Bill Haley

   
Artist: Bill Haley

   Genre(s): 
Other
   Rock
   

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Discography:


   
 Rock the Joint

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 24


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD6]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 33


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD5]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 21


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD4]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 22


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD3]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 29


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD2]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 25


   
 The Warner Brothers Years and More - Boxset [CD1]

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 28


   
 Master Series

   Year: 1997   
Tracks: 18

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Bill Haley is the ignored hero of early rock & roll. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are ensconced in the firmament, transformed into regular constellations in the rock music welkin, their music well-thought-of by writers and scholars as well as the record-buying public, about every note of euphony they always recorded theoretically eligible for release. And among the living rock & roll pioneers, Chuck Berry is given his due in the euphony market and by the history books, and Bo Diddley is acknowledged fittingly in the latter, even if his music doesn't sell the way it should. Yet Bill Haley -- world Health Organization was in that location before any of them, acting rock & roll earlier it fifty-fifty had a list, and merchandising it in sufficient quantities knocked out of a small Pennsylvania tag to pull in attention from the major labels earlier Presley was even recording in Memphis -- is barely delineate by more than than a xII of his other singles, and recognised by the modal attender for exactly two songs among the hundreds that he recorded; and he's frequently treated as slight more than than a canonized footer, an anomalousness that came and went selfsame chop-chop, in most histories of the music. The verity is, Bill Haley came along a lot earlier than near people realize and the histories usually acknowledge, and he went on making good medicine for geezerhood thirster than is commonly recognized.


The central event in Haley's life history was the single "Rock music Around the Clock" topping the charts for eight weeks in the spring and summer of 1955, an event that most music historians name as the dawn of the rock & roll era. Getting the song there, however, took more than a yr, a period in which the band had already through with unique and essential service in the movement of delivery careen & roll up into the world, with the million-selling single "Shake, Rattle and Roll" to their credit; equally important, in the iII old age earlier that, Haley and his band had already broken new anchor with the singles of "Projectile 88," "Rock-and-roll the Joint," and "Crazy, Man, Crazy."


Born in Highland Park, MI, in 1925, Haley was blind in unitary eye from parentage, and, as a issue, suffered from direful shyness as a boy. The folk affected to Boothwyn, PA, during the mid-'30s, where Haley highly-developed a strong passion for country music and began playing guitar and telling; by 14, he had left school in the hope of pursuing a calling in music. He bounced through a few country bands based in the Middle Atlantic states and as well tested to make himself as a singing and yodeling cowboy. His number one heavy break up came in 1944, when he replaced Kenny Roberts -- wHO was being drafted -- in the Downhomers, with whom Haley made his first-class honours degree appearance on records. Haley leftfield the group in 1946 and went through and through several other bands earlier reversive to his menage in Chester, PA, where he ab initio hoped to get some work out as a DJ. Instead, he formed a new band, the Four Aces of Western Swing, with keyboardman Johnny Grande, bassist Al Rex, and steel guitar player Billy Williamson, and sign-language a contract with Cowboy Records, a new pronounce formed by James Myers, a composer, musician, and publisher, and his partner, Jack Howard. Their number one record was released in 1948, a variant of "Candy Kisses"; by 1949, the radical had changed its identify to the Saddlemen and began moving betwixt labels, including liaisons with the fledgeling Atlantic Records, Ivin Ballen's Gotham Records, and Ed Wilson's Keystone Records, in front at last subsidence at Holiday Records, a small pronounce owned by David Miller, in 1951. Their number one release, done at Miller's pressure, was a cover of "Rocket 88," a song that originated out of Sam Phillips' fledgeling transcription operation in Memphis, courtesy of Jackie Brenston. It was a pumping art object of sexually revelatory, frolicky R&B, and Haley and the Saddlemen simply put a broader, slightly loping country boogie levelheaded onto it and boosted the beat division, while a lead guitar (belike played by Danny Cedrone) noodled some blues licks on the break away. Haley hadn't liked the idea of doing the sung dynasty, only Miller wanted it, and the consequence -- though no ane knew it at the time -- was the first white-band cover of what is now regarded by many scholars as the beginning real rock & seethe song.


