Rocket 88

The original version of the twelve-bar blues song was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, which hit number one on the R&B charts.[5] Brenston was Ike Turner's saxophonist and the Delta Cats were better known as Turner's Kings of Rhythm back-up band, who rehearsed at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Brenston sang the lead vocal and is listed as the songwriter, although Turner was the actual author.[6]

The song was a hymn of praise to the joys of the Oldsmobile "Rocket 88" automobile which had recently been introduced,[6] and was based on the 1947 song "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins.[7] It was also preceded and influenced by Pete Johnson's "Rocket 88 Boogie" Parts 1 and 2, an instrumental, originally recorded for the Los Angeles-based Swing Time Records label in 1949.

Drawing on the template of jump blues and swing combo music, Turner made the style even rawer, superimposing Brenston's enthusiastic vocals, his own piano, and tenor saxophone solos by 17-year-old Raymond Hill. Willie Sims played drums for the recording. The song also features one of the first examples of distortion, or fuzz guitar recorded, played by the band's guitarist Willie Kizart.[8]

The legend of how the sound came about says that Kizart's amplifier was damaged on Highway 61 when the band was driving from Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. An attempt was made to hold the cone in place by stuffing the amplifier with wadded newspapers, which unintentionally created a distorted sound; Phillips liked the sound and used it.[9][10] Peter Guralnick, in his biography of Sam Phillips has the amplifier being dropped from the car's trunk when the band got a flat tire and was digging out the spare.[11] Link Wray explains the development of his fuzz tone with a similar story.

The song was recorded in the Memphis studio of producer Sam Phillips in March 1951, and licensed to Chess Records for release.[12] The record was supposed to be credited to Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm featuring Jackie Brenston, but Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats was printed instead.[13] Turner blamed Phillips for this error since he is the one who licensed it to Chess.[13] Turner and the band were only paid $20 each (US$197 in 2019 dollars[14]) for the record,[15] with the exception of Brenston who sold the rights to Phillips for $910.[16]

"Rocket 88" was the third-biggest rhythm and blues single in jukebox plays of 1951, according to Billboard magazine, and ninth in record sales.[17] The single reached the top of the Best Selling R&B Records chart on June 9, 1951, and stayed there for three weeks.[18] It also spent two weeks at the top of the Most Played Juke Box R&B Records chart; spending a total of five weeks at number one on the R&B charts.

Ike Turner's piano intro on "Rocket 88" influenced Little Richard who later used it for his hit song "Good Golly, Miss Molly."[21]

Many writers have suggested that "Rocket 88" has strong claims to be called the first rock'n'roll record, but others take a more nuanced view. Charlie Gillett, writing in 1970 in The Sound of the City, said that it was "one of several records that people in the music business cite as 'the first rock'n'roll record.'"[22] It has been suggested by Larry Birnbaum that the idea that "Rocket 88" could be called "the first rock'n'roll record" first arose in the late 1960s; he argued that: "One of the reasons is surely that Kizart's broken amp anticipated the sound of the fuzzbox, which was in its heyday when 'Rocket 88' was rediscovered."[23]

Music historian Robert Palmer, writing in The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll in 1980, described it as an important and influential record. He noted that Hill's saxophone playing was "wilder and rougher" than on many jump blues records, and also emphasized the record's "fuzzed-out, overamplified electric guitar".[24] Writing in 1984, Nick Tosches, though rejecting the idea that it could be described as the first rock'n'roll record "any more than there is any first modern novel – the fact remains that the record in question was possessed of a sound and a fury the sheer, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before."[25] Echoing this view, Bill Dahl at AllMusic wrote:[26]

Determining the first actual rock & roll record is a truly impossible task. But you can't go too far wrong citing Jackie Brenston's 1951 Chess waxing of "Rocket 88, "is a seminal piece of rock's fascinating history with all the prerequisite elements firmly in place: practically indecipherable lyrics about cars, booze, and women; Raymond Hill's booting tenor sax, and a churning, beat-heavy rhythmic bottom.

Rock art historian Paul Grushkin wrote:[27]

Working from the raw material of post-big band jump blues, Turner had cooked up a mellow, cruising boogie with a steady-as-she-goes back beat now married to Brenston's enthusiastic, sexually suggestive vocals that spoke of opportunity, discovery and conquest. This all combined to create (as one reviewer later put it) "THE mother of all R&B songs for an evolutionary white audience".

