Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself. Lewis Grizzard
give two hundred to do it with Shirley.”
“You don’t have two hundred dollars.”
“I could get it.”
“How?”
“Sell my bicycle.”
“You’d sell your bicycle to do it with Shirley?”
“You wouldn’t sell yours to do it with Annette?”
“Maybe I would.”
Of course, I would have. The desire to do it strikes young in boys, and the delicious idea of doing it with a Bandstand regular was my first real sexual fantasy (which must be accepted as proof of our parents’ fears that interest in rock ’n’ roll did, indeed, prompt the sexual juices to flow).
* * *
The music was good back then. There were The Drifters, and The Penguins, and Paul and Paula, and Barbara Lewis, and Mary Wells, and Clyde McPhatter; and Sam Cooke sang about the men workin’ on the “chain ga-e-yang.” We had Bobby Helms doing “Special Angel,” and there was Jerry Butler talking about his days getting shorter and his nights getting longer. There were great songs like “A Little Bit of Soap” and “Duke of Earl” and Ernie K-Doe singing about his mother-in-law.
We danced and held each other close and took two steps forward and one back to “In the Still of the Night,” and later we shagged to beach music — The Tarns, The Showmen — and we twisted with Chubby Checker and did the Monkey with Major Lance. We had the soul sounds of James Brown — “Mr. Dynamite, Mr. Please Please Me Himself, the Hardest Workin’ Man in Show Business” — and Jackie Wilson sang “Lonely Teardrops,” and Marvin Gaye did “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs did “Stay.” And I don’t want to leave out Fats (Antoine) Domino and Chuck Berry and Joe Tex and Bobby Blue Bland and Soloman Burke and Jimmy Reed moaning over radio station WLAC, Gallatin, Tennessee, brought to you by John R., the Jivin’ Hoss Man, and Ernie’s Record Mart and White Rose Petroleum Jelly, with “a thousand-and-one different uses, and you know what that one is for, girl.”
There were a thousand singers for a thousand songs. It was truly an enchanted time. But then ever-so-slowly yet ever-so-suddenly, it changed. It seemed that one day Buddy Holly died, and the next day The Beatles were in Shea Stadium.
I’m not certain what it was that caused me to reject The Beatles from the start, but I suspect that even then I saw them as a portent of ill changes that soon would arise — not only in music, but in practically everything else I held dear.
The Beatles got off to a bad start with me because the first thing I heard them sing in 1964 was “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and it was basically impossible to do any of the dances I knew — the Shag, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, the Pony, the Gator, the Fish, the Hitchhike, the Twist, or the Virginia Reel— to that first song. About all you could do to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was jump and stomp and scream, which, of course, is what every female teeny-bopper at the time was doing whenever The Beatles struck guitar and drum and opened their mouths.
Also, patriot that I was, I stood four-square against the importation of foreign music, just as I have since stood steadfastly against the importation of Japanese cars and Yugoslavian placekickers. The only materials we really need to import from foreign countries, in my way of thinking, are porno movies. It doesn’t matter that you can’t understand what anybody is saying in those movies anyway, and I like the imagination of, say, the French when it comes to doing interesting things while naked.
But the British? I still have problems with them, especially with the current royal family. I’m sick and tired of Lady Di getting pregnant, I don’t care if Prince Andrew is dating Marilyn Chambers, and every time the Queen comes to the U.S., she is always getting offended by something a well-meaning colonist has done to her. I wish she would stay in Buckingham Palace and give the Cisco Kid his hat back.
Even then, I didn’t like the way The Beatles looked. I thought their hair was too long, I didn’t like those silly-looking suits with the skinny ties they wore, and Ringo reminded me of the ugliest boy in my school, Grady “The Beak” Calhoun, whose nose was so big that when he tried to look sideways he couldn’t see out of but one eye. Grady was a terrible hitter on the baseball team because his nose blocked half of his vision.
Soon after The Beatles arrived in the U.S., I started college. At the fraternity house, we were able to hold on to our music for a time. The jukebox was filled with the old songs, and when we hired a band, we had black bands whose music you could dance to and spill beer out of your Humdinger milkshake cup on your date. The Four Tops and The Temptations, The Isley Brothers and Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and Percy Sledge (which always sounded to me like something that might clog your drain) were still in demand at college campuses — at least all over the South. A few white bands were still in vogue as well, the most notable of which was The Swinging Medallions. They sang “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” and even now when I hear that song, it makes me want to go stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly-drenched nineteen-year-old coed in the other.
But the music, our music, didn’t last. At least, it didn’t remain dominant. Elvis’s music was switched to country stations, and every wormy-looking kid with a guitar in England turned up in the United States, and rock ’n’ roll meant something entirely different to us all of a sudden.
I didn’t like the new sounds or the new people who were making them. I found The Rolling Stones disgusting and The Dave Clark Five about a handful short.
Suddenly came the dissent associated with the Vietnam escalation, and with that came hippies and flower children. And one day I found myself (just as my own parents had done when Elvis peaked) condemning modern music as the hedonistic, un-American, ill-tempered, God-awful, indecent warblings of scrungy, tatooed, long-haired, uncouth, drugged-out, so-called musicians.
I didn’t know Jimi Hendrix was alive until he overdosed and died, and I thought Janis Joplin was Missouri’s entry in the Miss America pageant.
All the new groups had such odd names. There was Bread, and Cream, for instance. And there was Jefferson Airplane and Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk Railroad and a group named Traffic. I wondered why so many groups were named after various modes of transportation. I theorized that it was because those performers had all been deprived of electric trains as children.
I expected the members of musical groups to wear the same clothing when they performed — like white suits with white tails — and to do little steps together like “The Temptation Walk.”
These new groups, however, apparently wore whatever they found in the dirty clothes hamper each morning before a performance. T-shirts and filthy jeans seemed to be the most popular garb. Some, of course, performed without shirts. I found this to be particularly disturbing, since I have no use whatsoever for any music made by a person who looks as if he has just come in the house from mowing the grass on an August afternoon and his wife won’t let him sit down on the good furniture because he’ll sweat all over it and probably cause mildew.
I didn’t like drug songs and anti-war songs, and I didn’t like songs that were often downright explicit. Even The Beatles just wanted to hold somebody’s hand. The new groups, however, wanted to take off all their clothes, get in the bed, smoke a bunch of dope, and do all sorts of French things that have no business being watched, discussed, or sung about outside a porno flick on the sleazy side of town.
The only piece of raw rock ’n’ roll we ever knew about before The Beatles came along was a song by The Kings-men called “Louie, Louie,” and we really weren’t certain that what they were saying about “Louie, Louie” wasn’t just a rumor.
It was basically impossible to understand the words, except the part which went, “Louie, Lou-eye, Ohhhhh, baby, we gotta go.” After that, it sounded like, “Evahni ettin, Ah fackon nin.”
The smart money had it, however, that if you slowed the record down from 45 RPM to 33 RPM, you could make out some of the words and that the song was really