Just to place this in perspective, rock & roll is unremarkably written around as a phenomenon (and a reaction to) the complacency of the Eisenhower earned run average. But Haley had released what amounted to a rock & roll single in 1951, when "Dwight David Eisenhower" wasn't regular in time running to be prexy, the rural area was placid mired in Korea, and John Kennedy not still even a senator. Howlin' Wolf was still based in Memphis and film editing sides for Sam Phillips, while a 15-year-old Elvis Presley was in one-tenth grade. The members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were still in grammar schooltime; Lonnie Donegan was still known as Anthony Donegan and thought process of seemly an entertainer; and Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies had not still even met. And Big Bill Broonzy was about to introduce American blues to England.


At the time, "Skyrocket 88" didn't seem to matter too much in terms of gross revenue, as it was neither fish nor fowl; not good enough R&B to eclipse Brenston's original among black record buyers, nor sufficiently a country phonograph recording the way white audiences or the wireless stations that catered to them wanted. No one even had a advert for what it was; a "race record" as the trades called discs done in a style that seemed aimed at black listeners, merely one through by a white band in a kind of state style. Indeed, the isthmus itself remained funnily anonymous; Miller had seen to it that there were no packaging photos of Bill Haley & the Saddlemen, a measured effort to isolated their race, though the band's call and the commonwealth lay B-sides to those other singles pretty a great deal told wHO they really were. That debut single sold just now a few grand copies regionally, as did its followup, "Green Tree Boogie." Meanwhile, when Haley and his isthmus played, they and their business director, Jim Ferguson, began to notice that it was the jr. audience members wHO responded topper to the R&B-style songs that Miller had them doing. They likewise sawing machine all around them that exuberance for state music was flat, and that if they were look for a hit, it potential wasn't going to come from this new counseling.


They were stressful all kinds of permutations of country and R&B and acquiring some response, only they didn't know what it exactly was that they were doing musically. Then came "Rock the Joint," their showtime vent on Miller's new Essex Records pronounce; it had a drum, it had a memorable catch phrase, and it had a great execution at its essence (including the very same solo that Danny Cedrone would afterward usance on "John Rock Around the Clock"), and it sold well sufficiency that the band had to go on circuit promoting it. One of the places where it sold well was Cleveland, where DJ Alan Freed picked up on the call; it was straightaway afterward this that Freed began referring to the music corporate by "John Rock the Joint," music that he played every night on his show, as "stone & roll," so giving Haley a good deal of justification for his later title to have been in on the birth of the music earlier anyone ever knew it. [Short letter: Marshall Lyttle remembers "Rock the Joint" as the call Freed was playing during an appearance by the band on his radio show, when he began victimization the phrase "rock music & roll" -- scholars world Health Organization harmonize with the Haley connection also often attribute Freed's inspiration to the subsequently single "Screwball, Man, Crazy," piece early historians sound out that Freed appropriated the musical phrase from Wild Bill Moore's "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll".]


By this time, the bandmembers, all well into their 30s and long past being teenagers, were taking what amounted to a crash grade in what that audience precious; at Ferguson's prompting, they played hundreds of senior high dances, not usually a venue that a professional rural area band would trouble oneself with. In the sue, they also changed their image and call. By 1952, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen were history; alternatively, playing off of their leader's call and the heavenly phenomenon called Halley's Comet, they became Bill Haley & His Comets. The cowpuncher hats and early nation paraphernalia were junked as well. And they took a come together front at the successful R&B level acts of the Apostles of the time, especially the Treniers, and began working tabu wild quasi-acrobatic moves by their bass histrion and saxman, in special, stuff that was unthinkable for a country band just seemingly what the kids devoured at dances.


