In Linden, my mother opened the first in a series of ever-larger and more successful Pat Likely Dance Studios. And we, my sisters and I, were all expected to dance, especially in her annual dance 'recitals'. Several of my mother's students went on to professional careers as dancers or in some other aspect of the performing arts. And with my father's stage production expertise, the dance recitals became increasingly large and lavish. It certainly wowed them in Linden, New Jersey!
I was never a great dancer, but it turned out my sister Liz was. She became an exquisite ballerina and before she was eleven was being scouted by George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet. Liz and my mother began spending a great deal of time in New York at auditions and lessons conducted by some of the toughest taskmasters in the world of ballet (and some of those old queens could be real bitches). But if my mother was (back) in heaven, my sister was in hell. She couldn't take the pressure and the lifestyle and abruptly quit, creating a schism between them that would never mend.
I can't be certain exactly when I first became aware of this new music called rock & roll, but it was probably in 1955 with the release of a movie called "The Blackboard Jungle" * and its use of Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" over the opening titles. But at about the same time I began listening to a 'disc jockey' on WINS-AM in New York named Alan Freed.
Freed is generally credited with coining the term "rock and roll" and popularizing the music, but he was not the first to play it. Although the R&B roots of rock go back to the late 1930's, Freed introduced it and a roster of previously unknown black performers to a much larger (and whiter) audience. In the 1956 movie "Rock, Rock, Rock!" (in which he plays himself) Freed says, "Rock and roll is a river of music that has absorbed many streams - rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country songs, folk songs - all have contributed to the big beat".
In addition to his radio shows, Alan Freed ** produced and emceed a series of live rock & roll shows (they weren't yet called 'concerts') and I was privileged to have attended one of them.
My best recollection is that it was '56 or '57, which would have made me twelve or thirteen. Memory can play tricks on you and there are some parts of the story that are crystal clear, other parts less so. All the biographical material says that the Alan Freed rock & roll shows were at the Paramount Theaters in Brooklyn or Manhattan. But I am absolutely certain that the show I attended was at Fabian's Fox Theater in Brooklyn.
This was another great adventure for me since my previous trips to Brooklyn had been with my father ("Hallmark Hall of Fame") via the Staten Island Ferry, but this time I went with two friends my own age via a bus ride into Manhattan and subway connections to Flatbush Avenue in deepest, darkest Brooklyn.
The theater was large and decorated in an incongruous 'Siamese-Byzantine' style. I remember sitting in the balcony with an excellent view of both the stage and the first few rows of seats in the orchestra. (This is noteworthy only because we were able to see the kids dancing in the aisles, just like in the movies that followed.) There was one large band that backed all the musical acts, but it was far from our parents' idea of a 'big band'. These guys played rock & roll!
With one major exception, the exact line-up of performers is a little fuzzy. I'm sure we saw Chuck Berry, fairly sure we saw Fats Domino, The Cadillacs, Bo Diddley, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and The Coasters (or was it The Drifters?) And there were at least a couple of 'white' acts, one a guitar player, but I'm not sure whether it was Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent, maybe both.
But the major exception, the performance that will remain etched in my brain, was Jackie Wilson. I've seen a few true show-stoppers in my time, from Callas, to Pavarotti, to Ethel Merman, to Striesand in "Funny Girl", to (the unlikeliest of all) Dorothy Collins in "Follies", but it would be hard to rival Jackie Wilson on that stage in Brooklyn. In show-biz parlance, he "burned the place down".
It was about that same time that I bought my first 45 rpm record. It was "Don't Be Cruel" on one side and "Hound Dog" on the other by Elvis Presley.
Except for the early years, I was never a huge Elvis fan. I liked the music but somehow never really connected with him. His movies got progressively more ridiculous and by the time he reached his bloated, Las Vegas period I could not bear to watch him. But in 1957, another music star began to emerge from the pack that I did connect with and, as it turned out, someone I'd been watching on TV and listening to on radio for as long as I could remember - Rick Nelson.
* I could not have imagined that, many years later, the film's director, Richard Brooks, would become my friend, mentor and the reason I moved to California.
** Alan Freed died broke and discouraged in 1965 at the age of 43, having been caught up in the "payola" scandal of the late 1950's.
NEXT: "Atlantic City"
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