He released a bunch more singles on Essex, but for some reason they weren’t following up on the clear direction he’d set with those singles. So, “Rock Around the Clock” was an absolutely generic song for its time, and whatever Dave Miller’s reasons for not allowing Haley to record it, it wasn’t like he was missing out on anything special, was it?Īfter “Rock the Joint” and “Crazy Man Crazy”, Bill Haley was in a position to make a real breakthrough into massive commercial success, but… nothing happened. Indeed, even the title “Rock Around the Clock” had already been used, four years earlier, by Hal Singer:
In particular, the lyrics owed more than a little to Wynonie Harris’ “Around the Clock Blues”. It had been passed to him by Jimmy Myers, one of the song’s two credited writers, but for some reason Dave Miller, Haley’s producer, didn’t want Haley to record it - to the extent that Haley claimed that a couple of times he’d brought the sheet music into the studio and Miller had ripped it up rather than let him record the song.Īccording to John Swenson’s biography of Haley, Miller and Myers knew each other and didn’t get on, which might be the case, but it might also just be as simple as “Rock Around the Clock” being very derivative. When your big hit is *that* big, where do you go from there? What *can* you do next?įor a while, before leaving Essex Records, Bill Haley had wanted to record a song called “Rock Around the Clock”. Imagine that it’s a record that literally everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows, that sixty-five years and counting after its release is still instantly recognisable. Now imagine that your big hit becomes a marker for a whole generation, that it inspires a musical trend that lasts decades, that it causes actual rioting. Those problems can be bad enough if your big hit is just a normal big hit. It’s what everyone wants, and it’s what they’ve been working up to for their whole career, but what happens then? Is it a fluke? Are they ever going to have another hit as big as the first? How do they top that? A musician who has been doing fine, getting moderate sized hits and making a decent living, suddenly finds themselves selling tens of millions of records. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen to a musician is for them to have a big hit. Why not join them?Ī quick content note for this one – it contains non-explicit mention of infant death, alcoholism, and brain tumours, as well as a quote which uses a word which, while not a slur, is now no longer accepted as a polite term for black people in the way that it was at the time of the quote. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain his great late-fifties singles “Lean Jean” and “Skinny Minnie”, or the 1960s recordings I excerpt here (which are not in print anywhere that I know of) but it has everything else you could want. This box set, which is ridiculously cheap, contains almost every track anyone could want by Haley and the Comets, and it also includes the Jodimars track I excerpt here. I relied on volume one of Fuchs’ book for this post - it’s very good on the facts - but it suffers from being written by someone whose first language is not English, and it also *badly* needs an editor, so I can’t wholly recommend it. Another of Haley’s sons has a biography due out in April, which might be worthwhile, but until then the only book available is a self-published biography by Otto Fuchs. There are two biographies which are long out of print - one by John Swenson which I read as a very small child, and one from the nineties by one of Haley’s sons. Unfortunately, there aren’t many good books about Bill Haley available.
#Rock around the clock full
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.Īs always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.
Today we’re looking at “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs.
#Rock around the clock download
Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on February 18, 2019
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