Chart position: #23 Pop in 1954; #3 R&B, #1 Pop (for 8 weeks) in
1955; #39 Pop in 1974
Category: Country boogie, "fox-trot"
Writers: Jimmy DeKnight, Max Freedman
Label and number: Decca 29124, New York
Flipside: "Thirteen Women" (the A-side)
When recorded: April 12, 1954, in New York City
When released: May 1954, and again in May 1955
Why Important: It was the first #1 pop record that could possibly be
called rock 'n' roll.
Influenced by: "Victory Walk" by Charlie Bamet (1942), "Around the Clock"
by Wynonie Harris (1945), "Move It on Over" by Hank Williams (#4 C&W, 1947),
"Cornbread" by Hal Singer (#1 R&B,1948), "How High the Moon" by Les Paul
and Mary Ford (#1 Pop, 1951), "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston (#6 R&B,
1949) and Bill Haley and the Saddlemen (1952)
Influenced: Everybody
Important remake: The Sex Pistols (1979)
The story behind the record: To casual oldies fans, "Rock Around the
Clock" was, and is, the record that best defines the birth of rock 'n' roll.
Here's a true/false quiz to test your knowledge of the song.
1. "Rock Around the Clock" was the first song called "Rock
Around the Clock."
2. "Rock Around the Clock" was originally recorded by Bill
Haley.
3. "Rock Around the Clock" was Haley's first hit.
4. "Rock Around the Clock" was the A-side of the record.
5. "Rock Around the Clock" was an instant hit.
Each statement is false.
Bill Haley and his band, the Saddlemen, established their rockin' credentials during their three years of recording for Dave Miller's Philadelphia-based Holiday and Essex labels, from 1951 to 1953. Though Haley preferred Hank Williams-inspired country ballads and Bob Wills-flavored Texas swing numbers, Miller kept pushing him in the direction of R&B songs like "Rocket 88" [see #24] in 1951 and "Rock the Joint" [see #28] a year later. "Rock the joint" 's success finally convinced Haley that his future lay in up-tempo, blues-flavored music.
In 1953, when the Saddlemen became the regular house band at a Philadelphia lounge, they changed out of their boots and cowboy hats and into tuxedos. Haley decided that the band's name needed to change to conform with their new style. Apparently a local disk jockey commented to Haley at one point, "You know, with a name like yours you ought to call yourselves the Comets." For a short time Bill Haley and the Saddlemen became Haley's Comets, but since that didn't jibe with Haley's habit of having his full name up front, he settled on Bill Haley with Haley's Comets on the rest of their Essex singles and subsequently, on Decca Records, changed the name to Bill Haley and His Comets. (Actually, the man who discovered the comet in 1682, British astronomer Edmund Halley, pronounced his name closer to Holly than Haley, which means that Buddy Holly, not Bill Haley, should have been the one to call his group the Comets!)
The group's 1953 recording of "Crazy Man, Crazy" had become a freak pop hit and the group was packing in the kids at local clubs when songwriter Max C. Freedman-whose claim to fame at that point was "Heartbreaker," a 1947 hit for the Andrews Sisters-approached Haley with something that he and, ostensibly, Jimmy Myers had written called "Rock Around the Clock." When Haley added the song to the band's repertoire in the summer of 1953, during a stand in the beach resort of Wildwood, New Jersey, "Rock Around the Clock" became a big crowd pleaser.
But because of animosity between Jimmy Myers and the president of Haley's record company, Haley couldn't record it. "Jimmy and Dave Miller didn't like each other," Haley told writer Ken Terry in 1979. "Three times I took the tune into the recording studio and put it on the music rack, and every time Miller would see it, he'd come in and tear it up and throw it away. So I never could record it. I wanted to-had it rehearsed and all-but he just absolutely refused."
According to Jimmy Myers, whose professional name was Jimmy DeKnight, "I wrote `Rock Around the Clock' with the late Max Freedman and I had Haley in mind at the time, so when I gave it to him he flipped over it. He knew instantly it was for him." As it turned out, Myers would have to shop the song elsewhere. "Sonny Dae and His Knights was the first record out on it," Myers said. "It was a regional hit, did fairly well, but unfortunately it was a local company, they didn't know what to do with it. They didn't have national distribution." Myers also recorded the song himself. "It was a big band thing. I called it Jimmy DeKnight and His Knights of Rhythm." Haley had to wait until his Essex Records contract expired at the end of the year before he could commit "Rock Around the Clock" to wax.
(Incidentally, the first tune called "Rock Around the Clock" was written and recorded by saxophonist Hal Singer in 1950. It was a crude knockoff of Lucky Millinder's 1942 "Let It Roll," but influenced by Wild Bill Moore's 1948 "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll" [see #9], and it bore no resemblance to the later "Rock Around the Clock." The title was never spoken in the lyrics, which were sung in a gravelly voice by the original Spo Dee O Dee, Sam Theard.)
