Music: Rock 'n' Roll

The nation's elders fumed, fretted, legislated and pontificated last week over the socking syncopations of "rock 'n' roll" (TIME, June 18). Items:

¶ After a riot in Asbury Park, N.J.'s Convention Hall that sent 25 vibrating teen-agers to the hospital, Mayor Roland J. Hines slapped a rock-'n'-roll ban on all city dance halls. Taking the hint, Jersey City canceled Jazzman Paul Whiteman's "Rock 'n' Roll Under the Stars" show at the 24,000-seat Roosevelt Stadium. Cried anguished Sponsor Ed Otto: "We were executed by remote control."

¶ Bandsman Bill (Rock Around the Clock) Haley, whose Comets were among the groups shut out by the Jersey City ban, put a defense of sorts on records, in pounding choruses of a ditty called Teen-Ager's Mother. Sample lyrics: "Teenager's mother, are you right?/ Did you forget so soon/ How much you liked to do the Charleston?"

¶ In San Jose, Calif., rioting rock 'n' rollers routed 73 policemen, injured eleven people, did $3,000 worth of damage to a dance hall before they were evicted. Neighboring Santa Cruz banned rock 'n' rollers from civic buildings.

¶ In San Antonio, rock 'n' roll was banned from city swimming-pool jukeboxes because, said the city council, its primitive beat attracted "undesirable elements" given to practicing their spastic gyrations in abbreviated bathing suits.

¶ Piano Tuner O. J. Dodd told fellow delegates to the National Piano Tuners' convention in Kansas City that rock 'n' roll is raising hob with the nation's keyboards. For the first time in his long professional career, he said, he had seen a piano's thick bass chord snapped by a pianist flailing out a thundering rock-'n'-roll chorus.

The major sociological comment of the week was that of Roosevelt University Sociologist Dr. S. Kirson Weinberg, who saw in rock 'n' roll a manifestation of the insecurities of the age, added that "the effects of the music are more predominant in girls." Or perhaps it was that of the reader of the Denver Post who wrote: "This hooby doopy, oop-shoop, ootie ootie, boom boom de-addy boom, scoobledy goobledy dump—is trash."