When Doo-Wop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- What’s In A Label, A Record Label

 

Sometimes it is interesting looking back at the genesis, the different strands, of the 1950s rock explosion that produced some of the classic music that defined my generation, the generation of ‘68, the stuff that constituted our jail-break out from that slow death ma and pa stuff that came wafting over the radio in the background every freaking household drudge day, you know Frank and Bing, maybe a little Rosemary Clooney and Kay Starr (to speak nothing of  Kate Smith), a drop of the Inkspots  and a ton of big band stuff (Glenn Miller, Harry James, The Dorsey boys, etc.,etc.). Never some cool saucy stuff like Billie tearing up some Cole Porter thing, or a little Dizzy be-bop, be-bop, pop to clear the air, just vanilla, plain vanilla, thank you. (Naturally, turnabout is fair play so today’s generations X, Y, and Z can say touché on their own jailbreak moments but they are on their own hook, and can search for their own chronicler, thank you.) 

 

Sometimes it was individual performers like Elvis, with that sway, that sway that made the girls (and women too), uh, sweat, sweat in the wrong places according to the established ethos of the day, with that little hiccup in his voice when he went after a lyric, and that snarl like he had a chip on his shoulder (and maybe he had) and he dared anybody, male or female to flick it off, and Jerry Lee Lewis, with that frantic Cajun swamp thing, that manic driving right hand on the poor piano , practically doing a double flip over the damn thing and doing it anywhere, including that famous movie scene of him lumbering into town on the back of flat-bed truck proclaiming the new dispensation, that drove the music. Other times it was the lyrics, the Tin Pan Alley-etched lyrics, from old time Cole Porter and Irving Berlin days right up to the age of Beatle-mania. (It is hard to believe that in those days, those early rock days that the singer didn’t usually write the song.) And sometimes it was the sound, the sound associated with a particular label. One thinks of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records with the early rockabilly and blues explosion and the good old boys, mainly, black and white, who stopped at that recording studio laid down some tracks that still bop in the night. Or Verve, Or Decca, or later the Motown sound.

 

One place where the doo-wop, or doo-wop- oriented sub-genre that I have been thinking about lately got a full workout was at Coed Records. Now, like every musical genre, some of the material produced at that establishment was strictly of the moment, that doo-wop moment, and some of it was performed by one-hit Johnnies and Janies (who now in niche-hungry music industry are getting a new life on one-hit wonder CD compilations and, via some mad monk midnight by the phone single person lonely heart club burning remembrances, on YouTube), but a few, and that is all that one can expect, are classics.

 

Here those classics include 16 Candles and Step By Step (songs you prayed, prayed out loud that they would play, and play at the end of the school last dance night when you got brave enough to go up to that that dame, okay, okay, girl who had been giving you meaningful glances, or what you thought were meaningful glances, all night and asked her to the floor. And you, you who barely knew some slingo fox trots maybe double prayed for that slow one, jesus) , The Crests; You Belong To Me (ditto on the Crest songs, and maybe more if that “magic” you thought you felt was spot on), The Duprees; and, The Last Dance (ditto again, okay you got the drift) , The Harptones.