Word: wop
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Remember the rock-'n'-roll '50s? The era of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Little Richard, the doo-wop boys on the corner and Elvis on your 12-in. TV? Do you want to relive those glory days in a movie theater? Then go straight to a revival of The Girl Can't Help It or The T.A.M.I. Show, because The Idolmaker is something else, and less. I recalls one withered branch of pop nostalgia: the South Philly sound of Fabian and Frankie Avalon, which is to genuine early rock as Fritos...
...rock & roll is born. Other noteworthy artists introduced in this set are sax legend and wild man Big Jay McNeely, pianist/writer extraordinaire Sam Price and the little known but immensely talented and important blues singer from the Fifties, Big Maybelle. For the variety included, from very early Do-Wop to some of Rock & Roll's first shouters (Nappy Brown, etc.) to straight ahead boogie woogie rock, this LP is a perfect cross example of roots music. And as with all Roots volumes, the extensive and well-written liner notes are invaluable...
...struggling under the side of the desk in the center of the stair, uttering his own brand of condescension: "apebreath, banana boy, wop, grease ball, pizzabrain, vegetable-peddler;" he was pulling all the plugs on a last ditch performance to maintain grace. And I was unable to respond, my own vicious and maligned thoughts were tripping over each other, filling my mouth with cotton candy, my head with the stuff of insanity...
...perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found no more sense in Faulkner than in "the wop boob, Dante." He never understood the scars of the Depression and compared the New Deal efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt to those of "a snake-oil vendor at a village carnival...
Then there are the "Chesterfields," the black doo-wop group that teams up with frustrated song writer Laraine Newman (Carole King). The scene in which they meet and Newman reaches them her song captures the same special moment, the gel point of the music, which is really quite effective. Another such moment occurs when the 12-year-old leader of the Buddy Holly Fan Club sits with Freed and starts to cry as he recalls the news of Holly's death...