turning to television as their primary source of entertainment, decided to reorient their programming around popular music for teenage audiences.9 But while rock ’n’ roll would go on to enjoy commercial and critical success, in 1956 many commentators were unconvinced.10 In June 1956, for instance, the readers of Time magazine learned that the defining characteristics of rock ’n’ roll were:
an unrelenting, socking syncopation that sounds like a bull whip; a choleric saxophone honking mating-call sounds; an electric guitar turned up so loud that its sound shatters and splits; a vocal group that shudders and exercises violently to the beat while roughly chanting either a near-nonsense phrase or a moronic lyric in hillbilly idiom.11
Meanwhile, the editors of the British jazz weekly Melody Maker were dismissive. ‘Instrumentally and vocally’, they declared, the ‘Rock-and-Roll technique’ represented the very ‘antithesis of . . . good taste and musical integrity’.12 The American singer Frank Sinatra soon added his voice to the criticism, claiming that rock ’n’ roll was ‘phony’ music, ‘sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons’, which constituted ‘the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth’.13
Indeed, the public debate revolved around claims that rock ’n’ roll threatened the moral fabric of Western civilisation itself.14 Francis J. Braceland – one of America’s most eminent psychiatrists – described rock ’n’ roll as a ‘cannibalistic and tribalistic’ form of music, likened it to a ‘communicable disease’ and declared it a sign of ‘adolescent rebellion’.15 The boisterous, high-spirited teenagers who flocked to rock ’n’ roll concerts, the boys in their trademark leather jackets and fashionable ‘ducktail’ haircuts, the girls in their skirts or blue jeans, shrieking and gyrating to songs with highly suggestive lyrics, certainly stoked public fears about teenage ‘delinquency’ and errant sexual behaviour (rock ’n’ roll, after all, took its name from a popular African American euphemism for sexual intercourse).16 It was a similar story in Britain, where the Bishop of Woolwich, the Rt Rev. Peter Stannard, called for Rock Around the Clock to be banned on the grounds that its ‘hypnotic rhythm and wild gestures’ encouraged teenagers to lose ‘all self-control’.17
During 1956, no single artist better personified the spirit of rock ’n’ roll – nor caused greater alarm among the guardians of the status quo – than a certain Elvis Aaron Presley.18 Born in the little town of Tupelo, in northern Mississippi, in 1935, Presley had moved to Memphis in 1948 when his father, Vernon, found work in a local paint factory. With his bushy sideburns, pomade quiff, upturned collar and love of outrageous clothes, Elvis was a rebel – but one who also conformed to conventional mores: he regularly attended the local Pentecostal Church with his mother and was, throughout his career, unfailingly polite. After graduating from high school, Elvis scraped a living as a truck driver, machinist and cinema usher, but he dreamed of becoming a star. He had learned to thrash out a few basic chords on a guitar that had been given to him by his beloved mother, Gladys, and his musical tastes were strikingly ecumenical, although he had a particular fondness for gospel music and the blues. In the summer of 1953, Elvis had recorded a couple of covers at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studios, where he was judged a ‘good ballad singer’, but his big break came a year later. Standing alongside the guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black in Phillips’s cramped recording studio, Elvis had struggled through a couple of nondescript numbers before, instinctively, turning to a 1946 blues song, ‘That’s All Right’. The effect on Sam Phillips, who was listening from inside the control room, was electrifying: it was, he later said, ‘like someone struck me in the rear end with a brand new supersharp pitchfork’. ‘That’s All Right’ and its B-side, a version of the hillbilly classic ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, proved regional hits, popular with fans of both rhythm and blues and country music. Before long, the nineteen-year-old Elvis was performing live on stage, where his quivering legs and upturned lip drove audiences wild.19 In December 1955, RCA paid $45,000 to buy out his contract at Sun Records; within months, Elvis Presley was rock ’n’ roll’s first global superstar.20
RCA released ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on 28 January 1956; by the end of March it had stormed to the top of the pop, country and rhythm and blues charts, selling almost a million copies in the process. It hit the British charts in May.21 Guided by the brilliant if controversial ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, a carnival hand turned manager-promoter, Elvis quickly set about exploiting the growing power of television (by the end of the decade, almost 90 per cent of American families owned their own set).22 On Tuesday 27 March he appeared on The Milton Berle Show, performing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ to a cheering studio audience. But in the aftermath of Elvis’s appearance, which had delivered a major ratings boost to NBC, a storm of newspaper criticism erupted over his ‘suggestive’ and ‘vulgar’ ‘grunt and groin antics’.23 When he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show later that year, the audience reacted to even the smallest hint of bodily movement. Eager to avoid controversy, when Elvis drove the audience wild by launching into a raucous rendition of ‘Ready Teddy’ by the black artist Little Richard (renowned for his brash, flamboyant style, sexual energy and suggestive lyrics), the producer ordered the cameras to zoom in so that viewers at home could see only the top half of the singer’s body. Elvis’s performance, which was watched by a staggering 82.6 per cent of the total television audience, was a triumph.24