Most important, they would try out corporeal, phrases, and point moves, sightedness what worked and what didn't, in front of the teenage audiences they plant in Pennsylvania; and they listened to the way that this teenage audience talked. Haley time-tested to usance phrases that he heard, and put them into this melodious stew; some of what they came up with was enjoyably whacky material like "Dance With a Dolly" and "Full stop Beatin' Round the Mulberry Bush" (though even the latter had a guitar solo worth hearing more than erst). But some of it, like "Rockin' Chair on the Moon," was age ahead of its time; and some of it, like "Half-baked, Man, Crazy" -- a Haley original whose deed came from a piece of teenager slang that he'd heard -- did exactly what was intended, hitting the Top 20 on the crop up charts in 1953, a first for a white River band playing an R&B-style call.


Late that year, James Myers offered Haley and Miller a call that he had published (and, on paper, at least, co-authored as Jimmy De Knight) entitled "Rock Around the Clock." Written almost as a travesty of R&B conventions, its principal composer was Max C. Freedman, a songwriter best remembered up to that time for his 1946 hit "Siouan City Sue," and also responsible for such songs as "Do You Believe in Dreams" and "Her Beaus Were Only Rainbows." Miller either truly didn't determine the potentiality of the call, or else he didn't like the business arrangement that Myers had with Haley, because he refused to record it. After a few more attempts at carving early songs for the teen market that simply didn't work, Haley and the banding and their handler were ready to exit Miller and Essex Records. A meeting was set up with Milt Gabler, a producer at Decca Records, world Health Organization not simply liked the song and had no problem cutting it, simply byword some good potential in Bill Haley & His Comets, based on what Essex had through with them on "Rock-and-roll the Joint" and "Dotty, Man, Crazy." A shrink was gestural, and on April 12, 1954, the banding, with Danny Cedrone on lead guitar, did a two-song sitting in New York that yielded "13 Women" -- a post-nuclear holocaust sexuality phantasy worthy of Hugh Hefner (world Health Organization had only when started up Playboy powder store a class earlier) -- and "Rock candy Around the Clock." It was released a calendar month later and made the charts for one week at number 23, merchandising 75,000 copies, not bad but not selfsame important either. It was enough, however, for Gabler to docket another sitting in early June, where the banding recorded "Judder, Rattle and Roll."


That was the record that broke the band nationally on Decca, reaching act seven-spot and selling over a jillion copies 'tween late 1954 and early 1955. They followed it up quickly with "Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere)," a raffish piece that reached number 11 nationally and actually made the R&B charts for Haley, a first for him. Then, in early 1955, James Myers managed to get "Rock-and-roll Around the Clock" set in the adolescent delinquency drama The Blackboard Jungle, playing over the credits. The motion-picture show was a huge strike, and in its wake Decca re-released the song that spring. "Rock Around the Clock" shot up the charts this fourth dimension, and the resultant role was an eight-week run in the number one place; by some estimates, it became the sec biggest worldwide-selling single afterwards Bing Crosby's "T. H. White Christmas" (oddly enough, too a Decca discharge), 25-million copies sold worldwide.


The success of "John Rock Around the Clock" took position while Elvis Presley had so far to graph a record nationally; at a distributor point when Chuck Berry's very first gear individual for Chess had scantily been recorded; and when Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly weren't even close to auditioning for recording contracts. One has to visualize a reality in which Bill Haley & His Comets were the only established albumen tilt & wrap band, and the only andrew Dickson White rock 'n' roll & roll stars in the world. Within a class, that would all change, only it was long enough for Haley and his band to turn stars, with appearances on national tv set and a motion picture consider of their own. From the goal of 1954 until the end of 1956, they would plaza nine singles into the Top 20, one of those at number one and only and triplet more in the Top Ten.


