How The King Got His Start – Part Two

By Tom Poland    
August 30, 2013

Part Two: The British Are Coming

Author’s Note: It’s been 36 years since Elvis died. This excerpt from Save The Last Dance for Me, University of South Carolina Press, (Tom Poland & Phil Sawyer) chronicles how Elvis jump started the British Invasion.

Across The Atlantic
Unfettered by segregation and aided by renegade radio stations, large numbers of British teens formed bands in the 1950s to imitate their American hero. Elvis’s music, moves, attitude, and clothing symbolized rock and roll. He seemed rebellious, an outlier, and he had already paved the way for countless American performers, among them Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and others who would influence the Brits.

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first heard American black music over blacklisted Radio Luxembourg, which once boasted the world’s most powerful transmitter and broadcast pop music to the British Isles from 1954 to 1963. And then they heard the King.

In Life, wrote Richards, Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station. I had a little aerial and I’d walk around the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the dial … I’m supposed to be asleep … Like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I had been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day, I was a different guy.

The lads liked what they heard and they began to form bands and make rock music. It was Elvis more than anyone who influenced the Brits. (Radio Luxembourg would be the first European radio to announce Elvis’s death.)
Said George Harrison, Seeing Elvis was like seeing the messiah arrive.

John Lennon told Jerry Schilling, one of Elvis’s bodyguards to tell Elvis, If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been nothing.

Paul McCartney recorded Heartbreak Hotel using Bill Black’s bass at Abbey Road Studios. Said McCartney, It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ I thought, this is it. Musically it’s perfect.

Shaggers weren’t enamored of Elvis. Jo Jo Putnam abandoned the beach when the Ivy League settled in and there wasn’t the ambience and charisma like before. Elvis Presley had started his campaign to destroy good music and the old crowd was gone.

Other musical distractions took place. A fellow born in Spring Gulley, South Carolina, Ernest Evans, had a hit song with its own dance craze. Adopting the stage name, Chubby Checker, Evans’ The Twist did its part to undercut the shag. The Twist got adults who refused to dance to teen tunes onto the dance floor, but it wasn’t to shag. 

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in late November 1963 cut a deep hole into the psyche of the United States, creating a cultural vacuum. It didn’t take long for outsides influences to fill the vacuum with fresh material. 

On February 9, 1964, a defining moment changed everything. The Beatle’s historic appearance on ”The Ed Sullivan Show” garnered the then-largest television audience in history. This remarkable social and cultural milestone marked the start of the British Invasion. Releasing a two-year backlog of hits from England, the Beatles dominated the American charts. On April 4, 1964, the Beatles occupied the top five spots on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 music survey, a feat unmatched before or since. Such total domination blew away American acts, among them the makers of shag tunes.

In his book, This Magic Moment—Musical Reflections of a Generation, Harry Turner wrote, When the British invasion began, my friends and I thought that it was kind of amusing, but we never viewed it as good music. We thought that it would simply be a fad and the R&B-based music that we loved best would re-establish its pre-British Invasion position of strength. Suddenly, R&B, rockabilly, teen idol, folk, popular rock and roll, and other diverse American artists found themselves with one thing in common—they were without recording contracts.

Nineteen-sixty-four unleashed a cultural shift. If you were in your 30s, you were done: A culture of youth spread across the country like the big bang. Tensions between blacks and whites climbed the charts. The Civil Rights movement didn’t dance to rhythm and blues. It marched and staged sit ins. 

And then the antiwar protests arrived—all of this upheaval found its identity in the irreverent personas of the Rolling Stones. Like Elvis, they were white but sounded black. They played American music, via England. In a bizarre twist they dressed much like women: they grew their hair grew long and women of all ages and backdrops desired them.
 
Other British acts swamped the American music scene. Along came The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, The Kinks, Manfred Mann, Herman’s Hermits, The Zombies, and Petula Clark—all by the end of 1964. Britain seemed to produce wave after wave of bands, most with long hair. American bands were quick to pick up on the look and sound of the British groups. Groups such as the Byrds incorporated the British musical styles, hairstyles, and dress. An endless line of rock bands pushed shag music out the back door. The old music began to die. 

—

The British Invasion stimulated the widespread formation of new rock and roll bands in America, similar to what had occurred in the United Kingdom ten years earlier under the influence of American artists. The British Invasion played out by 1967, but the damage had been done, if you were a shagger. And if you were a newcomer who had yet to hear of the shag, the chances were you wouldn’t.

The styles and influences of the British bands had recharged the American rock and roll scene. The British Invasion offered audiences a new model: the self-contained rock group. The solo performer backed by stage or session musicians had fallen out vogue. Rock acts composed their own tunes. And single hits were out. The British acts, led by the Beatles, set a new standard: the high-quality long-playing album as the prime venue for the release of recordings. The popularity of 45 RPMs declined, and jukeboxes lost a bit of their dazzle.

The shag, its moon waning, now suffered from a crowd a bit rough around the edges. No explanation exists for this unruliness. Perhaps it was a bit exaggerated. Perhaps it was true. A long-time shagger who prefers to be identified as an anonymous source close to the jukebox remembers those days as being a bit disorderly.

Like all South Carolina kids, I got myself to Ocean Drive/Cherry Grove by any legal means during the 1960s. Myrtle Beach was considered a ‘rough’ place at night and usually full of Yankee tourists and military guys on leave looking for trouble. I never saw a fight but we girls stayed away from potential trouble spots. Some of the best male dancers had reputations as fighters. They were dangerous guys in more than one way.

Unlike Anonymous, fewer and fewer teens took up the shag. Even the most accomplished dancers retreated. The shag had been relegated to a disquieting status: no longer fashionable. Its bands weren’t popular. Its dance wasn’t popular, not with the masses. Dancing now consisted of fast freestyle movement to rock with partners standing apart, often far apart. The graceful symmetry of a couple in the old, wooden pavilions upon sandy dance floors had been supplanted by hard-driving rock, and then along came Saturday Night Fever. John Travolta starred in the dance movie of the decade, establishing disco as the dance and disco-joints as the venues of the in-crowd where glitzy couples danced beneath glittering mirror balls.

From Motown to the Beatles to Disco, the shag reeled beneath an assault of cultural change. The venerable culture that had wielded a forever effect on shaggers was disappearing beneath successive waves of new music. To be a shagger was to be an outlier. Shagging remained the dance of those who, in effect, now amounted to a resistance. If you were an old-guard shagger, it was not a time to dance. It was a time to weep.

Many shaggers found themselves to be an enclave of anachronistic outcasts coping as best they could in a dance Hades. They didn’t perceive of themselves as old fashioned but that’s how others saw them. During its heyday, the shag had been a warm night with a cold beer and a hot date, but life without the shag had become cold, dry, and lonely.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. He writes a weekly feature for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.