Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses

INTRODUCTION

WHO CREATED ROCK AND ROLL? Was it given life at an obscure country crossroads by a young Robert Johnson willing to sacrifice his soul for the power of the blues? Was it the rhythmic gospel beat found in the southern backwoods churches that gave it a pulse? Or was the part-time delivery boy who stopped in at Sun Records to record a song for his mother the one who breathed life into its body? Pinpointing the origins of rock and roll is an arduous task. Rock and roll, by its very nature, is difficult to define, and even harder to explain.

There may never be one clear-cut, universally accepted theory as to the origins of rock and roll music. One thing, however, is clear: Rock and roll has had a turbulent history. Rock and roll is a living, breathing body, constantly expanding its horizons and pushing its limits. Danny and the Juniors once boasted, Rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die. While that may be true, rock and roll has had its share of close calls. From its inception, rock and roll has been peppered with myth, folklore, legend, rumor, and fact. Perhaps no other field in pop culture has had so rich a history. Musicians’ untimely deaths. Lives filled with excess. Bizarre, unusual coincidence. Poignant, prophetic lyrics. Chilling, gripping circumstances.

Rock and roll is an enigmatic body of culture. Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses involves two distinct facets of rock history—fact and irony. Take a Walk on the Dark Side, however, is a different sort of rock history; it is an account of fact, fiction, myth, rumor, and legend.

This combination makes Take a Walk on the Dark Side a labor of love. It combines the two things that fascinate me most—rock and roll music and its history, and that which is bizarre and unexplainable.

My love for rock and roll is easy to explain. I grew up on rock and roll music. Much as it did with contemporary American culture, rock and roll took hold of me. The songs that I grew up with are like old friends. They are a part of my childhood, my memories, my life, and part of me.

My interest in the bizarre and unexplainable is probably best credited to human nature. Many individuals throughout history have been influenced by fate, happenstance, or chance. This allows humanity a glimpse of its own mortality. Public tragedies allow us to experience this vicariously. Some of us, however, have come far too close to the clutches of circumstance. In July 1996, I was in Paris with a group of family and friends. I remember all too well the icy sensations of horror that swept across me as I learned that TWA Flight 800 had exploded off the New York coastline. My return tickets were a grim irony: TWA Flight 802. Flight 800 had left JFK airport in New York and was destined for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. We were leaving Charles de Gaulle and flying into JFK in New York that evening. The incident was chilling yet fascinating.

Rock and roll has had a profound effect on me. On one hand, rock and roll’s pulsating rhythms and poignant lyrics make me feel alive, yet rock and roll’s bizarre coincidences and riveting circumstances serve as a dramatic reminder of my own mortality.

I think the Grateful Dead aptly described the history of rock music when they sang What a long, strange trip it’s been. How it began, where it started, what caused this thing called rock and roll music is an enigma. Rock and roll is constantly changing and ever-expanding.

In any event, it is clear that rock and roll was created in the American rural South. To some degree its very creators have struggled with the age-old question of whom the music actually serves. The self-proclaimed originator of rock and roll, Little Richard, who many of the British invasion groups believed to be bigger than Elvis, was ordained a minister in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. This conversion occurred in October of 1957, after Little Richard became alarmed that his chartered plane, with part of the fuselage on fire, would crash somewhere over Australia. Richard remembers the event: I gave up rock and roll for the rock of ages! I used to be a glaring homosexual until God changed me!1 To seal his pact with God, Little Richard promptly threw thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry into the Tasman Sea after he safely landed in Sydney. Strangely, the Australian tour included Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Cochran would die in an automobile accident on April 17, 1960, and Vincent would be injured in the same accident. Gene Vincent would die of a hemorrhaged ulcer on October 12, 1971. In this event Little Richard definitely made the best decision. Today, Little Richard has finally been recognized for his contributions to rock and roll and has been inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. But he hasn’t retired from performing, and he still manages to present the conflict between the infectious beat of rock and roll and his religious upbringing.