The Comets were one of the best sway & undulate bands of their eRA, with a for the most part sax-driven sound ornamented with heavy rhythm guitar from Haley, a slap-bass, and drumming with stacks of rim-shots; they had the "blackest" sound of whatever gabardine band working in 1953-1955. It wasn't invariably obvious and so, and has been forgotten today, on the dot how fluid their membership was, for all of the consistency of that good. Haley's deuce original bandmates from his Four Aces days, Johnny Grande and Billy Williamson, were formal partners, coupled to him at the hip lawfully, with frozen shares in the group's profit; tenor saxman Joey D'Ambrosio, bassist Marshall Lytle, and drummer Dick Richards, by contrast, were chartered employees earning one hundred fifty dollars a calendar week summation expenses -- a respectable living for most working musicians in 1955 -- when "Rock Around the Clock" hit the upside of the charts. Ironically, Danny Cedrone, whose guitar henpecked that birdsong and the key Essex hits "Rock the Joint" and "Crazy, Man, Crazy," died in an accident in July of 1954, and his successor, Franny Beecher, was earning 150 dollars a hebdomad when he worked with the dance band. In the late summer of 1955, with a number one undivided to their course credit and rafts of work in presence of them, D'Ambrosio, Lytle, and Richards all demanded raises, which Haley refused to grant them. They leave office that month and formed a passing Comets soundalike whole called the Jodimars (taken from parts of their first base names), wHO recorded for Capitol Records. Beecher was taken into the grouping as a full-time phallus (though not a better half) and remained with them until 1961, while D'Ambrosio's successor, Rudy Pompilli, became a core member of the dance band, working with them almost without interruption for the next 19 years, until his death in 1975.


In the late spring of 1956, careen & roll changed again as Elvis Presley, world Health Organization was jr., leaner, and a more than fiercely intimate presence, emerged as a lead; he not only made music that was as full as Haley's only he looked the role of a sway & undulate star. The differences in their several images could be summed up by examining the truest scenes in the movies that each did. Sway Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley & His Comets, was a highly fictionalized account of the dance band and its success, merely it did capture something of the spirit of the early days of rock & roll, with some full carrying out clips; the like Elvis Presley pic was Loving You, in which the singer played a fictionalized rendering of himself, named Deke Rivers. In Loving You, when Deke Rivers performs in front of an interview and sets the girls screaming and lightheaded, his would-be manager comments, "If he'd gone on whatever thirster, they'd be giving him their door keys." In Rock Around the Clock, by contrast, the single truest setting depicts a manque promoter driving through rural Pennsylvania and chancing upon a dance where Haley and troupe ar playing; he enters, sees hundreds of kids terpsichore to the band's music, and asks a cleaning lady being lifted up over the headway of her spouse, "Hey sister, what's that exercise you're getting?" She answers, riotously, legs in the air, "It's rock & roll!"


Haley's medicine was the soundtrack to a unspoilt time, whether dancing or more private diversion; Presley's music, at least where women were concerned, was an invitation to sexual fantasy about the isaac M. Singer. Nobody except the three Mrs. Haleys could take in had sexual fantasies about roly-poly, balding, dorky-looking Bill Haley. And, yet, Haley was every bit as horrific and dare in what he got away with in his medicine as the worst accusations ever leveled against Presley; even Haley's bowdlerized version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was the to the highest degree overtly sexual song always to reach the American Top Ten up to that time, and "Stone Around the Clock" wasn't very far behind. Though Max C. Freedman might've meant his vocal other than, interpreted literally in the true significance of the logos "rock'n'roll" as it was used in 1953-1954, "Rock Around the Clock" was a bouncing, beguiling musical invoice of 24 hours of sexual activity, and the forerunner to such numbers pool as "Reelin' & Rockin'" by Chuck Berry. Haley might've looked the theatrical role of the square trying to be cool once Presley came along, but on those iI songs he was as culturally and morally revolutionary as the worst warnings of the anti-rock & roll zealots intimated.


Alex Haley crataegus laevigata not get seemed a forefront creative person afterwards mid-1956, simply he remained a personnel to be reckoned with in music for some other year, cutting good singles -- including "Razzle," "Burn That Candle," and "See You Later Alligator" -- and several astonishingly strong albums. He did step by step lose relate with the teenage audience, and his square image couldn't perchance vie with the likes of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry, though the group always place on a salutary show up. Additionally, oversea, where any visiting American artist was tempered well, Haley was greeted wish visiting royalty; he constantly had big and fiercely loyal audiences in England, France, and Germany, which would call on out in vast book of Numbers to witness him.


