Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1958
by Scott Miller

"Good Golly Miss Molly" - Little Richard
My wife Kristine asked me what I knew about 1958, since I was born in 1960. Fundamentally, not a damn thing; it's great to occasionally be too young for something. I do know that when you go back as far as 1958, things were different. Jazz was dominant at the highbrow end of things. Rock and roll was still riding its initial wave of success, and with Elvis in the army, people were able to take a little break from objecting to the King's "gyrating" and resume having Little Richard just plain scare the hell out of them.

"I'm Gonna Love You Too" - Buddy Holly
Here's another exuberant smash from Buddy, from a day when the music was still alive. Buddy's melodies have an imaginative Anglo-Germanic folk music rectilinearity to them, reminiscent of the best polka in the same way as something like "The Happy Wanderer." His ability to capture that kind of static oom-pah musical value in vivacious rock is one indicator of why he was exceptional.

"Mambo Gozon" - Tito Puente and His Orchestra
This is the first recording that springs to mind when I try to pick the very best sounding record I've ever heard. I was ready to credit Tom Dowd's engineering because he did some Tito Puente sessions, but really it wasn't Tom—Mickey Crofford is the producer, and it's not on Tom's discography. The singers on this successor to Cachao and Perez Prado's Cuban dance innovation are simply chanting "A gozar este rico mambo (enjoy this rich mambo)"; it's essentially an instrumental, and the polychromatic interplay of percussive and harmonic elements in real space is intoxicating to the ears.

"The Sermon" - Jimmy Smith
This legendary twenty-minute jam gives the impression of a pure improv except for a little gem of an organ theme Jimmy must have brought in composed. Did I just say twenty minutes? I'd feel comfortable editing the thing down to about my favorite six minutes, except for my lack of sophistication as a jazz listener rendering me too cowed to actually attempt such a thing. My God, I hear someone say, this philistine cut out where Tina Brooks overblew a forward aerial submediant ascent while hopping on one foot—does he just hate life? So this sits a little out of character amid my generally stingy time slot allocations. There's a lot of great playing to be sure, including what constitutes my main exposure to guitarist Kenny Burrell, but still—allowing a twenty minute jazz cut; that feels like I've failed as a shallow smartass.

"Stagger Lee" - Lloyd Price
Greil Marcus wrote a history of the folk ballads that have been based on the 1895 St. Louis murder of "Stagger" Lee Shelton, the only exponent of which I know about is Lloyd Price's hit. Sounding a lot slicker even than the post-comeback "Just Because" (which I also love) from about a year earlier, Price's Stagger Lee is a high-production affair as murder ballads go, where the scene is late night street corner gambling and the only remaining historically accurate detail is a dispute over Lee's hat that he settled with a bullet.

"Dancing in the Dark" - Cannonball Adderley
I chose this romantic material, one of the better showcases of Adderley's facility with fluid runs, rather than a longer opus with Miles from the classic Somethin' Else. Adderley has had to compete with Coltrane for history's attention, and there's a mannerism and even economy here that Coltrane doesn't quite do.

"One for My Baby" - Frank Sinatra
Here's one of Frank's most amazing deliveries. It's emotionally pitch-perfect, as usual, and whereas I often hear more about his exceptional breath control than I can ordinarily hear (you mean, say, compared with Johnny Mathis's breath control?), on this one you can really hear the volume drop to a soft plateau and lock onto a perfectly controlled vibrato in a way that would challenge almost any good singer.

"Rumble" - Link Wray and His Wray Men
"Rumble" already sounds like bad news every step of the way, from the lumbering scale-indifferent bass line to the manhandled strings in the fuzz-guitar-pioneering performance—then they go and name it "Rumble"! This can't have been helping the cause of making fun of squares who thought rock and roll was the cause of juvenile delinquency.

"Tequila" - The Champs
The sax work by Danny "Chuck Rio" Flores is the highlight of this surprise B-side hit, if you don't count Pee Wee Herman's alluring signature dance. "Tequila" illustrates an essential difference between 1958 and now; in 1958, there were very capable musicians more or less sitting around on salary who could do what they do and more or less accidentally produce a hit record.