Perhaps the strangest conflict within an early rock and roll innovator occurred in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis. Even his birth was accompanied by the unusual: On that day, September 29, 1935, at an hour more dark than light, Mamie Lewis heard the first scream of her newborn child. A dog no one had ever seen had been howling outside the window near the bed. Her sister Stella had thrown stones to chase it away, but it had come back. Now, finally, it went off into the brush toward Turtle Lake, and Stella Calhoun never saw it again.2 I was first introduced to the southern lore involving a howling dog at night when I was a student at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee. My roommate, Steve, his girlfriend, and I were sitting up late one night watching a movie when we heard the sound of a howling dog. The sound was chilling. Steve’s girlfriend calmly looked us both in the eye and whispered, Someone close to one of us will die tonight. At first I laughed but then she looked seriously at me and exclaimed, Ever since I was a little girl in Columbia [Tennessee] and heard a dog howl at night someone close to me has died. At that time I was glad she was Steve’s girlfriend and not mine. But, I demanded, I hear dogs bark at night all the time! Giving me a knowing glance she simply responded, Barking is normal, but how many times have you heard a dog howl? I had to admit that she had me there. As I slept that night I paid little attention to our conversation about the nocturnal habits of howling dogs. However, just before dawn, the high-pitched ringing of the phone awakened me. Steve answered the phone and then became very quiet. I asked him, What’s up? Who’s calling us at this hour? I’ll never forget the haunted look in his eyes when he explained to me that his mother had just called. It seemed that she wanted to notify him of the death of his uncle. According to his mother, his uncle had died at approximately the same hour we heard the howling dog outside our apartment.

The reference to the dog outside the Lewis home may have signaled a run of incredible bad luck for the rock and roll giant who became known as the Killer. Jerry Lee Lewis’s career was practically destroyed when the media discovered that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra. To complicate matters more, this marriage took place before his divorce from his second wife was final. The marriage to Myra ended in divorce in 1970. In all, Lewis has been married six times. His fourth wife, Jaren, drowned in 1982 while awaiting terms of the final settlement of their divorce. He married his fifth wife, twenty-five-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens, in 1983; after less than ninety days she was taken from his home dead of an overdose of methadone . . . Both of his sons have died untimely deaths: one, Steve Allen Lewis, named for the television host and announced enemy of rock and roll, drowned in a swimming pool at age three in 1962; the other, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., died in an auto accident at age nineteen in 1973. Lewis’s older brother Elmo died when he was still a boy.3

At times Lewis followed in the footsteps of Little Richard and would preach in the local Pentecostal churches. It appeared that in his family the choice was usually music or the ministry. One of Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousins, Mickey Gilley, made a career for himself as a country singer. Another cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, became a famous televangelist. It may very well be left to the individual to decide which force each of the three cousins serves. In some cases this has become a continuous internal struggle between faith and fame.

Lewis had one such struggle during the recording of Great Balls of Fire. After Lewis and the session players got to drinking, Jerry Lee became filled with the Holy Ghost, and he decided that the song Great Balls of Fire was of the devil and that to sing it was to sin. Sam Phillips (owner of Sun Studios) argued against Jerry Lee’s stand. Following a long period of time filled with mutual quoting from the Scriptures by Phillips and Lewis, the rock classic was finally cut between midnight and dawn. Perhaps it was appropriate that the recording would occur around the very witching hour of night. In a recent interview Lewis said he still believes that his music may have served the devil. When his daughter reprimanded him over that comment, Lewis commented something to the effect that If my music hadn’t served the devil, then I sure gave him a good shoeshine. Jerry Lee Lewis may well have believed that on the night of his birth Robert John-son’s legendary hellhound had found him and led him down a path of self-destruction.