On the strength of their hit records, Myers got Bill Haley and His Comets signed to Decca Records in April 1954 and delivered them to veteran producer Milt Gabler, who ten years earlier had turned Billie Holiday from a jazz singer into a torch singer. "I was aware that rock was starting," Gabler told Haley's biographer, John Swenson. "I knew what was happening in the Philadelphia area, and 'Crazy Man, Crazy' had been a hit about a year before that. It already was starting and I wanted to take it from there."
Bill Haley and His Comets' first Decca session was held at New York's Pythian Temple on West 80th Street, a one-time dance club converted into a studio. They recorded only two songs: "Rock Around the Clock" and "Thirteen Women." Gabler preferred to record at the Pythian Temple because the old stage from its former days was still there, allowing him to set up the band as if they were onstage and capture the feel of their live shows. Haley's band that day consisted of guitarist Danny Cedrone, steel guitarist Billy Williamson, pianist and accordionist Johnny Grande, bassist Marshall Lytle and-as a nod to Haley's growing R&B sound-saxophonist Joey D'Ambrosia. Gabler, who wanted to stress the big beat sound that he could get from Pythian Temple's acoustics, brought in his own session drummer, Billy Guesak. Beginning with his three rim shots at the start of the record, Guesak would drop echoed snare bombs throughout, giving a dynamic to "Rock Around the Clock" that Haley's material had never had before.
As Guesak announces the downbeat, Haley jumps right in with "One two three o'clock, four o'clock rock . . . " According to Myers, "Haley was late for the session. He had taken the ferry over from Jersey, they got stuck or something, they were an hour or so late. When you call a recording session, the clock starts at the time the session is called. You have three hours to do at least two songs, or four if you can get them in. When he got there he set up in a hurry and did the song ["Thirteen Women"] the producer . . . wanted to do. Finally they had a few minutes left, so we cut `Rock Around the Clock,' once for balance, and the second take was it.
"It was the only good take. It was that or forget it. I was bouncing up and down in the control room with the producer. They had two [engineers] who looked like they worked for Tom Edison, gray-haired fellows. They had the needle bouncing around, but they wouldn't dare go near the red marks. They had never made a record before that was deliberately distorted."
The song was simplicity itself. Haley and his chick are ready to dance all night. "Put your glad rags on and join me, hon, we'll have some fun when the clock strikes one . . . When the clock strikes two, three and four, if the band slows down we'll yell for more . . . We'll rock rock rock till broad daylight." As the clock strikes midnight, the band bears down on the boogie beat-all three guitars, Lytle's bass, the drums and D'Ambrosia's tenor sax-and drives the song to its conclusion, a coda or "country turn" that's standard with musicians who need a way to finish up and get out of a jam or a vamp. Les Paul had used that same coda, sounding remarkably similar, at the end of "How High the Moon" [see #23].
"Rock Around the Clock" sounds suspiciously like a couple of other songs. First there's "Rock the Joint" [see #28], an R&B cover that Haley had recorded two years earlier, in which Haley exhorted in the refrain, "We're gonna rock, rock this joint . . . "Apparently guitarist Danny Cedrone noted the similarity because he delivers a solo on "Rock Around the Clock"-inspired by Les Paul's guitar playing on "How High the Moon"-that's identical to the one he played on "Rock the Joint." (The following year, in fact, Gotham Music sued Jimmy Myers, claiming that he had lifted "Rock Around the Clock" from its "Rock the Joint"; Myers' attorney told the press, "Naturally there would be some similarity between the two records since the same singer did both records using the same style of singing." He also confessed that Max Freedman, a "freelance" composer, had written the song and sold it to Myers. Gotham and Myers solved their differences out of court.)
The verse melody of "Rock Around the Clock" bears a close resemblance to the verse melody of Hank Williams's first hit, "Move It on Over" (1947). This hints at Bill Haley's involvement in the writing, or shaping, of "Clock" because he was a fan of Hank Williams. In fact, the flipside of his "Rock the joint" was a song he'd written called "Icy Heart"- a direct steal from Williams's "Cold Cold Heart." If any other evidence is needed, consider that in 1957 Haley and His Comets recorded a rock version of "Move It on Over." Even the idea of rockin' around the clock wasn't new. Back in 1945 both Wynonie Harris and Jimmy Rushing recorded "Around the Clock," a slightly lascivious paean to all-night fun: 'Well we looked at the clock and the clock struck five, everything in the joint was jumpin', jumpin' like it was alive . . . Well the clock struck seven, she said please don't stop, it's like Maxwell House coffee, good to the last drop."
Jimmy Myers claimed that Decca didn't like Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." "They said it would never sell. They only recorded it as a favor to me, for bringing them Bill Haley, and they put it on the B-side of the record. They called it a fox trot, they didn't know what to call that type of music in 1954."
Incredibly, the "hot" side upon the record's release was "Thirteen Women," a weird, mid-tempo number about the only man who survives a nuclear holocaust-along with the thirteen titular ladies. It was a cover record; Dickie Thompson's R&B original on Herald Records, titled "Thirteen Women and One Man," had come out earlier in the year and been banned in March by radio station WHOM in New York because of its questionable lyrics concerning what functions each of the women performed in his daily routine. To understand why this oddball took precedent over "Rock Around the Clock," we must go back to why Decca signed Bill Haley in the first place.