Michael Campbell wrote, in Popular Music in America: And the Beat Goes On:[28]

Both the distortion and the relative prominence of the guitar were novel features of this recording – these are the elements that have earned "Rocket 88" so many nominations as "the first" rock and roll record. From our perspective, "Rocket 88" wasn't the first rock and roll record, because the beat is a shuffle rhythm, not the distinctive rock rhythm heard first in the songs of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Still, the distortion and the central place of the guitar in the overall sound certainly anticipate key features of rock style.

Ike Turner himself said, in an interview with Holger Petersen:[29]

I don't think that "Rocket 88" is rock'n'roll. I think that "Rocket 88" is R&B, but I think "Rocket 88" is the cause of rock and roll existing ... Sam Phillips got Dewey Phillips to play "Rocket 88" on his program – and this is like the first black record to be played on a white radio station – and, man, all the white kids broke out to the record shops to buy it. So that's when Sam Phillips got the idea, "Well, man, if I get me a white boy to sound like a black boy, then I got me a gold mine", which is the truth. So, that's when he got Elvis and he got Jerry Lee Lewis and a bunch of other guys and so they named it rock and roll rather than R&B and so this is the reason I think rock and roll exists – not that "Rocket 88" was the first one, but that was what caused the first one.

A second version of "Rocket 88" was recorded by the then-country music group Bill Haley and the Saddlemen (who would later rename themselves The Comets) at a recording session on June 14, 1951, after Turner recorded his version.[30] Haley's recording was a regional hit in the northeast United States and started Haley along the musical road which led to his own impact on popular music with "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954.

Upright bass player Marshall Lytle commented on his playing on this recording. "Before we had drums, I was practically the whole rhythm section. Since we didn't have any amplification, I slapped it so hard the neck had big grooves in it. Bill liked it loud, so he'd scream, 'Play loud!'"[31]

Those who subscribe to the definition of rock and roll as the melding of country music with rhythm and blues believe that Haley's version of the song, not the Turner/Brenston original, is the first rock and roll record. No matter which version deserves the accolade, "Rocket 88" is seen as a prototype rock and roll song in musical style and lineup, as well as its lyrical theme, in which an automobile serves as a metaphor for sexual prowess.[32]

• Birnbaum, Larry (2012). Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll. Lanham, Massachusetts: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0810886384.
• Campbell, Michael (2011). Popular Music in America: And The Beat Goes On (4th ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0810886384.
• Collis, John (2003). Ike Turner: King of Rhythm. London: Do Not Press. ISBN 978-1-904316-24-4.
• Dawson, Jim; Propes, Steve (1992). What Was the First Rock 'n' Roll Record?. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-12939-0.
• Gillett, Charlie (1970). The Sound of the City. Sphere Books. ISBN 978-0722138601.
• Guralnick, Peter (1994). Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. New York City: Little Brown. ISBN 978-0316332200.
• Guralnick, Peter (2015). Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’N’ Roll. New York City: Little Brown.
• Grushkin, Paul (2006). Rockin' Down the Highway: The Cars and People That Made Rock Roll. MBI Publishing. ISBN 978-0760322925.
• Palmer, Robert (1981a). The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll. Picador.
• Palmer, Robert (1981b). Deep Blues. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-006223-6.
• Palmer, Robert (1995). Rock & Roll: An Unruly History. ISBN 0-517-70050-6.
• Petersen, Holger (2011). Talking Music: Blues Radio and Roots Music. Insomniac Press. ISBN 978-1554830589.
• Shepard, John (2003). Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Performance and Production. Vol. II. Continuum International. ISBN 978-0826463227.
• Tosches, Nick (1984). Unsung Heroes of Rock'n'Roll. Secker & Warburg.
• Turner, Ike; Cawthorne, Nigel (1999). Takin' Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner. London: Virgin. ISBN 185-2278501.
• Turner, Tina; Loder, Kurt (1986). I, Tina: My Life Story (1st ed.). New York City: Morrow. ISBN 978-0688059491.
• Whitburn, Joel (2004). Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles: 1942–2004. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research.

Rocket "88" - Lyon on Mississippi Blues Trail

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