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Not a book but a 12-inch, 33-1/3 rpm "stereo" (?) vinyl disc, a compilation on the Pickwick label, Pickwick SPC-3256, near-mint vinyl in a near-mint jacket, featuring "Rock the Joint," "Rock Around the Clock," "See You Later Alligator," Charles Calhoun's "Shake, Rattle & Roll" and "Flip Flop and Fly" (on which Calhoun shared songwriting credit with Lou Willie Turner), etc. Let us briefly consider the significance of Bill Haley and His Comets (or, as here, "the Comets.") Their early publicity and jacket notes showed no reticence about the fact that the band originally dubbed "Bill Haley and the Saddlemen" (1949-1952) introduced the new sound of "rock" (from Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, et al.) to their repertoire not out of any organic musical evolution, but simply because they found it got them more airplay than their original barn-dance playlist -- starting with their 1951 cover of Ike Turner's "Rocket 88," which then led to their 1952 release of "Rock the Joint." Switching to the Decca label, they had follow-up hits with Big Joe Turner's "Shake Rattle and Roll," and of course with "Rock Around the Clock," which was re-released to take advantage of the opening of the 1955 film "Blackboard Jungle." But this was not primarily a studio band, and Haley (1925-1981) -- once considered America's top cowboy yodeler -- long retained numbers like "Dance With the Dolly With the Hole in Her Stocking" in their stage show, surely confirming rock historian Nick Tosches' insistence that rock was NOT merely black music being played by white performers (though the Comets, like Elvis, certainly did cover their share of hits from the "Race Records" chart) but rather retained strong element of Western Swing. Lawrence Welk reported that when he first took his act to New York, the local promoter told him to drop his goofy onstage horseplay -- the bass player climbing up on his instrument and riding it like a pony, etc. But Welk found he got only a cool reception till he restored the stage antics, at which point his popularity boomed. Similarly, Haley's Comets -- especially acrobatic sax player Joey Ambrose and Marshall Lyle literally riding his string bass -- created a stage show that stayed popular in Europe long after America turned to the likes of Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Poorly researched jacket notes here by Robert Angus, editor, "Modern Hi Fi," begin with the claim that Haley wrote "Rock Around the Clock" -- actually properly credited on disc label here to M.C. Freedman-J. De Knight -- featured in the film Blackboard Jungle "that used Haley's recording as its theme." (The Richard Brooks film -- Glenn Ford, Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow -- was in fact based on the novel of the same name by Evan Hunter -- also known as Ed McBain -- who'd quit teaching in disgust after two months at a vocational high school in the Bronx.) Said jacket notes spiral down from there, insisting rock and roll songs contain "coded messages . . . secret from the adult world." Whoa, dude! Reduced from $14.
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