that I was getting lost in it, though. If anything, I found myself in the music, because somehow it satisfied all my secret needs.
Rock and roll’s simple childlike passion poetry had various smudges of joy, pathos and sentimentality which I felt or was starting to feel but couldn’t express. The lyrics were repetitive like the commercial jingles that regularly interrupted my favourite TV and radio shows. There was a throbbing rhythm which was sometimes almost menacing and had an element of the reservation about it. Melangian dialect was often used for the lyrics and Melangian groups like the Platters were as important to the music as white stars like Bill Haley and the Comets.
In the early days of Bandstand, Melangian teenagers used to participate. When the camera scanned the audience, which was invited to dance to each record that was played, the Melangian couples were by far the best dancers, doing the most intricate variations of spins, twirls and fancy footwork and never looking as if they’d just graduated from an Arthur Murray dance course.
As Bandstand was broadcast live from South Philadelphia, which was a rough part of the city that had more than its share of gangs, slums and delinquents, it attracted teenagers from that area, so the dancing audience didn’t look like a contrived showcase for middle-class kids. They had something of ‘the street’ about them.
The show was off the air before Ikey, Thelma and Edna got in from work, and they didn’t disapprove of my watching. My mother was only in her midthirties at the time, neither old enough nor old-fashioned enough to denounce rock and roll as a sinful or negative influence, which was a growing complaint about it among very conservative adults. She and Thelma liked the music in the house.
They were as enthralled as we kids were when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night, gyrating like a rhythm-and-blues singer. When his bumping and grinding below the waist was banned from the screen on a subsequent show, it made a tremendous stink, turning his censored performance into real box-office and TV-rating appeal. It made people talk about him. I can’t remember how many appearances he made on the show, but there were several at a time when Ed Sullivan had the most popular variety programme on nationwide television. The censorship made Elvis’s appearances newsworthy. The papers were full of reports and I guess it was the first time that television and journalism married their interests to make a rock idol.
Edna was a bit distressed by the newspapers’ claim that Elvis’s style was original, because she said rightly that it was really the Melangian rhythm-and-blues singers’ performing style. But she could have screamed about that until the cows came home and nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice. It was his white version of the form that made it provocative and caused white teenage girls to scream and want to pull out his hair and their own. Others imitated him and his style and helped his brand of rock and roll surpass teen-cult status to become a national phenomenon.
Bandstand was so influential to the promotion of this teen music phase that it was picked up by a big network and became a nationally broadcast television show. It was renamed American Bandstand and a young MC named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as the star presenter.
When the phase became a craze, Philadelphia was on the map again. Bandstand spotlighted a growing trend in America to recognize teenagers as a breed with their own style and culture, and the weekly allowance to be consumers. To say you were from Philadelphia in the mid-1950s was probably like saying that you were from Liverpool after the mid-1960s. The place name projected a certain teen-cult music status, not only because of Bandstand, but also because many of the popular teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Dion, Bobby Rydell, themselves teenagers, stepped out of Philadelphia city-centre high schools into the media frenzy building up in America about its teenagers.
Ten years after the Second World War, parents may have been relieved that they could afford and tolerate rock and roll, and regarded it as a minor cultural nuisance that was temporarily captivating their war babies. Even though I was a postwar baby, I was ready to be captured, too.
My passion for music and the culture that grew out of it was not my only interest. There were other elements of my life, like getting good grades at Jenks school, which held me back from becoming a wholehearted bobbysoxer. But I had no reluctance about putting my dolls and my roller skates in the basement to show that I wouldn’t be playing with them any more. And I found new friends in the neigbourhood who wanted to master the latest dance steps as I did.
I was nearly delirious when I spotted my first adolescent pimple and had to buy my first tube of Clearasil, which was new on the market and being advertised on television and in teen magazines.
Wasn’t there a whole generation going through it? I was just taking an early grab at the tail of pubescence. It pulled me into the pandemonium of teenage culture so fast that there wasn’t a chance for me to wave goodbye to childhood before it disappeared over the horizon with some of my more agreeable traits in tow, such as wanting to please adults. As can be expected, my mother wasn’t thrilled about my quick personality change. It made her nervous and angry to see me running up and down breathlessly while I chased the spirit of something that was invisible to her but galvanizing and hypnotic to me.
The teen cult was like the call of the wild. It beckoned me first through music. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had an insidious penetration. Sometimes I’d hear a song that I couldn’t get enough of from hearing it a few times on the radio, so I’d buy the record and listen to the same song over and over and over again. It manipulated me like a mantra with the lyrics about puppy love and such, accompanying a beat that excited me to the point that I was either transfixed or transported to another zone.
I had become so good and convincing at marching to other people’s drummers that it was a shock to me and my family when music let me hear my own. I was a handful and couldn’t be constrained any more by a harsh word or criticism of how I looked or behaved. I didn’t want to look like a nice little girl and refused to wear clothes that didn’t have a look of flair and independence. I would have teetered around in stilettos if only I could have got away with it.
First it was music, then it was clothes, then it was boys. Or first it was music, then it was love, then it was boys. I’m not sure. All I know is that while I was jumping up and down dancing in the mirror to the beat, not being in love just didn’t seem good enough. I pulled my cinched belt tighter and waited. Falling in love with love came before falling in love with somebody.
It’s a wonder that I kept my studies up, but I did. One day the school principal called my mother to find out why I was wearing lipstick to my seventh-grade class. This came as a bit of a shock to poor Ikey, who sent me to school looking as refined and dignified as possible. She never realized that on my way to catch the trolley car in the morning I slipped into a telephone booth en route and made a few subtle alterations. Like Superman, my persona was transformed by my get-up. I’d come out of the telephone booth with my skirt hitched up by a belt to a much shorter length, my hair swept to the side in a winsome braid, and at least two thick layers of Westmore’s Oooh-La-La Orange on my lips. The iridescent lipstick cost 49 cents at Woolworth’s. I kept it in my briefcase.
My whole demeanour changed under the ‘Oooh-La-La’ spell. I wanted to be noisy and boisterous and saw nothing appealing in being dignified. I didn’t want to imitate open-air girls except in their occasional company. Instead I wanted to mimic the DJ on WDAS (the Melangian radio station), whose fast, hip monologues derived from the reservation dialect. The friends I made in the neighbourhood were happy to do the same thing and were impressed that I was good at it.
My musical preference reflected my love for music from the reservation and its dialect. I didn’t want to sing along with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly or ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. I wanted to moon about to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Flamingoes. Anybody with that sound of a cappella singing
