Rock Around the Clock: how Bill Haley's song became a hit

Bill Haley
Bill Haley Credit: Rex Features

It is rather amusing to think that it was a middle-aged man who wrote the lyrics that stirred up a generation of teenagers in the Fifties.

When Philadelphia-born Max C Friedman penned the words "One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock, rock", as the opening line of a novelty number, he would have had no inkling of the staggering success in store for his song We're Gonna Rock Around the Clock Tonight. Friedman's song shot to number one on the US pop charts on July 9, 1955.

The song had actually been put on vinyl 15 months before – on April 12, 1954 – by Bill Haley and the Comets, who recorded the two minutes and eight seconds long song (with the title shortened to Rock Around the Clock) that became the biggest-selling UK single in the Fifties, and is reported to have sold around 40 million copies in all.

Bill Haley and The Comets
Bill Haley and The Comets Credit: Rex Features

 

Haley and his band recorded the song only as a late add-on to their rather odd A-side single called Thirteen Women And Only One Man In Town, a track that was about a nuclear bomb blast that leaves just 14 people alive. The single, released in May 1954, sold 75,000 copies and would have remained forgotten had it not been for a 10-year-old boy in Los Angeles who kept playing the b-side.

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The boy, Peter Ford, was the son of actor Glenn Ford, who was due to appear in the teenage-delinquency film called The Blackboard Jungle, set in an inner city high school The Blackboard Jungle. Ford, who starred in the Oscar-nominated film alongside a young Sidney Poitier, mentioned it to director Richard Brooks and he decided to play Rock Around the Clock over the opening credits of the film.

Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier in the 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle
Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier in the 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle Credit: Reuters

 

It sparked a buying frenzy and a million copies were bought in March 1955 alone. It was the first single by a rock 'n' roll band to top the charts. It stayed in the charts for 24 weeks, eight of them at No 1. Marshall Lytle, who was the original bassist for The Comets, recalled the moment he knew they had something special on their hands. 

"We were travelling on the New York Thruway from Buffalo to Boston to do a television show. I turned the radio on and Rock Around The Clock was playing," Lytle recalled. "This was a new Cadillac that Bill had just bought. It had one of those Selectrix dials where you just push the bar and it goes to the next station. I pushed the bar and it was playing again on another radio station. I pushed the bar again and it was playing again. At one given moment, it was playing five times on the dial. Within five minutes, I must've heard it a dozen times. I said: 'This is a monster hit.' When you hear a song that many times on that many different radio stations, you know damn well that it was a monster hit."

The song had been recorded in 35 minutes and Haley's vocals were almost inaudible on the first take, so a Decca Records engineer painstakingly spliced together segments from the only two takes that had been recorded. Shrewdly, the engineer kept the powerful sound of the guitar solo of Danny Cedrone, who had not had time to work up a new solo for the instrumental break so had re-purposed one from an earlier Haley recording called Rock This Joint.

Rock Around the Clock is only 2 minutes 8 seconds long
Rock Around the Clock is only 2 minutes 8 seconds long Credit: Rex Features

 

His guitar riff on Rock Around the Clock became a classic rock music solo. It helped that Haley, who was a former yodeller in a cowboy band named The Down Homers, knew how to sing energetic lyrics.

But for all the good fortune that made it a hit – one that has been featured in 14 films and recorded in 35 languages – the song is shrouded in tragedy, too, because Cedrone, who was paid $21 for his work on this track, fell down a staircase a month after the song was released and died of a broken neck at the age of 33.

 

Haley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and The Comets were inducted in 2012. Haley and the remaining Comets went on playing the song until the singer's death on February 9, 1981, aged 55.

Haley influenced a generation of singers (it's no coincidence that  Tom Jones and Cliff Richard both chose the song when they were guests on Desert Island Discs) and it's place in music history is without question. The singer from Michigan once said: "I was always proud of Rock Around the Clock. It sold many millions of records and rock and roll was born."  

 

 

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