Rock and roll grew out of rhythm and blues, country and gospel in the years after World War Two, then spent the next four decades refusing to sit still. These stories follow the pioneers who built it, the bands who reshaped it, the songs and albums that marked its turns, and the nights, some triumphant, some chaotic, that fans still argue about. Where a famous story turns out to be a myth, or only half true, these tiles say so plainly.
Every tile in a Rock and Roll game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1The gospel guitarist called the godmother of rock and roll
On the tile: Rosetta Tharpe1944-1951
Sister Rosetta Tharpe played electric guitar in gospel songs at a time when church audiences did not expect showmanship, and she gave them plenty. Her 1944 recording Strange Things Happening Every Day became the first gospel record to cross over, reaching No. 2 in April 1945 on Billboard's race records chart, the forerunner of the rhythm and blues chart. By 1951 she was famous enough to draw a paying crowd of about 20,000 to a Washington, D.C., ballpark for her own wedding. Scholars now hear in that 1944 record the architecture of rock and roll: electric lead guitar, a driving backbeat, ecstatic vocals.
2The original Hound Dog singer got a flat $500 fee
On the tile: Big Mama1952-1953
Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton was the first to record Hound Dog, growling out Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's new song at a Los Angeles session in August 1952. Released the following year, her version spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart and sold about half a million copies. Thornton's payment for the session was a single flat fee of $500, and she said she never saw another check from it. When Elvis Presley recorded his own version in 1956, it made him a fortune that never reached the song's originator.
3The Black hillbilly who reworked a country fiddle tune
On the tile: Chuck Berry1955
Before he was famous, Chuck Berry worked the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, slipping country and western numbers into a blues set. By his own account, his mostly Black audience began whispering, "Who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?" They laughed first and then asked for more, and white customers started turning up too. When Berry reached Chess Records in 1955, Leonard Chess passed over his blues material and seized on a reworking of the western swing fiddle tune Ida Red. Retitled Maybellene, it hit No. 1 on the rhythm and blues chart and No. 5 on the pop chart.
4The raunchy lyric a stranger cleaned up in minutes
On the tile: Little Richard1955
When Little Richard cut Tutti Frutti at a New Orleans studio in September 1955, his lyrics were far too explicit for radio. Producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell sent for Dorothy LaBostrie, a local songwriter, and asked her to rewrite the words on the spot. She replaced the raw line with "Tutti frutti, aw rooty," and with the session running short, Richard laid down the clean version in three takes, about fifteen minutes' work. LaBostrie's name went on the label beside his, and the record became one of rock and roll's founding documents.
5The piano record often called rock's first million-seller
On the tile: Fats Domino1949-1951
In 1949 a New Orleans piano player named Antoine Fats Domino recorded The Fat Man, built on rolling piano triplets and a wailing wah-wah vocal break. Some historians call it the first rock and roll record, though that label has been given to a dozen other songs, since the style grew gradually out of rhythm and blues rather than starting on one date. What is not disputed is its popularity: within a few years it became one of the earliest rock-styled records to sell a million copies, an early sign of the audience rock and roll was about to win.
6The DJ who put a new name on an old kind of music
On the tile: Alan Freed1951-1954
Alan Freed did not invent the phrase rock and roll, which had circulated for decades as blues slang, but no one did more to attach it to a new sound. In 1951, sponsored by a Cleveland record store owner who had noticed white teenagers buying rhythm and blues records, Freed began playing that music on WJW radio under the on-air name Moondog, branding the show rock and roll to make Black artists' records sound fresh to a broader audience. His nightly broadcasts turned Cleveland into an early center of the genre and made Freed one of its most powerful tastemakers.
On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley was struggling through a Sun Records session with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black when, during a break, he started fooling around with That's All Right, a blues song by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. Moore and Black jumped in, and producer Sam Phillips, hearing it through an open control room door, stuck his head out and told them to back up and start again so he could record it. That loose take became Elvis's first single two weeks later. Crudup was credited as the song's composer, but he fought for royalties into the 1970s and reportedly never received them.
