True, Bill Haley and the Comets recorded and released "Shake, Rattle and Roll" after "Rock Around the Clock" - but rock 'n' roll's first great anthem only spent a week on the US charts on its initial release, peaking at 23. On the other hand, "Shake, Rattle and Roll", released in August 1954, climbed to No. 7, spent 27 weeks in the top 40, and sold over a million copies. "Rock Around the Clock" had to wait until the release of the Glenn Ford film, Blackboard Jungle, the following year before rocketing to the top of the charts and staying there for seven weeks.
Underlining "Shake, Rattle and Roll"'s status as the first R&R biggie is the fact that the original version by Big Joe Turner, released in June 1954, also sold a million. It only reached 22 on the main Billboard chart, but hit the top spot on the R&B chart. Turner's version has far dirtier lyrics, and is bluesier and less raucous than Haley's, but is no less magnificent:
Obviously Haley wouldn't have received quite as much airplay had he sung the following verse:
Well you wear those dresses
The sun comes shining through
I can't believe my eyes
All that mess belongs to you
And, in 1954, he probably wouldn't have got away with the bedroom references, talk of saving "your doggone soul" or of "a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store" or of going "over the hill, way down underneath/You make me roll my eyes, then you make me grit my teeth". Must have been one hell of a breakfast!
However, when Elvis Presley's version was released as the A-side to the far superior "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" in 1956, he included all of Joe Turner's sexual references, apart from the "mess" verse quoted above. Perhaps Presley was already too big a star to care (unlikely - this was right at the start of his career), or maybe America was already becoming more permissive (again, this seems unlikely). Or perhaps the unacceptable raunchiness of the lyrics accounts for the fact that Elvis's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" failed to chart - but I imagine it was more to do with the fact that the blaring "excitement" of the track now sounds horribly forced (apart from Scotty Moore's slightly bonkers guitar solo). Contrariwise, Joe Turner used Haley's somewhat more decorous lyrics when being filmed (here).
There have been endless versions of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" since Elvis's flop recording - many of them by some of my favourite artists - but it's one of those songs that seems to have defeated just about everybody since Turner and Haley. The only version that came anywhere close (and, to be honest, not that close) to those great 1954 originals was Arthur Conley's soulled-up 1967 hit single:
Far better than the direct covers were near-contemporaneous recordings which "borrowed" the structure, tune and spirt of the original. Smiley Lewis's "Bumpity Bump" - a sort of catch-all Big Joe Turner rip-off - is particularly good:
Louis Prima (the voice on "I'm the king of the swingers..."), had a sizable hit with"Jump, Jive & Wail" in 1956:
And on the B-side of The Platters' 1955 hit, "Only You", we find this oddly familar-sounding ditty:
That's an awful lot of flattery!
There's a pleasing post-script to the story of rock 'n' roll's first monster hit: Bill Haley and Joe Turner became firm friends when they toured together in the '50s, and Haley helped Turner out when the great blues shouter's career hit the skids in the '60s.
For no particular reason, I'll leave you with the Bill Haley recording which I reckon marks the point where his brand of Hillbilly Boogie started shading over in rock 'n' roll - 1952's "Rock The Joint", on which Danny Cedrone first tried out the exact same guitar lick with which he would later grace grace "Rock Around the Clock":
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