"La Bamba" - Ritchie Valens
The other big 1958 accidental B-side hit was "La Bamba," highlighted by the guitar, which I think is Valens himself. It's a great, funny song, Valens adding a rock beat to one clever strain of a traditional Mexican folk tune: "para bailar la bamba (to dance the Swing/Stomp(?)) se necesita una poca de gracia (you need a little grace, humor)... Yo no soy marinero/Soy capitan (I'm not a sailor, I'm the captain)." According to Wikipedia, the ersatz music authority's very best friend, Valens had to learn the song phonetically; he'd spoken only English his whole life.

"Milestones" - Miles Davis
This high-precision, breezy, uptempo composition reminds me a little of the 6/8 scherzo in Beethoven's ninth—playful little up-and-down melody in the hands of a master, showing off the ability to sustain the delay on the notes for whole lines at a time. This was the first line-up with both Coltrane and Adderley; perhaps slightly more challenging a listen than Kind Of Blue—but only by dint of being more energetic, less relaxed and stretched out—I find it every bit as enjoyable: the Piper at the Gates of Dawn to Kind of Blue's Dark Side of the Moon.

"Summertime Blues" - Eddie Cochran
"Summertime Blues" is such a perfect creation—the way the acoustic guitar answers the chord changes, the way the low voice mocks authority on the second line of the choruses. Eddie Cochran wasn't making up that stuff about being too young to vote; he really was only nineteen when this came out, and 21 when he died in a car crash.

"Blues March" - Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
I mentioned Neal Hefti's "Odd Couple" theme (one of the near-misses on my 1968 list) in a Hank Mobley comment, and sax wizard Benny Golson's "Blues March" is an even more interesting node in the genealogy, demonstrating the way that class of melody derives from blues on one hand and military march on the other. Yes, of course there was "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" before any of that, but the blues in that kind of song was less New Orleans, filtered through swing. Mr. Blakey gets an unusual opportunity to pull out some two-stroke rolls.

"Peter Gunn" - Henry Mancini
The James Bond spy music genre had a clear forerunner: this dry-ice-cool private detective TV show theme by the inimitable Henry Mancini. This song is the reason B-52s songs sound so resonant—walking blues turned evil with tri-tone brass and, in lieu of blue notes, hard major and minor thirds pitted against each other.

"Well You Needn't" - Thelonious Monk
I knew this version of the Monk-composed "Well You Needn't" some time before I learned it was written in 1944, and was a recognizable standard to any jazz aficionado. Of course the Coltrane solo gives it a modern edge, as do the fearsome, languid spikes from Monk's fingers. The chromatic climbs must have seemed pretty crazy for a pre-bebop swing piece, more comfortable on Monk's Music.

"All I Have to Do Is Dream" - The Everly Brothers
The "whenever I want you" line teases a phenomenal amount of emotion out of a simple doo-wop progression, and of course Phil and Don execute the delivery so perfectly you don't worry about the two of them dreaming of that same girl's lips. Another difference from 1958 is that it would no longer occur to songwriters to glorify longing as an end in itself, let alone have the wherewithal to get it right in a universally accessible lyric.

"Johnny B. Goode" - Chuck Berry
I make this Chess single a tie for the most important rock and roll song with "Jailhouse Rock." They're both fundamentally about maintaining a love of life and a good attitude toward your fellow man in hard times; beyond that, their strengths are very different. "Johnny B. Goode" was of course the perfection of the Chuck Berry riff—still a staple of rock playing when I learned guitar in 1969—whose instrumental intro pattern situated the electric guitar as the movement's reactor core, elevating that intstrument to the realm of myth. The lyric has obvious, perhaps well-worn populist rags-to-riches appeal, yet as "All I Have to Do Is Dream" triumphs by celebrating the dream in isolation from its fulfillment, Johnny B. Goode triumphs by celebrating the rags in isolation from the riches. As the song ends, Johnny is still carrying his guitar in that same gunny sack; the point of the song is the few scattered souls who cheer him, in whose chorus we're invited to join in. Cheering on a peer to success is not something people do naturally, and Mr. Berry provides an infectious lesson on how to do it with the immortal "Go Johnny Go," one of the catchiest refrains of the century, and the antecedent of spontaneous explosions of sixties good vibes like "yeah yeah yeah."