In 1955, when Dick Stewart was a sophomore at Valley High school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of his high-school buddies told him about a nightly thirty-minute radio show on KDEF A.M. radio in the Duke City, a moniker the city was given in 1706 in honor of the Duke of Albuquerque during the time.

   KDEF A.M. was hosted by a man named Al Tafoya, and he chose “Night Train,” the 1952 blues instrumental national hit by James Meyer, as his theme song. After school, Dick, with great excitement, ran more than two miles home to set the A.M. radio station to the correct dial and noticed that some of the songs and tunes that Tafoya spun were very similar to the beat of some Black gospel singers that he had heard on black-and-white (no color then) television. The choir of about 30 had powerful and very appealing voices and it was accompanied by a boogie-woogie style piano and a drummer with a strong backbeat. Dick had never heard a beat like that before and fell in love with it.

   It was rock and roll in its infancy although the music was first referred to as “bop,” not the modern term “doowop” or “bebop” that was originally a ‘40s jazz groove, and the 45 rpm record spins were by some very talented Black artists such as Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, but their vinyl records were not played on the all-white radio stations as bigotry then was at an all-time high. The teenagers, however, loved the Black’s rhythmic rock-and-roll back-beat much better than that of the White artists, and they flooded the popular top-40 radio stations daily with phone calls of quit the bigotry because it doesn’t matter if the musicians are black or any other color.

   The teens won the battle, and the Black artists became famous almost overnight. Now as for the rock-and-roll title, it came shortly thereafter when Tafoya began to spin records by White artists such as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right” and “Hound Dog.”

   The late Buddy Holly historian, Bill Griggs out of Lubbock, Texas said it best in the January 2004 issue of the Lance Monthly, which was the most popular music newsletter in New Mexico in 1966 and 1967 in the reporting of rock-and-roll, R&B and Mexican American bands and events:

   “Who started rock and Roll? There is actually no set answer as it evolved over a few years’ time until Bill Haley burst onto the scene [in 1954] with ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ This was the first rock-and-roll record to go to number one on the national pop chart, but certainly not the first rock-and-roll song. Bill Haley has claimed the title [although] he was singing yodeling songs in the 1940s.

   “Jerry Lee [Lewis] doesn’t even enter the equation. His career began in 1957 and rock and roll was off and running by then. Elvis had records released in 1953-1954, good ones, but he didn’t hit the national scene until 1956. Elvis’s claim to fame in this regard is that it was [he] who brought Black music to a White mainstream audience.

   “Little Richard claims that he is the architect of rock and roll and started it all. He’ll tell you he was making records in 1951. Excuse me, but those were blues-shouter-type of records, not rock and roll. It wasn’t until ‘Tutti Frutti’ that we heard rock and roll from Little Richard. I will say that Richard was probably the artist who had the longest string of danceable records.

   “Gene Vincent came on the scene early on and was rock and roll, but this was in 1956. Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, etc. and most guitar-driven rock and roll came along during the mid-1950s, the so-called second wave.

   “So, let’s see. Who’s left? Well, it’s the artist whom, to my knowledge, has never made a claim as to being first but recorded ‘The Fat Man’ in 1949. I’m sure people will jump on me for this, but I feel of the major artists, Fats [Domino] was the one there first.”

   Dick Stewart’s favorite artist in the mid’50s was Fats Domino, a pianist who is credited for introducing the first standard band structure of the early bop bands: piano, saxophone, upright bass, and drums. Electric guitars didn’t make a showing until Chuck Berry who sang that famous line, “all around the world rock and roll is here to stay,” came on board in 1956. His guitar skills were considered very cool by nearly all of the flourishing rock-and-roll bands, and his famous guitar riffs were the primary ingredients that dethroned the piano as the principal instrument in the structure of the early rock-and-roll bands.

   Shortly thereafter, the electric bass took the place of the large cumbersome upright bass (also referred to as the standup bass) that was difficult to haul. If the band was not blessed with a truck, trailer, or commercial van then it was strapped on top of a car. As a result, the upright bass often encountered damage during a trip to an event.

   There were, however, some ‘50s West Texas rockabilly musicians that hated the introduction of the electric bass such as Richard Porter, band leader of the popular 1950’s Odessa, Texas band, the Poor Boys. He believed that the tone quality of the upright bass was far superior to that of the electric bass. “I think that all electric bass guitars should be stacked into one giant pile and burned beyond recognition,” Porter once said emphatically in an interview for one of Dick Stewart’s books, Fourteen Unsung Pioneers of Early Rock and Roll Who Didn’t Get Their Due.

   And then there was Buddy Holly, a West Texas country-and-western performer with his band, the Crickets, but when Elvis Presley came through on a West Texas tour and witnessed how he attracted screaming teenage girls en mass running to the stage and throwing kisses at the King of Rock and Roll, Buddy Holly quickly shelved the country music and became a rockabilly band. Elvis had combined rock and roll with a country-time beat and combined blues with a country beat that was so evident in his first hit, “That’s All Right Mama.”

   At first, Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ rock-and-roll structure was the upright bass, a lead and a rhythm guitar, and a full set of drums, although producer/engineer Norman Petty whose studio is in Clovis, New Mexico, was an ingenious arranger and directed the drummer, Jerry Allison, to use cardboard boxes in the band’s early releases because he felt that it would be the perfect percussion for the songs. He was right. Buddy’s first release, “That’ll Be the Day” was a smash hit.

   Soon thereafter, Buddy replaced the upright bass with the electric bass, which was famously played by one of his best friends, Waylon Jennings during Holly’s final twenty-venue tour in the late ‘50s. It was known as the Winter Dance Party. The two electric guitars (one for Holly, the other for Sunny Curtis) and electric bass and drums became the standard structure of the rock-and-roll groups worldwide from then on. (Sadly, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, and the pilot, Roger Peterson lost their lives in an attempt to fly to the next venue to avoid traveling in one of the freezing cold buses, all with broken down heaters.)

   All the nonalcoholic teen clubs were the rage during the mid-‘60s in Albuquerque and the local garage bands (most of the up-and-coming bands rehearsed in garages) increased in great numbers. In Albuquerque, one of the bands known as the Knights (a.k.a. King Richard and the Knights) was influenced by the Ventures from the Pacific NW and the Fireballs in Raton, New Mexico who had more top-40 hits than all of the inspiring New Mexican rock-and-roll bands to date. The Ventures’ unique sound was the heavy use of echo and the tremolo bar, also called the whammy bar by the musicians. The Fireballs’ guitarist (George Tomsco) was known as a mute picker in which he picked the notes of his Jazzmaster guitar while the palm of his hand rested lightly over the strings just below his picking. Lastly, there was Dick Dale whose unique style was staccato (double picking) that was so evident in his hit instrumental, “Miserlou.” His music was featured in the famous California Beach Party movies during the guitar-rock instrumental period in the early to mid-1960s.

    Between 1959 and 1964, instrumental guitar bands put the sappy puppy-love vocal groups that sang about girls and customized cars, in the backseat and took over the rock-and-roll airways with the Ventures leading the pack worldwide in vinyl album record sales, and these were the garage bands that were inspired by the Ventures to begin with. They copied the way they dressed, and they bought the same style of guitars that the Ventures employed, which were mostly Fender Jazzmaster, Jaguar, and Stratocaster axes. (to be continued in the next TLM issue.)

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