| Song Name - | "Rocket '88'" |
| Artist - | Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats |
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"Rocket '88'"—one of the most familiar rhythm and blues records of the pre-rock and roll era, and often cited as the first rock and roll disc—is something of an enigma: it isn't about a rocket; Jackie Brenston (credited as the songwriter) didn't compose it; and the Delta Cats never existed! In fact, "Rocket '88'" was written by Ike Turner. Years before he met Anna Mae Bullock (aka Tina Turner), Ike Turner was a blues musician from Clarksville, Mississippi. He began working as a musician at age nine, and in his teens he talked his way into a job as a disc jockey on a local radio station. He also picked up extra money as a studio pianist for rhythm and blues singers. Though he is most commonly associated with the guitar, Turner is also an excellent pianist; he learned from the barrelhouse legend Pinetop Perkins. His connections with record labels and radio stations in the region led to work as a talent scout for a number of small, independent record companies in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. One of these was Chess Records, a fledgling studio run by a fellow DJ and audio engineer named Sam Phillips (who several years later gave a recording contract to a local white kid named Elvis Presley). Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, worked frequently in Memphis. In 1951 they went to Chess with what they felt was a hit song. "Rocket '88'" was a paean to the Oldsmobile 88, a powerful automobile with a V-8 engine that made it faster (and thus cooler) than anything else on the road. Turner borrowed both the idea and the tune from "Cadillac Boogie," a hit for rhythm and blues star Joe Liggens in 1947. Such "re-imagining" of successful records was a tradition in the blues, as were songs about cars and women. As he was an ambivalent vocalist, Turner had his saxophone player, Jackie Brenston, sing lead. Turner's powerful boogie-woogie piano introduction gave the track a hard, muscular feel and established its assertive rhythmic presence. The driving triplets and overblown, "booting" tenor sax solo also lent a sense of momentum, a combination employed in most early rock and roll records. Phillips mistakenly gave songwriting credit to Brenston—who may have written some of the lyrics—and re-named the group to feature the vocalist. "Rocket '88'" seems all the more modern because of the fuzzy and distorted sound of the guitar. On the way to the recording studio one of the band's speakers fell off the top of the car, tearing the paper driver cone—the part of a speaker that vibrates to produce the frequency being amplified. The speaker still worked, however, and Sam Phillips discovered that the damaged speaker produced an interesting "dirty" guitar sound that nicely complemented the "booting" saxophone. Later, guitarist Link Wray would reproduce this "fuzz tone" on his 1958 hit "Rumble" by deliberately perforating his speaker cone with a sharp pencil. |
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"All the Blues, All the Time"
