._3809_Union_Boulevard.jpg)
St. Louis Truck Assembly was a General Motors automobile factory that built GMC and Chevrolet trucks, GM "B" body passenger cars, and the 1954–1981 Corvette models in St. Louis. Opened in the 1920s as a Fisher body plant and Chevrolet chassis plant, it expanded facilities to manufacture trucks on a separate line. During World War II, the plant produced the DUKW amphibious vehicles for the military. Another expansion was added for the Corvette line in 1953.
The song reached No. 1 on Billboard's R & B chart and No. 5 on the Hot 100.
1955 was an amazing year for music:
Rock and Roll's first #1 hit Bill Haley "Rock Around The Clock".
Bo Diddley debuts on national television on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town.
Elvis Presley is signed to major label RCA Records
For the song to get airplay in New York on the influential Alan Freed radio show in WINS, Alan Freed traded the airtime, it was played for 2 straight hours, for the song's copyright, and song writing credit.
That's one aspect of what Payola was, you pay the radio people, and they play your record.
If it's a really good song, they would pull a stunt like adding themselves to the writing credits, for a perpetual income, from the work of songwriters and singers that hadn't made any deal at all.
In April 1953, at the height of his Cleveland popularity, Freed drove his car into a tree after a late broadcast. His face required 260 stitches and 12,000 dollars’ worth of plastic surgery, but five weeks later he resumed his broadcasts from a hospital bed.
That same year, he plugged the Orioles’ record, ‘Crying In The Chapel’, the first R&B record to make the pop Top Twenty. The day after Freed’s repeated spins, the disc sold 30,000 copies in Cleveland; that so many copies were readily available appears evidence of some prior agreement. Dubious financial arrangements seemed confirmed when, years later, it was revealed that Jerry Blaine, owner of the Orioles’ Jubilee label, held the mortgage on Freed’s house.
Freed also worked at WABC in 1958 but was fired from that station on in 1959, after refusing to sign a statement for the FCC that he had never accepted payola bribes (at the time, the lid blew off the tv quiz show racket, and Freed was a presenter on one of those shows)
Ugly, ain't it.
In the early 1960s, Freed's career was destroyed by the payola scandal that hit the broadcasting industry, as well as by allegations of taking credit for songs he did not write.
In 1964 Freed was indicted by a federal grand jury for tax evasion and ordered to pay $38,000 in taxes on income he had allegedly not reported. Most of that income was said to be from payola sources
(lets say that the word taxes implies that the 38k was 20 percent of the payola... that would mean he had been paid 190k in cash, and blew it all on booze and lawyers to keep him out of jail for inciting a riot in Boston. That's nearly 200k, in what the govt THOUGHT he'd been paid, the real number was likely a lot more. That's 200k, in 1960 money. More than 2wice what the president of the USA made.)
Alan Freed died in 1965, alcoholism. Soupy Sales, once remarked: ‘In fact, Freed was always drunk but it was alright … he could handle it.’
He wasn't all bad, he certainly was antiracist in the era of segregation.
In 1986, more than 30 years after he wrote "Maybellene," Chuck Berry was finally credited as the song's sole composer.
I love the song Johnny B Goode. Might be my favorite 50s rock song
I set out a couple hours ago to dive into what Chuck Berry did at the Fisher Body Plant in St Louis before he launched his music career, but diving into a story is like trying to find a sentence in the internet, rarely does it show up, but everything related to it comes up first
Chuck Berry was the first person selected for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. He WAS the 1ST selected, but only among the first inducted, maybe that was alphabetical, I don't know.
NASA, the scientists, and Carl Sagan picked 'Johnny B. Goode' as the representation of music from the United States to send into space. Then, when he got the Kennedy Centre honour
Saw Chuckleberry here in SA in the '70's. He still rocked and still does,long after he's gone. The Father of Rock 'n Roll.
ReplyDeleteI love the 50s rock. its just so pure. there was no auto tune , no way for a studio to use a computer to fix your mistakes, etc.
ReplyDeletewhen I was a kid in the late 70s, I had tons of vinyl by Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc
the odd thing is , Chuck Berry helped start rock and roll, but his ONLY number one record was : "My Ding-a-ling"