Review: Bill Haley - Rockin' The Joint (1958)
Tracks: 1) New Rock The Joint; 2) Move It On Over; 3) How Many?; 4) See You Later, Alligator; 5) The Beak Speaks; 6) Forty Cups Of Coffee; 7) The Saints’ Rock And Roll; 8) Sway With Me; 9) It’s A Sin; 10) Burn That Candle; 11) Rock Lomond; 12) Rip It Up.
REVIEW
Naughty genre experiments and quasi-conceptual LPs may all be fine and dandy for anybody, but if we are talking Bill Haley and his Comets, there can hardly be any question what we really love these guys for: their hit singles! So, down with all the Dipsy Doodles and Pretty Alouettes and let us welcome Rockin’ The Joint as one of the earliest «back-to-basics» LPs. Who cares if it is actually just a collection of non-LP A- and B-sides from 1956-58, with only one new instrumental? What matters is that during those years the band still felt fresh, its rock’n’roll spirit was still vivacious, and there were plenty of subtle melodic hooks and funny lyrical twists to ensure that the formula was still far from creative exhaustion.
Two classic singles, ‘See You Later Alligator’ and ‘The Saints’ Rock And Roll’, alone suffice to guarantee for this record the status of second most important Bill Haley release from the classic years of the Comets. The original version of ‘Alligator’, written and recorded by the obscure Cajun songwriter Bobby Charles, is a cute little piece of jump blues, but next to Haley’s interpretation, it sounds downright dead — a stiff and monotonous vamp, waiting for somebody to come along and light that spark properly. The Comets did precisely that, creating the perfect swinger anthem for their era and immortalizing the trademark Louisiana farewell for generations to come. And nobody else in the rockabilly business could have delivered the tune as efficiently as Haley — perhaps only Carl Perkins was as good at converting bitterness into cheerfulness, but he did not typically perform that sort of «blues-pop».
The same old state of Louisiana continues to be relevant on the band’s cover of ‘The Saints’, arguably the one and only rock’n’roll variant of the song that matters — again, because the song is perfectly adaptable to the Comets’ style, so much so that Haley even changed the lyrics to match the band’s identity ("...when old Rudy starts to wail... when the Comets rock and roll..."). You might complain that the band takes all the soul out of the tune, and you might even be right from a certain angle, but every once in a while, in order to breathe a bit of new soul into a tune, you have to shake the old one out first. On this particular number, the Comets really give it all they got — one hundred percent, each single band member; if that ain’t soul, I don’t really know what is. The frantic shootout between Rudy’s sax and Franny’s guitar on the coda is one of the most breathtaking moments in the band’s catalog. Nobody else in the business had that kind of sound going on at the time — like a crazyass Benny Goodman big band condensed and packed into one tight rock’n’roll unit.
Other, less notorious, highlights on this collection include ‘The Beak Speaks’, a Franny Beecher instrumental composition co-written with the band’s steel guitarist Billy Williamson, giving Franny an opportunity to showcase a few nice jazzy licks; and ‘How Many’, a relatively recent Nashville ballad which Haley gives a bit of a gospel flair, adding suitable backing vocals in an unusual stylistic departure from the formula.
On the darker side of things, ‘New Rock The Joint’ may be a louder, more aggressive and «modern» version of the original ‘Rock The Joint’, released by Bill way back in 1952, yet the important thing is that it was really a timid melodic precursor to ‘Rock Around The Clock’, and reviving it for another single is basically self-repetition. ‘Move It On Over’ is a rather unfortunate re-adaptation of the Hank Williams’ original — one of the very few cases when Haley’s cover of an oldie is less rock’n’roll than the source material, since Hank’s tune was actually faster and livelier. (Rule of thumb: you do not cover Hank Williams unless you totally and completely reinvent Hank Williams, because Hank will get you beat every time). ‘It’s A Sin’ is another Nashville ballad with a semi-doo-wop, semi-gospel topping, but it gives off a generic rather than epic feeling, with its far less distinctive vocal melody. ‘Rock Lomond’, as you might guess from the title, is actually an outtake from Rockin’ The Oldies, where it should properly belong. And they probably forgot that ‘Burn That Candle’ had already been released on an earlier LP — great song, but why do we need it twice?
Especially considering that some of Bill’s finest singles from that period, for some reason, did not make the grade. For my own digital version of the album, I compiled some of them as bonus tracks — most importantly, ‘Teenager’s Mother’ (the B-side to ‘Rip It Up’), a surprisingly grim lyrical indictment of stubborn parents ("cause the same thing that’s worrying you is the same thing you used to do yourself") set to one of the band’s toughest and fastest grooves on record; ‘Rockin’ Rollin’ Rover’, one of the happiest rock’n’roll tunes about a dog ever written; and ‘Don’t Knock The Rock’, the title track to the movie of the same name which was basically a follow-up to Rock Around The Clock, but failed to replicate its success. These three should have been there instead of ‘Rock Lomond’ and ‘Move It On Over’.
Naturally, these «complaints» are all anachronistic: like most of Haley’s original LPs, Rockin’ The Joint has long since been retired from the catalog, and today all of these songs find themselves in solitary streaming rotation, or, for those of us who still like the feel of something solid in our hands (excuse me), on Decca’s compilation CDs and boxsets. The main point of the review, for what it’s worth, is to stress that the Comets had about 5–6 years of «vital» singles in them, which, if you think about it, is actually a longer period of time than fortune allocated to most of the classic early rock’n’rollers (who typically only lasted about three, four at max) — a good argument for preferring a calmer and healthier lifestyle to a more raucous and rebellious one, if you think about it!
Only Solitaire: Bill Haley reviews