The birth of rock 'n' roll: My theory

The top songs of 1953 and ’54 were syrupy feel-good ballads invoking the singer’s devotion not only to lovers (Perry Como’s "Wanted," Dean Martin’s "That’s Amore," Kitty Kallen's "Little Things Mean a Lot") but also to parents (Eddie Fisher’s "Oh My Papa"), Mother Nature (Frank Chacksfield’s "Ebb Tide") and even God ("Vaya con Dios," by Les Paul and Mary Ford). The rowdiest hits at that time were novelty tunes by the Crew-Cuts, like "Crazy ‘Bout Ya, Baby" and "Sh-Boom," but these were wild only by comparison with the soothing standards of the day: Upon close examination, the Crew-Cuts turned out to be respectable college boys who sang in perfect harmony and (as their name proclaimed) cropped their hair very short.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when Bill Haley & His Comets originally released "Rock Around the Clock" in the summer of 1954, pop music fans reacted much the way a symphony audience might receive a chorus of kazoos. With its deafening score and aggressively pointless lyrics (“We’re gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight”), "Rock Around the Clock" seemed to appeal neither to the heart nor the mind but to some primal and rebellious instinct deep in the gut. The song died almost immediately and was withdrawn within weeks of its release.

One year later

Yet only a year later the same record was released again. This time it quickly shot to the top of the charts, becoming one of the biggest-selling records of all time, not to mention the theme song of Blackboard Jungle, an equally disturbing 1955 film about urban juvenile delinquency. For better or worse, the age of rock ’n' roll — as well as its constant companion, the global youth culture, which dominates the entertainment world to this day — was under way.

So here’s the mystery: How could a record that was rejected so resoundingly in 1954 become such a resounding hit in 1955? What on earth caused such a dramatic shift in popular music tastes between 1954 and 1955?

The answer to that question has eluded pop music observers for nearly 60 years. But I think I may have found it last month, at the 50th reunion of my Penn class of 1964.

At one of that weekend’s panel discussions, I presented my theory about the unique role played by our class — not just at Penn but around the world — as a bridge between the complacent ’50s and the rebellious ’60s.

Depression and war

Our parents (the “Greatest Generation,” as Tom Brokaw later labeled them), having conquered both the Great Depression and global Fascism, were inclined to congratulate themselves for bequeathing to us a world of peace and prosperity — a judgment that our older schoolmates, even those just a year or two older than we were, tended to accept with gratitude. But to my contemporaries — the first of the so-called World War II “war babies,” born in 1942 and ‘43 — Hitler and the Crash of ’29 were already ancient history. We took the New Deal and D-Day for granted; when we looked around, we saw only a stifling and stagnant culture rooted in materialism, conformity, and racial discrimination. Unlike the teenage rebels-without-a-cause portrayed on screen by James Dean and Marlon Brando earlier in the ’50s, we were rebels in a world that seemed overdue for rebellion.

Our teachers didn’t know what to make of my class. At the Fieldston School in New York, we were told that the class one year ahead of ours was the best class in the school’s history — and we were the worst. We questioned authority, they said; we failed to respect our elders. Only in retrospect is the explanation apparent (and only in comparison with the angry revolutionaries who followed us did our teachers later appreciate us).

Inspired by JFK

Yet my classmates were not merely the first children of the 20th century to grow up with no conscious memory of the Great Depression or World War II. We were also, in college, the “Kennedy Class” — so-called because JFK was elected president in our freshman year and assassinated in our senior year. This close identification with a youthful and inspiring president imbued us with a notion that we could reform the world for the better — unlike, say, the counterculture protesters of the later ’60s who rejected constructive change in favor of destroying the system and rebuilding it from scratch.

Then as now, pop music tastes were driven largely by teenagers. Through 1954, most teenagers gravitated toward “grownup” music — that is, songs that would please the parents they so admired. My class and those that followed, by contrast, embraced music that would annoy the hell out of our parents. So what happened in 1955? Seen through this prism, the answer is clear: That year, my classmates around the world became teenagers.

Adult nightmare

But not just any teenagers. My contemporaries were not simply sowing wild oats for a few pubescent years before accepting our designated places as doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, homemakers, and other customary pillars of adult society. While our parents went about the business of running the world, their children constructed an alternative youth culture of their own that adults seemed helpless to control.

Our brand of teenage rebelliousness in the mid to late ‘50s was something the world hadn’t encountered before. The stamping of teenage feet at a rock ’n' roll concert nearly dislodged a balcony at Times Square’s Paramount Theatre, and that very same adult nightmare was repeated halfway around the world at theaters in Indonesia and Japan. A rock ’n' roll riot at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey, sent 25 kids to the hospital with injuries; a similar show in San Jose, California, routed 73 policemen and injured 11 people. Teenage mobs tied up traffic in Sydney and ripped up theater seats in London. This challenge to authority, this embrace of the so-called “devil’s music” that so threatened our parents and teachers, represented no mere private or local upheaval; it was a public statement of defiance echoed by teen throngs throughout the free world and even behind the Iron Curtain.

The ’60s revolt against authority and formality was just around the corner, and for better or worse we were its vanguard. But rock music was never the cause of this revolt — only a symptom. Many ministers, educators, and social workers of the late 1950s thought rock 'n' roll was driving America's teenagers to destruction, but they had it backwards: We were not the victims of this "devil's music," but its perpetrators.