Music seeped in and around me at home for as long as I can remember and this may have been the initial reason for my passion for it, but I can say without doubt that it was ‘seeing’ music that eventually made it stick to me like cement glue.
A stocky, rather ordinary man with slick dark hair named Bob Horn hosted the 3 pm music show from our local TV station – Bandstand. He played the latest single record releases and talked to an invited group of guests after they had mimed to their record. He also introduced the teenage studio audience.
If I rushed home from school I could catch all but the first half-hour of Bandstand. Tearing out of my fourth-grade class as soon as the final bell rang, I’d nearly get myself run over by the cars on Germantown Avenue because I’d spotted my trolley coming and couldn’t wait for the traffic lights to change.
Unfortunately, the programme time interfered with my friendship with the open-air girls and their after-school teas as well as my ballet practice at home to my scratchy 78 record of Chopin’s Polonaise. Watching Bandstand made me want to practise the mambo and the bunny hop instead, because that was what the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old audience was doing. That, and the bop. I’d been dancing since the hucklebuck, but never with the frenzied fever to get it right. I suppose that having a teenage brother and sister introduced me to teenage tastes early, but it was music that whipped me into my premature adolescence.
I was still wearing braids when I started bopping about the dining room in front of the television imitating teen attitudes with my head filling with notions about ‘earth angels’, ‘thrills on Blueberry Hill’ and other fairy-tale romances nailed to a four-four beat. I felt I was missing a ponytail, bobby socks, a cardigan sweater worn backwards and a felt skirt with a curly-haired poodle on it wearing a diamond-studded collar. I also had to find a partner to dance with as Dennis refused and Pam would arrive home loaded with homework and disappear straight upstairs to study.
Five afternoons a week for at least an hour each day I was mesmerized by Bandstand. I gave my undivided attention to the vision and sound of what they were calling rock and roll, which sounded like a pokier version of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on jukeboxes on the reservation and on the Melangian radio station. I don’t want to give the impression that I was getting lost in it, though. If anything, I found myself in the music, because somehow it satisfied all my secret needs.
Rock and roll’s simple childlike passion poetry had various smudges of joy, pathos and sentimentality which I felt or was starting to feel but couldn’t express. The lyrics were repetitive like the commercial jingles that regularly interrupted my favourite TV and radio shows. There was a throbbing rhythm which was sometimes almost menacing and had an element of the reservation about it. Melangian dialect was often used for the lyrics and Melangian groups like the Platters were as important to the music as white stars like Bill Haley and the Comets.
In the early days of Bandstand, Melangian teenagers used to participate. When the camera scanned the audience, which was invited to dance to each record that was played, the Melangian couples were by far the best dancers, doing the most intricate variations of spins, twirls and fancy footwork and never looking as if they’d just graduated from an Arthur Murray dance course.
As Bandstand was broadcast live from South Philadelphia, which was a rough part of the city that had more than its share of gangs, slums and delinquents, it attracted teenagers from that area, so the dancing audience didn’t look like a contrived showcase for middle-class kids. They had something of ‘the street’ about them.
The show was off the air before Ikey, Thelma and Edna got in from work, and they didn’t disapprove of my watching. My mother was only in her midthirties at the time, neither old enough nor old-fashioned enough to denounce rock and roll as a sinful or negative influence, which was a growing complaint about it among very conservative adults. She and Thelma liked the music in the house.
They were as enthralled as we kids were when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night, gyrating like a rhythm-and-blues singer. When his bumping and grinding below the waist was banned from the screen on a subsequent show, it made a tremendous stink, turning his censored performance into real box-office and TV-rating appeal. It made people talk about him. I can’t remember how many appearances he made on the show, but there were several at a time when Ed Sullivan had the most popular variety programme on nationwide television. The censorship made Elvis’s appearances newsworthy. The papers were full of reports and I guess it was the first time that television and journalism married their interests to make a rock idol.
Edna was a bit distressed by the newspapers’ claim that Elvis’s style was original, because she said rightly that it was really the Melangian rhythm-and-blues singers’ performing style. But she could have screamed about that until the cows came home and nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice. It was his white version of the form that made it provocative and caused white teenage girls to scream and want to pull out his hair and their own. Others imitated him and his style and helped his brand of rock and roll surpass teen-cult status to become a national phenomenon.
Bandstand was so influential to the promotion of this teen music phase that it was picked up by a big network and became a nationally broadcast television show. It was renamed American Bandstand and a young MC named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as the star presenter.
When the phase became a craze, Philadelphia was on the map again. Bandstand spotlighted a growing trend in America to recognize teenagers as a breed with their own style and culture, and the weekly allowance to be consumers. To say you were from Philadelphia in the mid-1950s was probably like saying that you were from Liverpool after the mid-1960s. The place name projected a certain teen-cult music status, not only because of Bandstand, but also because many of the popular teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Dion, Bobby Rydell, themselves teenagers, stepped out of Philadelphia city-centre high schools into the media frenzy building up in America about its teenagers.
Ten years after the Second World War, parents may have been relieved that they could afford and tolerate rock and roll, and regarded it as a minor cultural nuisance that was temporarily captivating their war babies. Even though I was a postwar baby, I was ready to be captured, too.
My passion for music and the culture that grew out of it was not my only interest. There were other elements of my life, like getting good grades at Jenks school, which held me back from becoming a wholehearted bobbysoxer. But I had no reluctance about putting my dolls and my roller skates in the basement to show that I wouldn’t be playing with them any more. And I found new friends in the neigbourhood who wanted to master the latest dance steps as I did.
I was nearly delirious when I spotted my first adolescent pimple and had to buy my first tube of Clearasil, which was new on the market and being advertised on television and in teen magazines.
Wasn’t there a whole generation going through it? I was just taking an early grab at the tail of pubescence. It pulled me into the pandemonium of teenage culture so fast that there wasn’t a chance for me to wave goodbye to childhood before it disappeared over the horizon with some of my more agreeable traits in tow, such as wanting to please adults. As can be expected, my mother wasn’t thrilled about my quick personality change. It made her nervous and angry to see me running up and down breathlessly while I chased the spirit of something that was invisible to her but galvanizing and hypnotic to me.
The teen cult was like the call of the wild. It beckoned me first through music. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had an insidious penetration. Sometimes I’d hear a song that I couldn’t get enough of from hearing it a few times on the radio, so I’d buy the record and listen to the same song over and over and over again. It manipulated me like a mantra with the lyrics about puppy love and such, accompanying a beat that excited me to the point that I was either transfixed or transported to another zone.
I had become so good and convincing at marching to other people’s drummers that it was a shock to me and my family when music let me hear my own. I was a handful and couldn’t