On 3 June, when announcing a blanket ban on rock ’n’ roll music at all public gatherings, the Santa Cruz authorities justified their actions on the grounds that the music was ‘detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community’. The ban had been prompted by a concert the previous evening, which, according to local police lieutenant Richard Overton, had seen the crowd ‘engaged in suggestive, stimulating and tantalizing motions induced by the provocative rhythms of an all-negro band’.25 As Overton’s comments indicate, much of the opposition to rock ’n’ roll music – especially in the United States – was prompted by fears about interracial socialising (and, particularly, interracial sex). It was, then, no surprise that southern segregationists were among its loudest critics. In incendiary comments that spring, the Alabama firebrand Asa ‘Ace’ Carter claimed that the roots of rock ’n’ roll could be traced to ‘the heart of Africa, where it was used to incite warriors to such frenzy that by nightfall neighbors were cooked in carnage pots!’ The ‘basic, heavy-beat music of the Negroes’, Carter warned, ‘brings out animalism and vulgarity’. The popularity of black artists with multiracial audiences left segregationists apoplectic; some claimed it was all part of an NAACP plot ‘to mongrelize America’.26 On 10 April, four white men attacked the popular African American singer Nat King Cole – a jazz pianist and singer rather than a rock ’n’ roll artist – as he performed on stage in Birmingham, Alabama. At one level Cole was a convenient proxy, but the fact that he was touring with a white singer, June Christy, provided added provocation. The following month, segregationists holding placards that declared ‘Jungle Music Promotes Integration’ and ‘Jungle Music Aids Delinquency’ picketed a genuine rock ’n’ roll concert at the city’s auditorium (they were particularly exercised by the presence of both black and white artists on the bill). As segregationist pressure mounted, the local authorities moved to ban mixed-race shows, while in Louisiana segregationist politicians went further, passing a state law that prohibited ‘all interracial dancing, social functions [and] entertainments’.27 Nor were the racial anxieties surrounding rock ’n’ roll restricted to Dixie: in Inglewood, California, white supremacists warned that interracial dancing would result in ‘total mongrelisation’, while teachers in Boston heard that rock ’n’ roll ‘enflames and excites youth like jungle tom-toms’. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, where Britons were adjusting to the consequences of mass immigration from the West Indies, the Daily Mail wondered whether rock ’n’ roll was ‘the Negro’s revenge’.28
The battles over rock ’n’ roll were, though, just one manifestation of a wider cultural and generational revolt. The prevailing sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo was captured in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in February. Directed by Don Siegel and based on an earlier novel by Jack Finney, it told a story of an alien invasion of the little town of Santa Mira, California. Gradually, the town’s citizens were being replaced with emotionless replicas that hatched from mysterious extraterrestrial pods and displayed a hive mentality. The movie brilliantly tapped into Americans’ deep fears about possible Communist infiltration while also offering a parable about the dangers of mindless conformity (whether suburban or socialist).29
Nor was the year’s cultural rebellion restricted to the West. Across Eastern Europe, for instance, the guardians of the status quo faced youthful subcultures that proved every bit as worrying as the rock ’n’ roll fans in America or the Teddy boys in Britain. Eastern Europe’s young rebels may have gone by different names – the bikiniarze in Poland, the potapka in Czechoslovakia and the jampecek in Hungary – but they shared a taste for unconventional fashion (drainpipe trousers and brightly coloured shirts for the boys, wide, loud-patterned skirts for the girls and thick rubber-soled shoes for both) and a commitment to ‘outlaw’ music, above all jazz. In fact, jazz was banned in the ‘people’s democracies’ on the grounds that it was symptomatic of the corrupt, decadent, individualistic culture of the West. Some young zealots had even taken to smashing up the offending records with hammers. Although the post-Stalinist thaw saw an easing of cultural restrictions (notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia), listening to jazz retained its association with dissidence.30 In Hungary, for example, the jampecek – with their ‘tight trousers, checkered coats, and colourfully-decorated neckties’, distinctive street slang and love of American jazz music, which they sought out in coffeehouses and dancehalls and listened to illicitly on the BBC and Radio Free Europe – were condemned as ‘hooligans’ by newspaper editors, and faced harassment (or worse) from the secret police, precisely because their attempt to carve out an alternative social and cultural sphere was seen not merely as incompatible with the wider ‘socialist’ project but as an attempt to resist Communism itself.31
In fact, throughout 1956 writers, poets and artists were at the forefront of efforts to secure social and political change across the ‘people’s democracies’, using the opportunities afforded by Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to push back against Stalinism, demand greater cultural freedom and criticise the regimes under which they worked. In his ‘A Poem for Adults’, for example, Adam Wayk portrayed a Poland in which students were ‘shut off in textbooks without windows’ and where the language had been ‘reduced to thirty magic formulas’. In its most famous verse, Wayk wrote that:
They drink sea water,
crying:
‘lemonade!’