Milt Gabler had for many years produced singer-saxophonist Louis Jordan's Decca R&B hits, such as
"Saturday Night Fish Fry" [see #15] and "Caldonia." In the 1940s Jordan had practically invented the
stripped-down rhythm and blues combo, and his many hit records (several of them million-sellers) and movie
appearances had made him that decade's top black star. But by 1953 Jordan's swing-based jump blues had
gone out of fashion, his sales had dropped off considerably and Decca failed to pick up the option on his
contract when it came due. Gabler, seeing that the pop market was beginning to accept the looseness of
R&B if not the music itself, decided to adapt the Jordan formula to a white act, and Bill Haley and His
Comets, who were already stars because of their surprise hit recording of "Crazy Man, Crazy," seemed the
perfect musicians to try it with. Later, describing his work with Haley's band in the studio, Gabler told
Arnold Shaw: "We'd begin with Jordan's shuffle rhythm. You know, dotted eighth notes and sixteenths, and
we'd build on it. I'd sing Jordan riffs to the group that would be picked up by the electric guitars and tenor
sax."
Louis Jordan might have turned "Thirteen Women" into a mildly amusing recording. The only problem was, Bill Haley lacked Jordan's impish humor. In fact, Deadpan Bill had almost no sense of humor. So "Thirteen Women" turned out to be as funny as, well, a nuclear holocaust. In any event, disk jockeys soon began to play the B-side.
On May 29,1954, "Rock Around the Clock" entered the Top 40 for only one week, peaking at number twenty-three. Haley moved on to his next record- a cover of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll"-as "Rock Around the Clock" faded seemingly into history. "I was totally disappointed," said Myers. "I had the gut feeling it would be a hit. It sold about ten records because Billboard and Cash Box followed Decca's lead and went on the other side of the record. When I found out they were getting rid of it, I loaded up the trunk and went out for six or eight weeks. Every time I saw a radio antenna I drove off the road into the radio station. Usually they'd put it right on the turntable. By the time I got back to Philadelphia off the road, it was selling. Then I shot out about two hundred copies to every name I could get in Hollywood, and I was lucky enough to get [The] Blackboard Jungle."
The Blackboard Jungle was one of those films that comes out of nowhere and hits a nerve. The story of a New York teacher coping with juvenile delinquents at an inner-city high school, The Blackboard Jungle captivated an audience that for the previous year had been hearing news stories about street gangs and the detrimental effects that R&B and "bop music" were having on American youth. The film opened with "Rock Around the Clock." When delinquents started rioting in movie theaters and slicing up seats with their switchblades, both "Rock Around the Clock" and The Blackboard Jungle became news.
Decca rereleased "Rock Around the Clock" and serviced distributors and disk jockeys as if it were a brand new record. "Rock Around the Clock" took off, reached number one on the pop charts on July 9,1955, and didn't leave that spot until September. It also topped the charts in England. How revolutionary was this bigbeat record? The week it went number one, it displaced Prez Prado's ultra-square "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossoms White." "Rock Around the Clock" was later the inspiration for another film, a 1956 cheapie called Rock Around the Clock, which featured Haley and the band.
Danny Cedrone, whose fleet-fingered performance on "Rock Around the Clock" (as well as on "Rock the Joint") became perhaps the most famous guitar solo in rock 'n' roll history, didn't live to share the glory. He died of a heart attack in the late summer of 1954, thinking that "Rock Around the Clock" was a stiff.
Haley's failure to share his success with his band gradually broke up the original Comets, who chafed at being salaried employees. Joey D'Ambrosia recalled, "You know how much money I made from doing `Rock Around the Clock'? Forty-two dollars and fifty cents. Union scale for the session. I didn't even get the gold record 'cause by the time it had sold a million, we were gone."
Dick Richards, Haley's regular drummer who was replaced on the session, agreed that Haley short-changed his band members. "In September of '55 we went to Haley and asked for a raise. He turned us down. The same week he bought a new Cadillac." Soon after, Richards, Marshall Lytle and D'Ambrosia quit the Comets and formed their own group, the Jodimars (Joey, Dick, Marshall, get it?).
In the early'70s MCA, a many-tentacled corporation, took over Decca's catalog and reissued "Rock Around the Clock" to coincide with Bill Haley's triumphant return to performing on the suddenly popular oldies shows held at Madison Square Garden by Richard Nader. When the song was picked up as the theme for the nostalgia sitcom "Happy Days" during its first season on television, "Rock Around the Clock" returned to the pop charts for the third time in 1974 and rocked as high as number thirty-nine-not bad for a twenty-year-old record-and Haley for a time found new life. But alcoholism had already put him on a slippery slope to nowhere. Haley succumbed to paranoia and often went into incoherent rages. He died alone, bitter and broken in Harlinger, Texas, on February 9, 1981.
According to most estimates, "Rock Around the Clock" has sold well over one hundred million copies to date.
"Just before my sixteenth birthday I saw the movie The Blackboard Jungle, and 'Rock Around the Clock' by Bill Haley and His Comets was it for me!"-Spencer Davis, guitarist