History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (6 page)

Four deep, rumbling bass notes on a piano fall into a full
oooooo
from voices so bound as one they feel more like the sound of a horn than people, individuals, people with names, desires, intentions, ambitions, fears—a sound more like nature than will. The sound is muffled, made of its own echo, from a cave in the imagination, far away, something always present and always just out of reach, until this moment, which lasts only a single second before it disappears into a song. It’s enough to say that something all out of proportion to its medium—a seven-inch 45, a transistor radio—is already under way.

It’s 19 February 1956 in New Haven, Connecticut, where Fred Parris, tenor, and three other singers—Al Denby and Ed Martin, baritones, and Jim Freeman, bass—are recording as the Five Satins. They’d recorded before—the previous summer, when there really were five of them. Two teenagers who convinced Parris they could make records, Marty Kugell and Tom Sokira, took the singers to the New Haven VFW post. The musicians the producers had hired never appeared; that day, the Five Satins sang acappella. For one song, “Rose Mary,” Kugell and Sokira had instruments overdubbed for a single on their own Standord label; for the flipside, “All Mine,” they never got around to it, though with
the two-track tape recorder they were using, the faint rumble of a passing truck, like a phantom bass player, was never erased, leaving a sound that on the record itself you could less hear than apprehend. It was a tangled doo-wop ballad, but at the very end, with nothing to fall back upon, Parris stepped out of genre, fashion, fad, out of a song anyone else could have written and anyone else could have sung. “This is the story,” he announced—and with those four words he instantly gave the song that had preceded them a drama it hadn’t been able to produce, a sense of foreboding after the fact, because until this moment, though you might have heard what happened, you didn’t care—“of a love affair.” There was a pause, and then an incantation, as full of pride as anguish: “
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine
—”

Parris was no amateur. As a seventeen-year-old late of the Canaries—for a long moment it seemed impossible to name a group harmony combo after anything but a bird—he was writing his own songs. He formed the Scarlets, and traveled to New York to get a record deal. Starting in 1954 with “Dear One,” they made three singles for Bobby Robinson’s Red Robin label. Robinson was a major operator, at the center of the Harlem hit parade, but none of the records made it out of town. There was one hit—Parris’s “Cry Baby,” which did nothing for the Scarlets, but in 1956 made it to number 18 on the national charts in an utterly bleached version by the Bonnie Sisters, three nurses from Bellevue Hospital. Parris
went back to New Haven. He and the rest of the Scarlets were drafted, scattered around the country; Parris formed the Five Satins in New Haven during a leave. Of course their Standord single went nowhere. But one night, as Parris always told the story, on guard duty in Philadelphia, thinking about his girlfriend, he wrote “In the Still of the Nite.”

Not “In the Still of the Night”—both Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael and Jo Dent had written sweeping dance numbers with that title in the thirties. This was simple—

In the still

Of the night

—but with a hesitation that made the memory the song was attempting to summon almost too sweet, too erotic, to bear—

I held you—

Held you tight

—it wasn’t obvious. Once past those rumbling piano notes, the listener, like the singer, held on to every word.

Kugell and Sokira had backing musicians this time—a pianist, a stand-up bass player, a drummer—but no money for a place to record, and they didn’t want to go back to the VFW. As Parris told Randall Beach of the
New Haven Register
in 1980, “they made a deal with somebody” who could set them up in the basement of Saint Bernadette’s Church, in the all-white Morris Cove section of New Haven, near the shoreline. “This ‘somebody,’ Parris said, also played saxophone,” Beach wrote. “The ‘deal’ was that if he could get them in there, they would ‘let him play sax on the record.’”

So they dove in, with Parris’s aching lead and Denby, Freeman, and Martin mouthing doo-wops behind him: “Shoo-doot, shooby-doh, shoo-doot, shooby-doh, shoo-doot,
shooby
”—and then an unexpected “Whoa,” a long, climbing syllable that seemed to soar out of earshot and took the performance into a realm of its own.

