I read this article on an eBay page, where I was able to "zoom" in. Unfortunately, I can't replicate that zoom, but basically, it's Bobby Rydell hedging his bets. The conventional wisdom ever since 1956 was that rock'n'roll couldn't last, that it was a passing fad. Well, in 1960, when according to that eBay site, this article appeared somewhere (it's torn out of a magazine, and that's what's for sale), the fad wasn't so passe that Rydell couldn't have a song go all the way to number two on the Billboard chart. That was in addition to several other hits that year. Rydell got his first hit on the charts a year earlier, and would continue to have hits for the next couple of years.
Finally, in 1964, rock 'n' roll ended...
...and rock began.
At least that's how they tell the story nowadays. It may be that there's no actual cut-off date between "rock 'n' roll" and "rock", but I do know the language had changed for good by the time I got to seventh grade some ten years later and told this one classmate I liked rock 'n' roll, only to be dismissed as a total nerd. Didn't I know rock was Led Zeppelin and rock 'n' roll was something they played on Happy Days? The Beatles, at least, liked rock 'n' roll, which had come along when they were entering their teenage years, and was what inspired them to go into music in the first place. But their tweaking of the sound (along with further tweaking by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and several others) spelled doom, or the nostalgic circuit, for the likes of Bobby Rydell. But he never complained. And it's not like he sunk into total obscurity. In fact, he got a...
...high school named after him.
(My apologies to Shady, who recently showed this on his own blog.)
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| 1942-2022 |