By 1959, Haley was no longer placing either singles or albums anyplace near the summit of the charts. His brand of rock & roll, made up of R&B crossed with body politic boogie and honky tonk, was passé, and a switch to instrumentals didn't solve the problem of falling sales. None of this would have been so bad, demur that Haley -- more often than not through the horrific job done by his business manager Jim Ferguson -- had managed to waste about of what he'd earned during the salutary years, and owed a incapacitating tax financial obligation to the government as substantially. Contrary to the popular percept, he remained an active musician end-to-end the 1960s, transcription for Warner Bros. and a brace of other U.S. labels, and he too establish a moneymaking playing and recording life history in Mexico (where Haley, not Chubby Checker or Hank Ballard, started the "twist" craze). He pursued a music calling piece avoiding task liens, and trying to maintain a man and wife and a collapsing publication business together. Haley managed to pull it off, acquiring through the decade with some possessions noneffervescent in his workforce, for the most part by juggle a lot of gigs in Mexico and Europe and pickings tons of payments in cash. Curiously, during this period Haley himself became something of a rock & roll historian in interviews; maybe sore to his possess receive of being shunted aside, when he talked about the twist phenomenon, he went out of his way to course credit Hank Ballard as the originator of the sung, and always acknowledged his debt to Big Joe Turner for "Shake, Rattle and Roll."


By the late '60s, with the second Coming of the rock & roll revivification, Haley short establish himself faced for the start meter in a 10 with major take for his process in America. It couldn't have happened at a bettor metre, because that same year, for the number 1 time in more than ten old age, he didn't owe anything to the authorities. The Internal Revenue Service had been seizing all of his royalties from Decca Records for a 10, and fortunately for him, Decca (possibly thanks to Milt Gabler) had been honest in its accounting; in that metre, gross sales of "Rock Around the Clock" and his other Decca hits, more often than not oversea, had wiped out Haley's integral six-figure tax debt. And to peak off the safe news program, Haley not entirely had a full concert agenda in front of him in the U.S.A., simply major record labels interested in recording him; he terminated up signing with Buddha/Kama Sutra Records for a partner off of alive albums. The adjacent few age showed Haley in a triumphant comeback around the earthly concern. To peak it all sour, "Rock Around the Clock" even charted afresh in the Top 40 during 1974 when it turned up as the report music for the hit video serial Felicitous Days during its start season.


By the seventies, however, years and the ravages of fourth dimension were starting to pick up up on all concerned. Saxman Rudy Pompilli, who'd been with him since 1955, died in 1975, and Haley eventually retired from playacting. During his last years, Haley developed grievous psychological problems that left wing him delusional at least part of the meter. By the time of his death in 1981, the process of reducing his use in the history of rock & roll had already begun, partially a resultant of ignorance on the part of the writers handling the histories by then, and as well, to a degree, as a outcome of political correctness; he was white person, and was sensed as having exploited R&B, and thither were enough citizenry like that in the early history world Health Organization had to be written around just were easier to cast as "rebels."


In the years since his last, the surviving members of the Comets, including piano player Johnny Grande guitar player Franny Beecher, saxman Joey D'Ambrosio, bassist Marshall Lytle, and drummer Dick Richards, all in their 70s and 80s, receive continued to put to work together and were soundless able to perform to sell out crowds in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, doing Haley's classical repertory. Haley's have reputation has increased more or less, specially in the heat of Bear Family Records' outlet of iI boxes covering his vocation from 1954 through and through 1969, and Roller Coaster Records' issuing of Haley's Essex Records sides. True, thither are possibly 45 songs on those 12 CDs of material that Haley should non receive bothered recording, simply in that respect are hundreds more than in those same collections, some of it eye-popping and all of it constituting a unplayful body of solid, often inspired rock & roll, interspersed here and at that place with some dependable land sides. Perhaps small of the post-1957 hooey could plant the whole earth on fire, only Haley had already been on that point and done that, and unruffled had a portion of full music to take on.