Theosophy Aardvark :- Bill Haley and His Comets

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Bill Haley and His Comets

In 1954, Bill Haley and His Comets recorded a landmark rock and roll song, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock," which held down the Number One spot for eight weeks and went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide. Although the term Rock ‘n Roll was around before this, Rock Around the Clock is now regarded by many as the first Rock ‘n Roll song and the start of the Rock ‘n Roll era.

In the UK, "Rock Around the Clock" re-entered the charts seven times, most recently in 1974 when Bill Haley and the Comets appeared on BBc Television’s Top of the Pops.

If only for the impact of "Rock Around the Clock," in which Haley adapted a black R&B song to a more streamlined rock and roll beat, Haley would deserve a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yet his impact in the early days of rock and roll went well beyond that. Two years earlier he'd put out "Crazy, Man, Crazy," an original song that became the first rock and roll record to make Billboard's pop chart.

Haley moved into rock and roll via country and western music. He was a member of the Downhomers and musical director for the Saddlemen. The latter group had a regular radio show at a Chester, Pennsylvania, radio station. Haley brought different sounds into the Saddlemen's repertoire in an attempt to blend, in his words, "country and western, Dixieland and the old-style rhythm & blues."

In 1952, the Saddlemen released "Rock This Joint" on the Essex label, and it sold 75,000 copies. By 1953, the group had changed its name to Bill Haley and His Comets and recorded the slang-filled "Crazy, Man, Crazy," a bonafide rock and roll hit. Haley and His Comets were thereupon signed to Decca Records.

At their first session forDecca, they cut "Rock Around the Clock" (which had originally been recorded in 1952 by Sunny Dae. Little attention was paid to Haley's version upon its initial release in the spring of 1954. The group followed it with their cover version of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll," which cracked the Top Ten in July 1954 and sold a million copies. "Rock Around the Clock" got its second lease on life by being chosen for the soundtrack to The Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 movie about high-school delinquency that generated controversy in the press and pandemonium among the young. In effect, "Rock Around the Clock" became an anthem for rebellious Fifties youth.

The Blackboard Jungle was banned by several towns in the UK after fights at and around cinemas and cinema seat slashing incidents.

A1956 movie named after the song, which featured nine lip-synched performances by Haley, made him a star here and abroad. His celebrity was particularly long-lived in Britain, where he continued to be treated as rock royalty into the Seventies. Haley, who performed on the revival circuit throughout the Sixties and Seventies, saw his signature song become a U.S. hit for the second time when "Rock Around the Clock" appeared on the 1974 soundtrack for American Graffiti. It is estimated that Haley and His Comets have sold 60 million records worldwide. He died of a heart attack in 1981.

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