When rock and roll legends are discussed there are mentions of doomed bands and bizarre coincidences that reach from beyond the grave. One of the most incredible coincidences concerns the tragic legacy of Buddy Holly. Holly was one of the first white artists to take the black man’s music and adapt it to a more diverse audience. When he and his band the Crickets were signed to their first label, Brunswick, the record executives had first thought that the band was a black group. Little did they know that an all-white southern band from Texas would take the legendary all-black Apollo Theater in New York by storm. Did this diffusion of musical styles help lead the country to denounce the Jim Crow laws and lay the first foundation for the establishment of the Civil Rights movement? Maybe; this is a point that could be well argued. When Holly appeared on stage and on national television wearing his trademark black horned-rimmed glasses, he gave other musicians, including a very nearsighted John Lennon, the courage to appear naturally on stage wearing glasses and not be hung up promoting a cool stereotypical image. As a matter of fact, Buddy Holly’s look was the epitome of cool!

If the cultural acceptance of Buddy Holly was important, even more so was his music. The secret to his songs was primarily the clever wordplay and an infectious beat. Holly’s playing did more to promote the Fender Stratocaster guitar than any other artist (notwithstanding Jimi Hendrix, of course). In a time filled with the terrible uncertainty of the Cold War, Buddy Holly and his music provided a much-needed reprieve. After Holly’s marriage to Maria Elena Santiago, he became a solo artist and booked himself into a series of winter rock and roll shows. It was at this time, on February 3, 1959, that the music died.

The pilot, Roger Peterson, was twenty-one years old and was not instrument certified to fly in the conditions that that fateful night demanded. (One of the most interesting rumors concerning the plane was that its name was American Pie. This namesake was said to serve as Don McLean’s inspiration for his American Pie, an ode to Buddy Holly and the day the music died. Unfortunately, this concept of American Pie is just an unfounded urban legend. There is no documentation that the plane was christened with a name; this has become yet one more instance of rock and roll folklore.) Shortly after 1:00 A.M. Eastern time in the early morning hours of February 3, 1959, the small Beechcraft Bonanza airplane crashed into an open field. All the plane’s passengers were killed, as well as the pilot. Holly died at the age of twenty-two, the Big Bopper at twenty-eight, and Ritchie Valens at seventeen. The untimely death of these three young stars has played a major role in rock and roll mythology.

It seemed that tragedy would continue to pursue other associations with Buddy Holly. His birthplace in Lubbock, Texas, was condemned for demolition on February 3, 1978, the nineteenth anniversary of Holly’s tragic death. Another coincidence that concerned Buddy Holly involved the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon. Moon had long been known as a wild man of rock. His drinking and other madcap exploits were legendary. The last album Moon made with the Who was Who Are You, released in 1978. On the album cover Moon was shown sitting in a chair that is labeled Not to Be Taken Away. The dramatic irony of the chair’s statement was reinforced with the announcement of Keith Moon’s death. According to published reports, Moon had attended the London premiere of The Buddy Holly Story with Paul McCartney and some other friends. After the premiere, Moon and his girlfriend returned home, where he took his medication and went to bed. A few hours later Moon awoke and took some more pills. This was to be a fatal mistake. The large meal had slowed the reaction of the first pills. When the second dosage was taken an accidental overdose occurred. Keith Moon was dead at the age of thirty-one. The incredible irony in Keith Moon’s death was not only in the fact that his last public appearance was at The Buddy Holly Story, but that he died on September 7, 1978. You see, September 7 was Buddy Holly’s birthday! Another strange coincidence involving Keith Moon concerns the suite in which he died. The flat belonged to Harry Nilsson, and four years earlier Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died in the same room from a heart attack (and not from choking to death on a ham sandwich!).4 Maybe this gives a new meaning to Heartbreak Hotel.

Many DJs claimed that rock and roll would never die, but in the late 1950s the music was placed on temporary life support. For instance, it was in 1957 that Little Richard became an ordained minister and cut back on his devotion to rock and roll. Nineteen-fifty-seven was also the same year that Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin. This scandal made headlines early the next year in 1958 and effectively, but thankfully temporarily, pulled Lewis’s music from the airwaves and Lewis’s presence from the concert stages. Also in 1958, Elvis Presley was drafted into the army. When he returned he played the role of a pop singer and movie star but finally rediscovered his rock and roll roots in 1968. The next year, 1959, saw the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens, as we have noted. At the conclusion of this year, Chuck Berry would be arrested and imprisoned on a morals charge. At the very moment that rock was reeling from the deaths and seclusion of its most brilliant performers, the U.S. Congress began the payola scandals. Payola referred to bribes being given to certain disk jockeys to play certain artists’ recordings on the air. Of course this would result in hit records. The central figure of this investigation was none other than Cleveland, Ohio’s own Alan Freed, the man who coined the term rock and roll and its first promoter. Sadly, Freed was blackballed by the very industry he helped create. He died indigent on January 20, 1965, at the age of forty-two.

