Old Gods Almost Dead Read Free Page B

sugar, and fruit were rare treats, and the English people were deprived of protein in favor of those fighting in the war. The Stones and their generation were slight of stature, thanks to Hitler and his armies.
    The war ended in 1945, but England was devastated, and rationing continued. Candy—sweets—didn’t reappear until 1953, and children rioted when the shops finally opened. London, Liverpool, Manchester were pocked by gutted buildings and the gaping holes of bomb craters. The urban landscape was one huge building site as the poverty-stricken kingdom tried to rebuild. It’s no accident that for their first promo pictures as a five-piece group, the Stones were photographed on a London bomb site, almost twenty years after the end of the war, as if they identified themselves as a new generation emerging from the rubble of the old.
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    Cold War. The American B-29s landing in the late 1940s were the first occupying force in Britain for a thousand years. The American servicemen brought their music with them: country music and the blues, sounds the English began to love. But the British music union was protectionist, so one didn’t hear much on BBC radio. Country blues came to England in 1951 when Big Bill Broonzy arrived with a touring jazz show. Broonzy played up-tempo city blues when he performed in Chicago and New York, but in England he only did the old Delta songs he thought the British jazz audience wanted to hear.
    In England, jazz still meant New Orleans band music. After the vaudeville-style English music halls faded in the 1930s, they were replaced by dance bands playing a circuit of ballrooms around the country. After the war, the American “progressive jazz” of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis had a cult associated with bohemian intellectuals, but in England, jazz meant the old New Orleans style called Dixieland in America (where it had already died out) and trad in England. Trad jazz was popularized by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton, an aristocrat distantly related to the queen, and then taken over by the popular Chris Barber Jazz Band and groups led by trumpeter Ken Colyer and Mr. Acker Bilk.
    Then rock and roll hit England hard, when the Hollywood “juvenile delinquency” exploitation movie
Blackboard Jungle
opened in 1956 with its theme song, “Rock Around the Clock,” blasted out by Bill Haley and the Comets. It was shake, rattle and roll as Haley’s subsequent English tours sparked riots when teenage audiences trashed the movie theaters where Haley played. There was similar mania for other American rockers like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, and especially the hoodlum-looking Gene Vincent and his blue suede shoes. Suddenly England had its own delinquents, tough “Teddy boys” sporting leopard-skin lapels and armed with bike chains. The Teds and their girls filled the old dance band ballrooms now. Keith Richards: “We were very conscious we were in a totally new era. Rock and roll changed the world. It reshaped the way people think. It was like A.D. and B.C., and 1956 was year one.”
    English rock and roll: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Low-voltage R&R controlled by mobsters from the East End of London, working out of Soho, the dark and shabby (but very alive) strip-club showbiz zone south of Oxford Street in London’s West End. The vivid, hustling ambience of Soho is captured in the 1959 movie
Expresso Bongo!,
in which sleazo talent agent Laurence Harvey “discovers” raw teenage talent Cliff Richard in a Soho coffee bar and makes him a star.
    Another craze hit England in the mid-fifties when “skiffle” music got big. Played on washboards, banjos, and basses made out of tea chests, skiffle adapted American hillbilly jug band music with a local English spin. Breeding a few stars like Lonnie