"Rock and Roll Waltz," by Kay Starr

March 1956--(Three Weeks)

"Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright/They just seem a little weird..."--Cheap Trick

Happy day! This is the first post on this blog where a song on the hit list is a tune I've never EVER heard of before. And while "Sixteen Tons" and "The Great Pretender" are classics, "Memories are Made of This" is familiar because of Dean Martin's presence, and even "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" is somewhat of a standard today,"Rock and Roll Waltz" has fallen by the wayside, a piece of pop fluff that must have seemed outdated mere months after its release. Frankly, songs like these are the reason why I started this blog in the first place:  to mercilessly lampoon the greying favorites of yesteryear.

And "Rock and Roll Waltz" definitely deserves mockery--this is a song that, by modern standards, seems false on so many levels it's hard to count them all.  For starters, although the girl in the story is clearly supposed to be a teenager, Kay Starr herself was no Rock and Roll ingenue:  she was 34 years old and desperately searching for a comeback since her swing tune "Wheel of Fortune" became a chart-topping hit four years earlier.  (You may remember that one from a montage in the middle of "LA Confidential.")  This fact might be easily overlooked if not for the fact that the entire song sounds like it was written and produced by old school music industry veterans trying desperately to cash in on the Rock and Roll craze, despite the fact that Rock was and still is an genre that thrives on youthful energy and rebelliousness.  And while it's often tricky to judge what is or isn't hip, UN-hipness is painfully easy for anyone to spot.

You can hear this out-of-touch mentality several places within the lyrics, such as when Kay refers to the music in the other room as a "Jump tune," which is terminology I've often heard associated with Big Band jazz but never to Rock and Roll.  She also refers to her record player as a "record machine," and then, seemingly in a half-hearted acknowledgment of the music's black roots, calls the genre "good for your soul."  But what really makes this song ludicrous is the fact that, although the song attempts to be a waltz/rock and roll hybrid, it sounds NOTHING LIKE ROCK AND ROLL, from that era or any other.  Starr is backed up by an entire wind section and a chorus, but no electric instruments; there's a little boogie woogie in the piano part, and the drummer contributes some Rhythm & Blues boom-chuck in the chorus, but that's really the full extent of musical ingenuity in the arrangement.  Ironically, the parents who surely made this song a #1 hit (no self-respecting Rock and Roll fan would have bought one) in order to bond with their children were actually dancing to updated music from their own generation:  it's definitely more Lawrence Welk than Bill Haley. 

At any rate, the premise of the song is ludicrous when you really think about it.  Then as now, Rock and Roll is rarely waltzed to because precious little of it was ever written in 3/4, which once again confirms my suspicion that the writers of this song had no idea what teenagers were actually listening to.  And although Kay herself seems entranced by Mom and Pop, singing "They looked so cute to me / I love the Rock and Roll Waltz," I'm fairly certain that most teens would run screaming out of the room upon beholding such an embarrassing sight, along with cries of "I hate this stupid house!" from behind a promptly slammed door.

There's really nothing left for me to add on this one except to note that Kay Starr just might be the oldest living solo artist to have a single on the Billboard 100 pop charts; I haven't made a truly comprehensive survey of the entire post-1955 list, but the fact remains that, having outlived nearly all of her contemporaries, Ms. Starr is 86 years old and still going strong. Cher has a long way to go to catch up...

Up next:  Revenge of the Squares, part 1.