It is my sincere hope that the material presented in Take a Walk on the Dark Side might make you see things in a different light. Perhaps some of the references will make your pulse race a little faster. Maybe you’ll find yourself glancing over your shoulder when you are alone in the room. Perhaps you will never listen to one of your records or CDs in the same way. Please remind yourself that some of these stories are simply myths and legends; the others? Well . . . you be the judge of that, but above all, enjoy the book.

In compiling my sources I would like to thank my publisher, Fireside Books, at Simon & Schuster, and especially my editor, Brett Valley, for his guidance and assistance. I would also like to thank Matt Walker, my former editor, who is now at Yale working on his Ph.D. My very special thanks goes to Lisa Lyon, producer of Coast to Coast AM and the Premiere Radio Network, as well as to Barbara Simpson (the Princess of Darkness) and to Ian Punnitt, two of the best interviewers anywhere. I’d like to thank Anne Devlin from Anne Online, and my attorney Norman Gillis; and Connie Loy for being there and believing. There are several other individuals who have made a difference in my professional life. I’d like to thank Jeff Cohen of Richmond, Virginia, Allan Handelman, J. Fox and Dave Bolt of the ABC Radio Network, and the hundreds of DJs across the country who sit with me and discuss these incredible tales. Indeed, Music is our special friend. Special thanks also goes out to the incredible Susan Vargas, my favorite television producer in Hollywood. Susan, I’m sure we will do more incredible series together. As for my ultimate source of strength, I would like to thank my family, especially my mom, who guided me with unconditional love, and my daughter, Shea, who is growing up way too fast. I know that this work would not have been possible without all of their combined efforts. I would also like to thank Derek Davidson at Photofest, Jon R. Hichborn at royaltytracking.com and Delta Haze, and Yvette Reyes at AP/ Wide World Photos for their much appreciated assistance.

In some cases you must realize, as I have done during my research, that some of these are simply myths that have made their way up the ladder to accepted legend. For example, I get tired of the Yoko bashings that I have heard from some unknowing fans. Isn’t it ironic that the woman some Beatle fans accuse of breaking up the Beatles in the first place is the same person who made it possible for the three surviving Beatles to reunite and give their fans the three Anthologies? Maybe some individuals seek only the negative.

I would also especially like to thank all the fans, who always offer me more strange coincidences to consider. If you know of some other strange facts in which I would be interested, please contact me at Fireside Books. As always I appreciate your input!

For the record, I do not believe that a listener can be possessed by listening to music that is said to contain backward messages. Rather, an individual can become obsessed and spend his life listening to the garbled backward sounds of mixed phonemes. In many ways the backward sounds resemble splatters of paint thrown haphazardly on a wall. Sometimes the actual problem may be in the viewer and not the creator. But if you enjoy discussing these messages, you’ll learn about them here. Just remember that any sound can have more than one interpretation. It may be a good idea to listen to a track first without looking at some-one’s comment on its hidden meaning. With this in mind I hope you enjoy your journey into this offering. We’ll begin as together we walk down a deserted rural highway in Mississippi. The full moon is shining palely down upon one solitary figure holding a guitar standing by a crossroads. The time? It is shortly after midnight. Come. Let me introduce you to Robert Johnson . . .

1. WAITING AT THE CROSSROADS

I went down to the crossroads and fell down on my knees, Asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please.

—Robert Johnson, Crossroads Blues

You may bury my body down by the highway side So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.

