The Fabulous ‘50s & Me
My hometown paper, The Milwaukee Journal, which I peddled from 1952 to 1955––it was 45 cents for six weeklies and a Sunday, a minority tipping me 5 cents, with one sweet guy, a World War Two Vet, tipping me a dime––had a feature on Sundays in which two different radio DJs would write a column. In late 1956, one wrote about this horrible thing that happened that year. All these kids had turned 13, and had started listening to that awful trashy garbage––rock ‘n’ roll. But there was a bright side, he wrote as he went on. All these other kids were turning 18, and, no longer being ignorant kids, would each and every one, in lockstep, stop listening to that garbage and listen instead to stuff like Frank Sinatra! It was Sinatra who had been a despised-by-grownups teen heartthrob a quarter century previously. His thought was that no one, including those ignorant kids, would ever listen to a rock ’n’ roll song after it’s brief moment on the charts. It was silly, tawdry, trashy and low class––Frank Sinatra had said as much, going on about the “leer-ics.” Who in their right mind would want to hear any of it ever again? Does any of this sound familiar?
But I was in heaven. I now had a goal in life although I didn’t realize it until about 40 years later, when I suddenly became aware that what I had been trying to do since March 1956 is have as much fun as Little Richard seemed to be having. One of the first impressions I had of Little Richard was that not only did he seem to be having more fun than I’d ever seen anyone have, but he seemed to be having more fun than I thought it was even possible for a person to have. I’ve come close enough to that goal to be very grateful.
In September of 1956, I went to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I was the first person in my family to attend college. That October I met my first Bohemians, and co-discovered folk music, the five-string banjo and Bluegrass. I also realized the Catholic Church was bullshit and I could simply quit. My Bohemian friends disdained rock ‘n’ roll, except Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday”, because that song had some cultural awareness or something. One of my rock ‘n’ roll despising Boho friends went on to be a sound engineer for a big New York City radio DJ. He got fired for playing “Surfer Bird” four times in a row.
That summer I had discovered Nashville’s WLAC, which played rhythm and blues at night, a lot of other records I never heard up North. All the DJs sounded like they were Black, but I eventually found they were all White. For my high school graduation I had asked for a tape recorder, a Revere reel-to-reel with a built-in radio you could tape from. I taped hours and hours of WLAC.
One of my Boho friends, Rob Hunter, not to be confused with the Grateful Dead guy, was taking banjo lessons from Ron Teofan, who was studying to be a dentist at Marquette University. He drove us to Nashville to see the Grand Ole Opry. Teofan had played at the Louisiana Hayride when Elvis Presley was a regular there. Teofan was one cool guy, even though he was planning to be a dentist. For a while he played with the Geezinslaw Brothers, but he mainly has practiced dentistry in Mesquite, Texas. He’s now retired.
Nashville was 700 miles south of Milwaukee, and we listened to Country music on the radio all the way down. I was still disdaining Country music, as in: Bluegrass good! Country bad! But Bobby Helm’s “Frauline” converted me. We attended the Grand Ole Opry and rode the elevator with Ernest Tub’s son, Justin. I was making progress at overcoming my musical prejudices, although it took me until the ‘80s to get over my bad attitude about Polka music, which was ubiquitous in Milwaukee when I was growing up.
By late 1957, I had managed to get suspended from UW-M for the second time for low grades and for flunking ROTC (Reserve Officer’s Training Corps), which at the time was compulsory in many colleges and universities. Basically, I never studied. Subconsciously, I realized years later, I knew, even then, that I had a more interesting path to follow than what college was showing me. I went to San Francisco in May of 1958 to see what this “Beat” stuff was all about. I drove my mildly-customized 1946 Ford coupe I had bought from the guy who fixed it up––a chrome removed special with a snazzy “Bermuda Blue” paint job––for $150. Like a jerk I never took a picture of it. I still occasionally dream that I still own it. In my dreams I’m always so glad I never sold it.
