Bill Haley biography

Bill Haley is the neglected hero of early rock & roll. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are ensconced in the heavens, transformed into veritable constellations in the rock music firmament, their music respected by writers and scholars as well as the record-buying public, virtually every note of music they ever recorded theoretically eligible for release.  Yet Bill Haley - who was there before any of them, playing rock & roll before it even had a name, and selling it in sufficient quantities out of a small Pennsylvania label to attract attention from the major labels before Presley was even recording in Memphis - is barely represented by more than a dozen of his early singles, and recognized by the average listener for exactly two songs among the hundreds that he recorded; and he's often treated as little more than a glorified footnote, an anomaly that came and went very quickly, in most histories of the music. The truth is, Bill Haley came along a lot earlier than most people realize and the histories usually acknowledge, and he went on making good music for years longer than is usually recognized.

The central event in Haley's career was the single "Rock Around the Clock" topping the charts for eight weeks in the spring and summer of 1955, an event that most music historians identify as the dawn of the rock & roll era. Getting the song there, however, took more than a year, a period in which the band had already done unique and essential service in the cause of bringing rock & roll into the world, with the million-selling single "Shake, Rattle and Roll" to their credit; equally important, in the three years before that, Haley and his band had already broken new ground with the singles of "Rocket 88," "Rock the Joint," and "Crazy, Man, Crazy."

Born in Highland Park, MI, in 1925, Haley was blind in one eye from birth, and, as a consequence, suffered from terrible shyness as a boy. The family moved to Boothwyn, PA, during the mid-'30s, where Haley developed a strong love for country music and began playing guitar and singing; by 14, he had left school in the hope of pursuing a career in music. He bounced through a few country bands based in the Middle Atlantic states and also tried to establish himself as a singing and yodeling cowboy. His first big break came in 1944, when he replaced Kenny Roberts - who was being drafted - in the Downhomers, with whom Haley made his first appearance on records. 

Haley left the group in 1946 and went through several other bands before returning to his home in Chester, PA, where he initially hoped to get some work as a DJ. Instead, he formed a new band, the Four Aces of Western Swing, with keyboardman Johnny Grande, bassist Al Rex, and steel guitar player Billy Williamson, and signed a contract with Cowboy Records, a new label formed by James Myers, a composer, musician, and publisher, and his partner, Jack Howard. Their first record was released in 1948, a version of "Candy Kisses"; by 1949, the group had changed its name to the Saddlemen.

Their first release was a cover of "Rocket 88," which -  though no one knew it at the time - was the first white-band cover of what is now regarded by many scholars as the first real rock & roll song.

Just to put this in perspective, rock & roll is usually written about as a phenomenon (and a reaction to) the complacency of the Eisenhower era. But Haley had released what amounted to a rock & roll single in 1951, when "Ike" wasn't even yet running to be president, the country was still mired in Korea, and John Kennedy not yet even a senator,  while a 15-year-old Elvis Presley was in tenth grade.

That debut single sold just a few thousand copies regionally, as did its follow-up, "Green Tree Boogie." Meanwhile, when Haley and his band played, they and their business manager, Jim Ferguson, began to notice that it was the younger audience members who responded best to the R&B-style songs that they were doing. They also saw all around them that enthusiasm for country music was flat, and that if they were looking for a hit, it likely wasn't going to come from this new direction.

Then came the more successful "Rock the Joint," and Cleveland DJ Alan Freed picked up on the song; it was immediately after this that Freed began referring to the music embodied by "Rock the Joint," music that he played every night on his show, as "rock & roll," thus giving Haley a good deal of justification for his later claim to have been in on the birth of the music before anyone ever knew it.

By 1952, Bill Haley and the Saddlemen were history; instead, playing off of their leader's name and the celestial phenomenon called Halley's Comet, they became Bill Haley & His Comets. The cowboy hats and other country paraphernalia were junked as well and they began working out wild quasi-acrobatic moves by their bass player and saxman, in particular, stuff that was unthinkable for a country band but seemingly what the kids devoured at dances.

In 1953, James Myers offered Haley a song that he had published (and, on paper, at least, co-authored as Jimmy De Knight) entitled "Rock Around the Clock."  On April 12, 1954, the band, with Danny Cedrone on lead guitar, did a two-song session in New York that yielded "Thirteen Women" - a post-nuclear holocaust sex fantasy worthy of Hugh Hefner (who had only started up Playboy magazine a year earlier) - and "Rock Around the Clock." It was released a month later and made the charts for one week at number 23, selling 75,000 copies, not bad but not very significant either. It was enough, however, to schedule another session in early June, where the band recorded "Shake, Rattle and Roll."