—Robert Johnson, Me and the Devil Blues

WHISPERS FROM THE CROWD FOLLOWED him throughout every roadhouse in Mississippi. This solitary, gaunt, black bluesman spun pentatonic riffs and moaning slide guitar lines to accompany a hoarse voice filled not only with the well-known pain of the blues, but also a voice that seemed to hint that his worst pain would certainly await him after death. Members of the crowd had heard the legend. This was Robert Johnson. The same man who had waited at the crossroads and made his pact with Satan himself. In exchange for the ability to play the blues, and enjoy the adoring company of women, whiskey, fortune, and fame, Robert Johnson would offer up his tormented soul as his only escape from the cotton fields in which he had made his own hell. This was a bargain that would allow him a reprieve from the poverty into which he had been born.

As with any legend, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. It appears that Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on May 8, 1911. His birth was a result of an extramarital affair between his mother, Julie Ann Majors, and a farmworker whose name was Noah Johnson. Robert Johnson’s legal father, Charles Dodds Jr., had earlier deserted his young wife to live with his mistress in Memphis, Tennessee. By 1927, Robert Johnson was working in the cotton fields and had utilized several aliases, Robert Sax and Robert Spenser among others. Johnson later stated to other bluesmen that he used the aliases in case a murder happened while he was in town, so that the police would be unable to pin it on him.

Biographers state that Robert Johnson was married twice. His first wife was Virginia Travis, who in 1930 died tragically in childbirth; death claimed both mother and child. He later married Callie Craft and started to pursue his musical release through the blues. Johnson’s first musical instrument was the harmonica but he later changed to the guitar, an instrument that would allow him to become known as a blues innovator and the father of modern rock and roll. Local blues legends like Willie Brown, Son House, and Charley Patton would politely let the young Johnson sit in with them as they played the roadhouses. At first they were not impressed with Johnson’s playing and avoided any contact with the young want-to-be bluesman. It was at this time that Johnson disappeared for six months. Some say that he went in search of his natural father, while others say that this was the time that Robert Johnson, armed with a black cat’s bone, waited at the crossroads and made his bargain.

The Robert Johnson myth concerns the reaction of the older blues players to Johnson’s return and his new complete mastery of the guitar. According to legend, it was Son House who stated that He [Johnson] sold his soul to play like that. The actual crossroads encountered by Robert Johnson was that of superstition and religion. Throughout the early Puritan church doctrine Christians believed that God gave man an inner light that would multiply his acts of goodness. This was a sign that the true believer was one of the chosen, the elect, whose crops would always grow taller, and that success would follow him throughout each of life’s challenges. He was marked by the community as a tribute to his Christian ideals and virtues, which represented obedience to God’s commandments and living a life to be emulated that would transcend a life filled with suffering. Just so, the old field spirituals helped the black worker cope with the horrors of the cotton fields and slavery in general. These ballads gave each individual hope, a hope that there was an afterlife where suffering would end and eternal bliss in paradise would await each true believer. It was in this world that a man’s good works and faith would allow him to find eternal Providence. In Robert Johnson’s case, this would prove to be the opposite. The lifestyle of the blues dictated a life filled with whiskey, loose women, and gambling. These were not the golden virtues patterned in the southern churches to lead man to salvation, but instead a pathway to pain and damnation.

Johnson’s guitar instructor was said to be Ike Zinnerman. This was a peculiar name for a bluesman, since the great performers all had legendary nicknames such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Son House, and Howlin’ Wolf. Even stranger than his name was the method of his instruction. It seemed that he claimed to have learned to play the guitar at night, sitting in old country churchyards, with his only companions being the tombstones of the dead and an eager pupil, Robert Johnson. Some claimed Zinnerman to be the devil, and most of the area bluesmen had no problem in accepting this explanation. With this as his origin, Johnson inspired whispers of his legendary pact throughout the cheap blues joints where his music became popular.

The use of the crossroads as a symbol of Satan’s presence comes from the concept of being the final resting place for suicides and those unworthy of being buried in hallowed ground. As the bodies were buried, stones and other objects were tossed upon the corpses to show Christian contempt for their selfish deaths. After the burial, the only memorial those poor souls’ graves would contain would be the well-beaten footpaths of unsuspecting travelers who unknowingly, with each heavy footfall, would help obliterate the memory