As the song went on, that sensual hesitation at the beginning disappeared, and everything was chaste, fated, in God’s hands—and, as singing, almost everything was completely straight. Save for a slight tearing around the edges of the words, speaking for doubt, ambiguity, the sense that the love the song was chasing might already be gone, there was nothing in Parris’s voice you would have been surprised to hear in any white nightclub in the United States. The singer remembered a night in May and the stars in the sky, he hoped and prayed that love would last. “
I remember,
” he called, letting the word rest in the air—just as he had so subtly and, as the song would resonate over the decades, so indelibly rhymed “May” and “Pray”—and the singers called the words back to him. There was a second, this time overtly
melodramatic hesitation just past a minute into the performance. “I’ll hope / And I’ll pray,” Parris lilted, and then as he broke “To keep” off the phrase, starkly, the pianist returned to take the song back. He pounded twice, again that deep bass rumble—

Bump bump

—the sound surrounded on each side by a silence so thick you could feel the night closing in on it. Parris was on top of the moment, barely letting go of one word and half of another—

Your pre
h
—

—the word seemingly cut off right there, leaving you with no idea of what might be coming next, and then the pianist hit again,

Bump bump

—before Parris smoothly finished the word “precious” as if it had always come in two parts, soaring again into the word “love,” the word itself now so in love with its own idea that it rippled in widening concentric circles as if a stone had been thrown into its lake.

But the song was lumbering; it was beginning to wear itself out. It’s hard to say what keeps it alive—some promise of something more in the very incompleteness of the emotion the singer wants to fulfill, but can’t? And then, as has happened so many times in rock ’n’ roll, the instrumental break took the song past itself. The sound in early rock ’n’ roll records, especially group harmony singles, often has a preternatural clarity at its heart; you are there, watching, hoping, as the song unfolds, that no one breaks the spell. The sound is open, full of room; you sense time passing. But this is not like that. On this night in the basement, there’s a whole sky inside the sound, and the sky is overcast, the clouds thickening and descending as the song pushes forward, so that every expression of emotion, every moment of particularity, where the listener can sense that what is at issue is now, not then, here, not there, feels like a victory. There is no telling whether the record, the thing that goes on sale and on the radio, has captured a sound that once existed in that now, not then, or whether the record has imposed a sound on an event that had no such texture, but the sound is what remains: the record is the sound, the sound is the record. It is this darkening, desperate world that the sound both calls up and makes—and, as the guitarist and critic Robert Ray once said, “What’s interesting about rock & roll is that the truly radical aspect occurs at the level of
sound.
‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more radical than Lennon’s ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the
World,’ and the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did.” And now this sound, too, will change people’s ideas about the world—it will feel bigger, less fixed, more threatening, more beautiful—and it will change how people feel themselves to be in the world.

Again, the piano rises up out of the music, but distantly now, claiming nothing, setting the stage. Vinny Mazzetta, the Saint Bernadette’s connection, raises his saxophone and begins to play. Denby, Freeman, and Martin take over the singing.
Doo-bop, doo-bah,
they sing under Mazzetta’s bending solo, the sound of someone completely lost in a song, in a nowhere Parris has not yet found, a utopia where there are no dreams to realize, no debts to pay, where there is only reverie, where for a few seconds every dream is fulfilled and every debt forgiven, and Mazzetta and the singers floated through time as if it wasn’t there: “It just came out,” Mazzetta said in 2010. “I played what I felt.” The singers gained in passion with each repetition,
Doo-bop, DOO-BAH, doo-bop, DOO-BAH,
then a single
doo-bop
cut off, suspending the moment, time not stopping but pushing back, the halt calling everything into question. Mazzetta keeps on, in a world of his own, and again the singers cast their fate with his. The piano steps in again, Parris again takes the song, but after only a few seconds he sings the title words for the last time and begins a wordless drift, a long, high walk into the territory
Mazzetta had found that Parris can now see and trust, and so he left everyone—the other singers, the musicians, whoever might hear him—behind. Years later I called up a DJ who had talked all through that closing passage, complaining that it was the best part, that he’d ruined the song. That’s what endings like that were for, he said: for DJs to sell the next record, the next commercial, to keep you from changing the station as a song faded out. And you didn’t change it, he said, did you?

On the original Standord release it was the B-side to Parris’s “The Jones Girl,” a fast number; the New York label Ember re-released it for a wider market with “In the Still of the Nite” still buried. But “The Jones Girl” dried up with a few plays, and some DJs turned the record over. “In the Still of the Nite” wasn’t a huge hit—not right away. In 1956 it climbed no higher than number 24. But it took up residence in people’s hearts. When in 1959 the Los Angeles DJ Art Laboe assembled the first
Oldies But Goodies
collection on his own Original Sound label, “In the Still of the Nite” was the opening track. It had only been three years, but to the song’s original teenage listeners that was a lifetime, and the
Oldies But Goodies
album carried a queer sensation, that of feeling your own life historicized, given weight, a promise that if the things one loved were, like all things, certain to pass away, it wouldn’t be that quickly. The album and those that followed did more: they gave rock ’n’ roll as such
a sense of its own history, which meant a suspicion that it might have a future.