returning home secretly
to vomit.32
First published in the summer of 1955, ‘A Poem for Adults’ was roundly condemned by Party officials, but enjoyed renewed success – both in Poland and across Eastern Europe – in the aftermath of the Twentieth Party Congress, as its denunciation of inhumane bureaucratic structures and attack on the betrayal of socialist principles resonated ever more strongly.33 In Hungary, meanwhile, Tibor Déry’s ‘Behind the Brick Wall’ – a short story about Budapest factory workers, forced to steal to supplement their meagre wages and increasingly resentful at their treatment at the hands of faceless bureaucrats – was one of several dissident stories, poems and plays that proved popular during the summer of 1956.34
The year’s contribution to a wider cultural revolution was further strengthened by the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. With its references to illicit drugs and ‘deviant’ sexual practices, and its denunciation of modern capitalist society, the poem – which had first been performed in San Francisco the previous October – quickly became one of the most famous works by the so-called Beat generation of writers. ‘Howl’, which begins in the stepped triadic style before moving into a unique extended form in which the length of the lines are determined by the poet’s own breaths, was the culmination of Ginsberg’s attempt to ‘write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go . . . and scribble magic lines from my real mind’.35 Its opening lines would become some of the most famous words of poetry ever committed to paper:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .36
Ginsberg’s masterpiece, which would make him an icon of the 1960s counterculture, encapsulated what the respected poet Richard Eberhart described as the new generation’s exuberant, youthful desire to ‘kick down the doors of older consciousness and established practice’ in favour of ‘what they think is vital and new’.37
Another young artist who was eager to kick in the doors of the establishment was the British playwright John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger debuted at the Royal Court Theatre that May. Set in a cramped attic bedsit, it told the story of the dysfunctional relationship between Jimmy Porter, a working-class anti-hero, and his young wife, Alison – who bears the brunt of Jimmy’s tantrums, hurtful taunts and pent-up frustrations. Although the early reviews were terrible (the play was described as ‘putrid bosh’ and ‘self-pitying snivel’), Osborne’s fortunes were transformed by a couple of glowing notices in the New Statesman and the Observer, whose theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, gushed that ‘all the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour . . . the casual promiscuity, the sense of a crusade worth fighting for . . .’ Look Back in Anger was, Tynan declared, ‘the best young play of its decade’.38
In October, the BBC broadcast a twenty-five-minute extract on television, and a month later the play was shown in its entirety on the new commercial network, ITV. Meanwhile, audiences flocked to the Royal Court – drawn, in part, by breathless talk in the gossip columns about the ‘Angry Young Men’. The term, which was coined by the theatre’s press officer, was soon being applied to a range of contemporary artists, writers and filmmakers (including the existentialist Colin Wilson and novelist Kingsley Amis) who, as one historian has put it, ‘sought to loosen the grip of a conservative establishment on the throat of British culture’. Look Back in Anger was hailed as a revolutionary cultural watershed and Osborne lauded as the voice of a new generation: a playwright who had, in the words of one commentator, ‘captured the young imagination and with it the fish-sweatered noctambules from Espresso-land’ and the ‘bed-sitter avant-garde from . . . Notting Hill’.39
Writing in the autumn edition of Sight and Sound, the director and film critic Lindsay Anderson claimed that the enthusiastic response of many young people to Look Back in Anger could be traced to Osborne’s attack on the establishment’s ‘sacred cows’.40 It was an anti-establishment tone that would resonate even more strongly in the aftermath of Suez.
The Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is met by joyous crowds in Cairo, 27 July 1956. The previous evening, during a speech in Alexandria, he had announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
Credit: Keystone-France
