History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online Page A

it is. What you want me to say is, I love you.” But the grooves are cheap; the needle sticks. “ I love you. ” “ I love you. ” “ I love you. ” “ I love you ”—the record won’t play beyond those words. Those words are all she’ll ever hear, but her son will hear the music.

In the Still of the Nite
    1956 • 1959 • 2010

Four deep, rumbling bass notes on a piano fall into a full oooooo from voices so bound as one they feel more like the sound of a horn than people, individuals, people with names, desires, intentions, ambitions, fears—a sound more like nature than will. The sound is muffled, made of its own echo, from a cave in the imagination, far away, something always present and always just out of reach, until this moment, which lasts only a single second before it disappears into a song. It’s enough to say that something all out of proportion to its medium—a seven-inch 45, a transistor radio—is already under way.
    It’s 19 February 1956 in New Haven, Connecticut, where Fred Parris, tenor, and three other singers—Al Denby and Ed Martin, baritones, and Jim Freeman, bass—are recording as the Five Satins. They’d recorded before—the previous summer, when there really were five of them. Two teenagers who convinced Parris they could make records, Marty Kugell and Tom Sokira, took the singers to the New Haven VFW post. The musicians the producers had hired never appeared; that day, the Five Satins sang acappella. For one song, “Rose Mary,” Kugell and Sokira had instruments overdubbed for a single on their own Standord label; for the flipside, “All Mine,” they never got around to it, though withthe two-track tape recorder they were using, the faint rumble of a passing truck, like a phantom bass player, was never erased, leaving a sound that on the record itself you could less hear than apprehend. It was a tangled doo-wop ballad, but at the very end, with nothing to fall back upon, Parris stepped out of genre, fashion, fad, out of a song anyone else could have written and anyone else could have sung. “This is the story,” he announced—and with those four words he instantly gave the song that had preceded them a drama it hadn’t been able to produce, a sense of foreboding after the fact, because until this moment, though you might have heard what happened, you didn’t care—“of a love affair.” There was a pause, and then an incantation, as full of pride as anguish: “ Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine —”
    Parris was no amateur. As a seventeen-year-old late of the Canaries—for a long moment it seemed impossible to name a group harmony combo after anything but a bird—he was writing his own songs. He formed the Scarlets, and traveled to New York to get a record deal. Starting in 1954 with “Dear One,” they made three singles for Bobby Robinson’s Red Robin label. Robinson was a major operator, at the center of the Harlem hit parade, but none of the records made it out of town. There was one hit—Parris’s “Cry Baby,” which did nothing for the Scarlets, but in 1956 made it to number 18 on the national charts in an utterly bleached version by the Bonnie Sisters, three nurses from Bellevue Hospital. Parriswent back to New Haven. He and the rest of the Scarlets were drafted, scattered around the country; Parris formed the Five Satins in New Haven during a leave. Of course their Standord single went nowhere. But one night, as Parris always told the story, on guard duty in Philadelphia, thinking about his girlfriend, he wrote “In the Still of the Nite.”
    Not “In the Still of the Night”—both Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael and Jo Dent had written sweeping dance numbers with that title in the thirties. This was simple—
In the still
Of the night
    —but with a hesitation that made the memory the song was attempting to summon almost too sweet, too erotic, to bear—
I held you—
Held you tight
    —it wasn’t obvious. Once past those rumbling piano notes, the