Many strict rock ’n’ roll fans think that the Top Forty period from 1959 through 1963 was weak and shallow. Most of the original rockers who molded the ’50s were gone: Elvis had joined the Army, Little Richard joined the church, Chuck Berry went to jail, Jerry Lee Lewis was ostracized, Fats was fading, Bill Haley was retiring, and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. Who filled the void? Teen idols. Safe and sanitized. But while they were peddling puff and powder, other musical forms were rippling the currents, leading us to the Beatles and the Brits.
Soul music arrived when masters of the genre like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke stoked the fire.
Then strings were added to create the sounds of the new Drifters. Producer Jerry Wexler of this huge Atlantic Record’s drama despised this recording—he thought it sounded like two radio stations—but strings soon became the rage on the pop scene.
If violins and cellos were what you sought, you wouldn’t find them on any record cut by Gary U.S. Bonds, a young lad who, along with his sax player Daddy G and the Church Street Five, went into a studio resembling a cave in Norfolk, Virginia and waxed the ultimate party records of the period. This was about as far away from the teen idol sound you could imagine.
There was no shortage of dance music during this period. The Twist dominated the air waves, as did the Mashed Potato and the Locomotion, just to name a few. Berry Gordy’s Motown Sound added a few new steps of its own thanks to the Miracles and the Marvelettes, and the Contours, who challenged every teenager to master all the different dance moves of the time. It’s impossible to sit still while their smash hit Do You Love Me broke the sound barrier.
If you still think that rock ’n’ roll had disappeared during this period, you are mistaken. One of the hallmarks of the Allen Freed age was vocal group music, labeled in the ’70s as Doo-Wop. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, a Doo-Wop revival was in full swing, giving this teen idol period a sound that had been missing for a few years. Black and Italian street corner groups were once again back in style. One of the most prevalent was a classic Doo-Wop remake of an old pop standard, performed by a group from Pittsburg named The Marcels.
Many other Doo-Wop classics dominated the airwaves from 1959 to 1963. Teen idols and their Brill Building songwriters mostly avoided this scene, save maybe Dion and the Belmonts. Perhaps the premiere vocal group of the ‘60s was the Four Seasons, featuring the falsetto of Frankie Valli. Known first as the Four Lovers and eventually as the Jersey Boys, the Seasons had been together since the mid-‘50s until they hit it big with producer Bob Crewe in 1962, where their first three records were giant Number One hits.
The same record producers who created the Teen Idol Bobby sound were also responsible for the Girl Group Sound, which actually began in the late ’50s but peaked in the early to mid-’60s. The Chantels and Shirelles were already famous by the time Phil Spector and his ilk arrived to create songs like Be My Baby or He’s So Fine by the Chiffons. To compose a list of all the girl groups who were popular during its tenure would take a summertime. They were that popular.
If you believed that rockers were absent from the Teen Idol era, you weren’t tuned into the right radio station. Not only did Del Shannon present a Beatles tune to the American public, he also introduced an unusual instrument called the mellotron to rock ’n’ roll music. You can hear it demonstrated in his first two hits Runaway and Hats Off To Larry, both from 1961. Del Shannon was no teen idol. He was the real thing.
Rock ’n’ roll music wouldn’t exist if there were no Elvis. You could say the same about Roy Orbison. No one had pipes like Roy Orbison. And certainly no one composed pop and rock music like Roy Orbison. His songs were distinctively different, allowing him to incorporate the wide range of his voice. If anyone kept rock ’n’ roll surging ahead during this time, it was the man from Wink, Texas, who started his career in rockabilly and provided us with incredible ballads and rock ’n’ roll classics ever since.
Finally, if you want to know where all the guitars were, you can bet that future virtuosos like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and hundreds of others had already tuned into Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. You can bet they also were influenced by Dick Dale, who started the surfing craze in the early ’60s..
The next time you think there was nothing happening musically except for teen idols from 1959 to 1963, play any of the tunes I’ve mentioned here—LOUD.