Poodle skirts! Hula hoops! “Duck and cover!” Ike! John Foster Dulles! Pope Johnny! It was a decade of quiet relief after three decades of wild social change. It was an era of preppies and short haircuts, unless you were a bad boy, like a greaser or a beatnik. Juvenile delinquency and reefer were background noise. In some sections of the South, police required parents to sign releases before their children could attend rock and roll shows. It was the Devil’s music!
This year saw the worst recession since the Great Depression, and when Republicans in Ohio and California put right-to-work referenda on their states’ ballots, they got their clocks cleaned, paving the way for 1960. Lyndon Johnson was Majority Leader, Nixon was Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller was about to be elected governor of New York, Jack Kennedy was a handsome senator from Massachusetts, and Pat Brown was about to be the first of his family to be elected governor of California. Many of the Liberal Class of ‘58 in Congress would serve until 1994.
Elvis was in the Army, and this was one of the few periods when he didn’t have something on the charts. The middle-of-the-road pop music of the Fifties was yielding to rock and roll, and doo-wop was a major factor. Let’s listen in on the music of the Silent Generation and the early Baby Boomers.
Cue the Rockumentary theme on Turntable One! (This was a backup band at Motown that consisted of the Funk Brothers and pickup musicians from the Detroit Symphony.)
Edward Raymond Cochran (1938-60) was a rockabilly singer who experimented with multitrack recording and overdubbing even on his earliest singles. He played piano, bass and drums. His image as a sharply dressed and good looking guy with an attitude epitomized the Fifties rocker.
He was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and moved with his family to California in the early 1950s. He played in the school band and taught himself to play blues guitar. His first success came when he performed the song “Twenty Flight Rock” in the salacious film “The Girl Can't Help It.”
He died at age 21 in an accident while traveling in a taxi during his British tour.
In 1987, Cochran was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
There is a line in the song that needs a bit of explaining. “I’m going to take my father to the United Nations.” In those days the UN was actually taken seriously!