I was in San Francisco for about two weeks, but I thought actually moving there would be like going to Paris in the 1920s––cliché alert––and being a 19-year-old Boho-in-training fool, I didn’t want to be a cliché. So I drove to Compton, downstate, and lived with my Grandma there for the summer. Compton was a peaceful and integrated place back then. I would ride the light rail to downtown Los Angeles, where there was a music store ran by the man who had been Spike Jones’ weird-instrument wrangler, to who I did my very first fanboy gush. There was a banjo lessons note on the bulletin board there and I signed up. My new teacher took me to see Herman the Hermit (Herman Stone), who was the father of Cliffy Stone, the leader of a Western Swing band. Herman had almost 100 banjos and he was selling. He had learned banjo from his father, who had learned from his father, who had learned from his father, who had learned from the slaves on his plantation. Herman sold me a Paramount Model C for $150. I sold my Ford to pay for it.
I had my tape recorder with me on the trip West and all my WLAC tapes. In one of the most stupid moves of my life, I taped them all over with Pete Seeger records. All the Seeger records are available to this day. There may be no live recordings of WLAC circa 1956 to 1958. You can find me singing the White Rose Petroleum Jelly jingle I used to hear there on YouTube:
Whether you’re husband, filly, or wife Use White Rose in your everyday life Listen to me ladies, listen to me gents The new White Rose only costs ten cents White Rose! White Rose! White Rose! Petroleum Jelly! Petroleum jelly, pure as can be Use White Rose for your family Listen to me, people listen to my song Use White Rose and you won’t go wrong White Rose! White Rose! White Rose! Petroleum Jelly! Why don’t you buy White Rose! So you can try White Rose!
The jingle finishes with a saxophone break. There may have been previous rhythm and blues style jingles, but this is the first one I heard. Best of all was the tagline:
And remember, gentlemen, a container of White Rose in the glove compartment is better than two at home on the bathroom shelf.
My individual song notes tell about all my rock ‘n’ roll heroes starting to go down right about this time, culminating with the Holly/Bopper/Valenz plane crash in early ’59. I don’t mention the other factor in the great r&r crash: the r&r industry, like the jukebox distribution industry, was largely under control of the Italian mob. The Italian mob did not like seeing all these White girls going crazy over Black musicians. They thought the girls should be going crazy over nice Italian boys instead. Enter Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, etc. I was fed up with pop radio and quit listening by early ’59.
1958 was the year folk music returned to the pop charts after a six-year hiatus, via the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”. Boy, did us folk music types hate the Kingston Trio. They were bland. They were watered down. They couldn’t play for shit. They were popular as hell and they made a ton of money. And worst of all, to the general public, they represented folk music. We all knew if anyone was going to represent folk music it should be Pete Seeger! But as the years rolled on, I realized that they were just another folky sub-genre, like the Brothers Four, who I also used to hate, because they were bland White college-age kids who seemed to have identical voices and who, obviously, had never heard of the Smith Anthology. I eventually noticed that the Four Preps, who had a big hit at the same time with “26 Miles Across The Sea (Santa Catalina is waiting for me)”, had voices that were interchangeable with those of the Kingston Trio. Some time after I noticed how similar their voices were to those of the Beach Boys. It was simply that they all had a mid-20thcentury California accent.
So between early 1959 and late 1962 I was pretty shut off from popular music. I would hear stuff on an occasional publicly played radio, and of course on jukeboxes, so I was aware of an occasional big hit: “Stay”, by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs; “Cathy’s Clown”, by the Everly Brothers, “Alley Oop”, by the Hollywood Argyles (first use of the word “hip” in a pop hit): “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures; “Take 5”, by the Dave Brubeck Quartette, “Runaway”, by Del Shannon, “I Danced Till A Quarter To Three”, by Gary U.S. Bonds, “Dedicated To The One I Love” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, by the Shirelles. And in the summer of 1962 “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Sherry”, by the Four Seasons, were inescapable. It so happened that at that time in Greenwich Village there were a lot of lesbians named Sherry. The following dialogue was oft repeated:
Do you know where Sherry is?
Which Sherry?
You know, dyke Sherry.
Which dyke Sherry?
Back then they said, “dyke”, not lesbian.
Leave a Reply