Rock 'n' roles

NBC and CBS try to shake it up

by Matt Ashare

Dicky Barrett as Bill Haley

For decades, critics, musicians, fans, and just about anyone else with an interest in popular music participated in what amounted to an ongoing, ultimately unresolvable discussion/argument about who invented rock and roll. Was it Elvis? Was it Ike Turner with his "Rocket '88"? How about Harmonica Frank, the eccentric Sun recording artist immortalized in the first chapter of Greil Marcus's Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music? (Frank, at 73, reasoned that since he'd never heard anyone else play rock and roll before he started playing it, "I am the originator of rock 'n' roll regardless of what you might have heard.") There was even an amusing book published in '92 by Faber and Faber dedicated to the subject: Jim Dawson & Steve Propes's What Was the First Rock 'n' Roll Record?

But these days even the most casual student of rock and roll is aware, for example, that Elvis was in large part a media creation molded and shaped by a succession of friends, relatives, disc jockeys, publicity agents, business associates, critics, and the times in which he lived. And, really, the very process of discovering an "inventor" of a cultural phenomenon as massive as rock and roll is a creative one that can't help making an invention of sorts out of the inventor. So it was no surprise to find NBC dedicating its coveted Sunday-night movie slot last week to a made-for-television tribute to a "King of Rock 'n' Roll" who was not in the strictest sense an artist -- the legendary Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed.

Mr. Rock 'n' Roll: The Alan Freed Story, which features Judd Nelson in the title role, documents Freed's controversial rise and his equally controversial decline in the midst of the payola scandal. He broke one racial barrier in 1951 by playing black music, or R&B, on a white radio station, and another in 1957 by allowing Frankie Lymon, a black artist, to dance with a white girl on his summer package of nationally televised rock spectaculars, The Big Beat, which was the first of its kind. And since one fine formula for the creation of rock and roll involves mixing black music together with white youth culture, it's fair to say that "I invented rock and roll" is no empty boast coming from Freed.

In what turns out to be an odd coincidence, Mr. Rock 'n' Roll opens with Nelson as Freed wearing a red tartan blazer and bellowing, "Ladies and gentlemen of Boston, let's give a big, big welcome to the band with the biggest hit in rock-and-roll history -- Bill Haley and his Comets." Because this week -- Wednesday night at 9, to be exact -- Boston rocker Dicky Barrett will make his television acting debut wearing a similar blazer and playing the part of Bill Haley in CBS mini-series named after that "biggest hit in rock-and-roll history": Shake, Rattle & Roll.

The two-part, four-hour special, which begins Sunday at 9 p.m., is a clever if somewhat cheesy bit of historical fiction that chronicles the rise and fall of a faux '50s rock-and-roll band -- Tyler Hart and the HartAches -- who mix and mingle with "real" period stars. There's Terence Trent D'Arby as Jackie Wilson, Blink-182's Thomas DeLonge and Marcus Allen Hoppus as Jan and Dean, Billy Porter as Little Richard, and Chante Moore as the leader of the Emeralds, a girl group who might as well be the Shirelles. All of which serves as a backdrop for what else but a big old love story -- just think of Shake, Rattle & Roll as The '60s set in the '50s meets That Thing You Do. To up the authenticity ante, musical supervisor Spencer Proffer got Lamont Dozier, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Carole King to write tunes for the HartAches and the Emeralds, and Bob Dylan to hand his previously unrecorded "Fur Slippers" over to B.B. King, which in and of itself is an apt reflection of how rock and roll was originally "invented." And so, like NBC's The '60s mini-series, Shake, Rattle & Roll will also serve to cross-promote a soundtrack CD (on MCA), this one featuring everything from genuine oldies like the Chords' "Sh-Boom" to faux oldies like the Emeralds' Carole King-penned "Wall Around My Heart" to new covers of oldies like Dicky Barrett doing "Shake, Rattle & Roll" with help from Dan Wilson of Semisonic.

I gave Barrett a call out at Longview Farms studio in Western Mass, where he and the Bosstones are currently working on a follow-up to their 1997 blockbuster, Let's Face It (Mercury), to find out how he enjoyed playing something other than a Bosstone. "It might have been a really bad idea," he joked, "but for a fleeting moment I thought I'd try to act. So I watched some footage of Bill Haley and noticed that he used to smile a lot and kind of sway. So that's what I tried to do. There were experts there on the set, rock-and-roll historians, to keep things authentic. And they said it was great. But now that it's getting closer to airing and I'm seeing these big silly pictures of me as Bill Haley, I'm starting to get nervous. I mean, I'm used to seeing silly pictures of myself, but usually they're of my own devising." n

Shake, Rattle & Roll airs from 9 to 11 p.m. this Sunday and Wednesday, November 7 and 10, on CBS/Channel 12.