That was the record that broke the band nationally on Decca, reaching number seven and selling over a million copies between late 1954 and early 1955. They followed it up quickly with "Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere)," a jaunty piece that reached number 11 nationally and actually made the R&B charts for Haley, a first for him. Then, in early 1955, James Myers managed to get "Rock Around the Clock" placed in the juvenile delinquency drama The Blackboard Jungle, playing over the credits. The movie was a huge hit, and in its wake Decca re-released the song that spring. "Rock Around the Clock" shot up the charts this time, and the result was an eight-week run in the number-one spot; by some estimates, it became the second biggest worldwide-selling single after Bing Crosby's "White Christmas", 25-million copies sold worldwide.

The success of "Rock Around the Clock" took place while Elvis Presley had yet to chart a record nationally; at a point when Chuck Berry's very first single for Chess had barely been recorded; and when Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly weren't even close to auditioning for recording contracts. One has to visualize a reality in which Bill Haley & His Comets were the only established white rock & roll band, and the only white rock & roll stars in the world. Within a year, that would all change, but it was long enough for Haley and his band to become stars, with appearances on national television and a movie deal of their own. From the end of 1954 until the end of 1956, they would place nine singles into the Top 20, one of those at number one and three more in

In the late spring of 1956, rock & roll changed again as Elvis Presley, who was younger, leaner, and a more fiercely sexual presence, emerged as a star; he not only made music that was as good as Haley's but he looked the role of a rock & roll star. The differences in their respective images could be summed up by examining the truest scenes in the movies that each did. Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley & His Comets, was a highly fictionalized account of the band and its success, but it did capture something of the spirit of the early days of rock & roll, with some good performance clips; the comparable Elvis Presley movie was Loving You, in which the singer played a fictionalized version of himself, named Deke Rivers. In Loving You, when Deke Rivers performs in front of an audience and sets the girls screaming and swooning, his would-be manager comments, "If he'd gone on any longer, they'd be giving him their door keys." In Rock Around the Clock, by contrast, the single truest scene depicts a would-be promoter driving through rural Pennsylvania and chancing upon a dance where Haley and company are playing; he enters, sees hundreds of kids dancing to the band's music, and asks a woman being lifted up over the head of her partner, "Hey sister, what's that exercise you're getting?" She answers, exuberantly, legs in the air, "It's rock & roll!"

Haley may not have seemed a cutting-edge artist after mid-1956, but he remained a force to be reckoned with in music for another year, cutting good singles - including "Razzle-Dazzle," "Burn That Candle," and "See You Later Alligator" - and several surprisingly strong albums. He did gradually lose touch with the teenage audience, and his square persona couldn't possibly compete with the likes of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry, though the group always put on a good show. Additionally, overseas, where any visiting American artist was treated well, Haley was greeted like visiting royalty; he always had large and fiercely loyal audiences in England, France, and Germany, which would turn out in huge numbers to see him.

By 1959, Haley was no longer placing either singles or albums anywhere near the top of the charts. His brand of rock & roll, made up of R&B crossed with country boogie and honky tonk, was passé, and a switch to instrumentals didn't solve the problem of falling sales. None of this would have been so bad, except that Haley -- mostly through the horrendous job done by his business manager Jim Ferguson -- had managed to squander most of what he'd earned during the good years, and owed a crippling tax liability to the government as well.

Contrary to the popular perception, he remained an active musician throughout the 1960s while avoiding tax liens, and trying to keep a marriage and a collapsing publishing business together. Haley managed to pull it off, getting through the decade with some possessions still in his hands, mostly by juggling a lot of gigs in Mexico and Europe and taking

By the late '60s, with the advent of the rock & roll revival, Haley suddenly found himself faced for the first time in a decade with major demand for his work in America. It couldn't have happened at a better time, because that same year, for the first time in more than ten years, he didn't owe anything to the government. The next few years showed Haley in a triumphant comeback around the world. To top it all off, "Rock Around the Clock" even charted anew in the Top 40 during 1974 when it turned up as the theme music for the hit television series Happy Days during its first season.

By the 1970s, however, age and the ravages of time were starting to catch up on all concerned. Saxman Rudy Pompilli, who'd been with him since 1955, died in 1975, and Haley eventually retired from performing. During his final years, Haley developed severe psychological problems that left him delusional at least part of the time. By the time of his death in 1981, the process of reducing his role in the history of rock & roll had already begun, partly a result of ignorance on the part of the writers handling the histories by then, and also, to a degree, as a result of political correctness; he was white, and was perceived as having exploited R&B, and there were enough people like that in the early history who had to be written about but were easier to cast as "rebels."