Review: Bill Haley - Rockin' Around The World (1958)
Tracks: 1) Pretty Alouette; 2) Piccadilly Rock; 3) Rockin’ Rollin’ Schnitzlebank; 4) Vive La Rock And Roll; 5) Come Rock With Me; 6) Wooden Shoe Rock; 7) Me Rock-A-Hula; 8) Oriental Rock; 9) Rockin’ Matilda; 10) El Rocko; 11) Rockin’ Rita; 12) Jamaica, D.J.
REVIEW
Not only are we still going conceptual — we are actually witnessing the true birth of worldbeat!! Forget Peter Gabriel, discard David Byrne, toss down Paul Simon — this is where it all really begins... well, at least from one possible perspective. Although it would be tough to suspect Mr. Haley of a particularly high level of musical sophistication, Rockin’ Around The World shows that his knowledge and love of pop music was hardly limited to contemporary or traditional American forms. Now that those traditional American forms have all been taken care of with Rockin’ The Oldies, the next artistic goal is to sail across the Atlantic, take bits and pieces of traditional folk tunes and classic «ethnic» melodies, and mold them all in a rock’n’roll fashion, along the same lines the Comets used for the old swing and lounge tunes half a year earlier.
Overall, this seems like a silly novelty idea, and the predictable result is a silly novelty sound. But at least it is a hilariously silly novelty sound — at the very least, it is exciting and instructive to see just how much technical effort the band, and Bill in person, had invested in the creation of these odd concoctions. They rewrote most of the lyrics, inserting all sorts of contemporary references to «rocking». They sped up the tempos. They bluesified the main melodies. They appropriated and modified everything to the point of making source material barely recognizable — all in the name of the all-powerful rock’n’roll, conqueror of all. And they did it all in the friendliest of spirits, so much so that you’d really have to be on the batshit crazy spectrum of political correctness to condemn them for such musical mischief. Unfortunately, few people, if any at all, saw the entire effort as anything other than a one-time musical joke — which, for all I know, it might have been, but this does not prevent us from being able to dig up some musical symbolism along the way.
For instance, all of us are well acquainted with Elvis’ transformation of ‘O Sole Mio’ into ‘It’s Now Or Never’, which basically amounted to a new set of English lyrics and the addition of a steady pop rhythmic base. But few of us know that two years before the fact, the Comets took the same tune, did all the same things with it, but also accelerated the tempo, installed a boogie bass line, threw out the romantic sap (while still leaving the romantic plot), and ended up with a driving dance number called ‘Come Rock With Me’. So if this were a creative contest, who’d be the winner? Would it be Elvis, just because Elvis can always sing Bill Haley under the table? Or would it be Bill, who actually did a far more complicated job of showing how far in a completely different direction you can go with that kind of melody?.. okay, cutting the bullshit, it would still be Elvis, but actually, if you ever thought romantic Neapolitan songs were corny as hell in the first place, the Comets’ recipé for cooking them up might work for you just fine.
Now, obviously, modern day purists and puritans would castigate Haley for almost completely identifying «the World» with «the Western World»: other than a brief clarinet-centered incorporation of unspecified Middle Eastern motives into ‘Oriental Rock’ (what a title!), and steel guitarist Billy Williamson’s oh-so-1950s imitation of the Caribbean accent on ‘Jamaica, D. J.’, all of the source material essentially stems from Europe (France, Germany, England, Holland), maybe with a little Latin America in tow: in short, no attempts to put Australian aboriginal music or Mongolian throat singing to a good old rock beat. Then again, it is unlikely that the record was motivated by some profound understanding of conceptual artistry, let alone any early predecessor to the modern feeling of liberal guilt. It is more likely that Bill and the people at Decca genuinely believed that this would be a good way to bring the new sounds of rock’n’roll closer to the ears of as many different immigrant minorities in the US as possible (too bad we all had to wait for the Ramones in order to bring ‘Chinese Rock’ into this world, though).
If this were indeed so, odds of success for the Comets would have been hardly any higher than when they were wooing teenagers’ mothers with the nostalgia-meets-modernity sounds of Rockin’ The Oldies. For instance, would a conservative citizen of French origin be genuinely able to admire the re-write of ‘Frère Jacques’ as ‘Vive La (sic!) Rock And Roll’? Or, conversely, would a not-so-conservative citizen of French origin, already sick to death of all the stereotypes about «gay Paris», find new respect for ‘Frère Jacques’ upon finding out that it has been remade as a fast dance number for the local ballroom? And would the average German-American really be happy to hear the old nursery rhyme of ‘Schnitzelbank’ remade as ‘Rockin’ Rollin’ Schnitzlebank (sic!)’ instead of an actual ‘Rock Around The Clock’? In any case, I have no info on Rockin’ Around The World to have been a smash hit in circles of American citizens with non-Anglo-Saxon European ancestry, so if I got that marketing strategy right, it was doomed to fail.
Yet as a curious experiment in genre-mashing which could be fun for younger generations to dig out fifty years after the fact, Rockin’ Around The World is, I believe, a total gas. The only way one can truly enjoy all these classic ditties these days (for the record, Haley’s range also covers ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, ‘Hawaiian War Chant’, and ‘La Cucaracha’ in one sitting — I feel silly even typing out all these names) is from a deconstructivist point of view, and, without knowing it, Haley went on record as their first, or one of the first, post-modern interpreters. Too bad there was nobody to see it from that point of view back in 1958 — had the record made more of an impact on discerning musical minds, who knows, maybe rock music could have turned into an art form several years earlier than it did. Then again, by 1958 Bill Haley’s image was so much set in stone that even if he wrote a rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard, critics and fans alike would just call it virtually undanceable and move on.
Only Solitaire: Bill Haley reviews