Over the years, “In the Still of the Nite” sold millions of copies. Included on soundtrack albums for
American Graffiti
and
Dirty Dancing,
it orbited the globe like a satellite. Though he continued to record new songs well into the 1980s, Parris and different versions of the Five Satins never played a show, whether in clubs around New Haven, for rock ’n’ roll revival concerts in New York, on PBS doo-wop fund-raisers, without “In the Still of the Nite” being the reason the audience was there at all.

With those in the audience now silently taking the place of the backing singers, the song never lost its luster, or its fundamental unlikelihood, the aura of accident and chance that seeped into the performance. It could, and did, go anywhere: at first, into slow dances, girls resting their heads on boys’ shoulders even if the girls were taller, and then, decades later, when the song had to let people change it if it was to survive, into the threesome in David Cronenberg’s
Dead Ringers.
One of Jeremy Irons’s two suicidal, sadomasochistic twin dentists is dancing with a woman; the song creeps out of the expensive darkness of the room. The woman demands that the other twin, sitting on a couch, looking as if he would rather be anywhere else, dance too. He resists; she insists; he pulls himself to his feet. With the woman in the middle, the two men grasp her body, but really
they are reaching for each other, enacting her annihilation as she moves between them, each of them wishing she were dead. For an instant, there is the sense that the song could actually save them all. Then the two men, both with that sick Jeremy Irons look of loathing for all existence, kill it. Why was the song there? Because it was just right for the scene as Cronenberg wrote it? Or because he had always loved the song, and had waited years for the chance to play it himself, in his own way?

That was 1988, almost as many years after the Five Satins made “In the Still of the Nite” as have passed since Cronenberg made his austere and nearly perfect film, and in those years the record has lived a fuller life. “You could tell I was only 21,” Vinny Mazzetta told Randall Beach in 2010. “I didn’t know any better: bringing blacks into the Cove, into a church. But I just said, ‘They’re here to make a record.’ A good thing happened.”

Sometime in the late fifties, the Spades, a vocal group that formed in 1957 at McCallum High School in Austin—with no White-Negro hipster ambitions, they would claim, let alone any racial disparagement (“The playing card theme,” one member said. “You’d have names like the Diamonds, the Knaves, the Kings and so on”)—took up the song. For vocal groups, it had become what “Louie Louie” would be for guitar bands in the 1960s and long after that: something
to get a rehearsal started, something to test yourself against. Right off, it had been covered by such hitmakers as the Fleet-woods and the Crests, both of whom succeeded in making it sound ordinary. What the Spades did with it might have been what any number of groups anywhere in the country did with it, but the Spades left something behind.

Don Burch and Tommy Kaspar were eighteen and John Goeke sixteen when they began singing together; Jimmy Davis joined later. They were the first signing for Domino Records, a company that was started after eleven Austin business people attended a seminar called “How to Market a Song.” In 1958, a single, “Baby,” attracted the major label Liberty in Los Angeles, which took over distribution. To avoid alienating anybody, now that they were playing on a bigger stage, the group changed its name to the Slades. When the Texas stations playing the Slades’ second single, Burch’s “You cheated,” were flooded with calls, the Domino partners decided to hold onto it—but their seminar hadn’t included pointers on how to meet unexpected demand or to break into major markets, which is to say to include a bribery expense for big city DJs and station managers in the promotion budget. In Los Angeles, the producer George Motola leaped into the breach. With cash in hand, he surveyed the fabulously polyglot doo-wop and R&B world of the city, took the best—the songwriter and crooner Jesse Belvin, the harmony singers Mel Williams and Charlie Wright, the
older blues singer Frankie Ervin, plus Johnny “Guitar” Watson—named them the Shields, as close as he could get to the Slades, put them in the studio, and watched them leave the Slades in the dust, scoring a national hit while the original slipped off the charts and disappeared. It was a matter of fresh-faced Texas boys and tough L.A. hustlers, white boys finding their voices in what had begun as a black style and then black artists, some of whom had been making records all through the fifties, taking their song and showing the kids who’d made it up how it was done. Over Ervin’s stolid, deliberate lead on Burch’s blunt lyric—