Wanda Jackson was already a rising country singer when she toured with Elvis Presley in 1955 and 1956, and he talked her into trying rockabilly. She became one of the first women to record rock and roll, growling her way through songs like Let's Have a Party, released as a single in 1960 and her first Top 40 pop hit. Her stage clothes became a trademark too: tight sheaths on rhinestone straps, trimmed with short silk fringe and sewn by her seamstress mother. Jackson is remembered today as the Queen of Rockabilly.
9The crash, and the rival who held his record back
On the tile: Carl Perkins1956
Carl Perkins wrote Blue Suede Shoes in December 1955 and cut it at Sun two days later. It became the first record to reach the top, or very near it, on all three national charts then compiled: pop, country and rhythm and blues. Booked onto The Perry Como Show, he never made it. Before dawn on March 22, 1956, the band's car hit a truck, killing its driver and hospitalizing Perkins and his brother Jay, the rhythm guitarist. Elvis Presley visited them and held back his own version rather than steal their thunder. Carl and the band played the Como show that May, Jay in a neck brace.
Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson formed a group with cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine under the name the Pendletones, a nod to the wool Pendleton shirts popular with surfers. Dennis was the only member who actually surfed, but the group recorded a song called Surfin' anyway. When Candix Records released it in November 1961, it carried a name they had not chosen: the Beach Boys, coined by label promotion man Russ Regan to tie them to the surf craze. By most accounts nobody asked the band first, and members have told different stories about how they found out.
2The famous rejection that nobody quotes correctly
On the tile: The Beatles1962Legend
On January 1, 1962, the Beatles auditioned for Decca Records in north London and were turned down about a month later, in person over coffee. In his 1964 memoir, manager Brian Epstein quoted label executive Dick Rowe telling him, "Groups of four guitarists are on the way out." Decca signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead, partly because they lived near London and cost less to bring in than a band from Liverpool. Rowe denied the remark to the end of his life, and the version everyone repeats, that guitar groups were finished, is not even the one Epstein wrote down.
The joke came first, and it was aimed at a band that never happened. In 1966 Jimmy Page talked about forming a supergroup with Jeff Beck and two members of the Who, and by one account Keith Moon and John Entwistle said the thing would go down like a lead balloon. That supergroup fell apart. Two years later Page assembled a new band after the Yardbirds split, revived the insult and made it grander: Led Zeppelin. Manager Peter Grant suggested dropping the a from lead so that anyone unfamiliar with the phrase would not say leed. They toured as the New Yardbirds first.
4The blues band named for the men who weren't its star
On the tile: Fleetwood Mac1967
When guitarist Peter Green left John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in 1967 to start his own blues band, he was its clear star and songwriter. Yet he named the group after its rhythm section, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, first using Fleetwood Mac as the title of an instrumental and then as the band's name, partly to entice the reluctant McVie away from a steady job with Mayall. Green played his last show in May 1970. Years later a very different lineup, built around Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, made the group famous under the names of two sidemen.
On a Tuesday night in September 1964, Pete Townshend swung his guitar up in a low-ceilinged room at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, northwest London, and punched the headstock through the plaster. The top of the neck stayed behind when he pulled it out. Instead of stopping, he made a show of it, smashing what was left and throwing the pieces across the stage. He has said it was the laughter of art students at the front that made him angry enough to finish the job. Keith Moon upended his drum kit at another Railway date, and wrecked instruments became part of the act.
6The art student who designed his band's royal crest
On the tile: Queen1973
Before he was Freddie Mercury, he was Farrokh Bulsara, a graphic design student who left London's Ealing Art College with a diploma in 1969. He put that training to work on his own band's crest, drawn shortly before Queen's first album in 1973. It combines the zodiac signs of all four members: two lions for the Leos, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, a crab for Brian May's Cancer, and two fairies for Mercury's own sign, Virgo. A crown sits inside a large Q, and an enormous phoenix spreads above the whole design. Versions of it have appeared on Queen's records ever since.
7The four strangers who all took a Beatle's fake name
On the tile: The Ramones1974
None of the original Ramones were related, and not one of them was born a Ramone. Bassist Dee Dee Ramone borrowed the surname from Paul McCartney, who had briefly checked into hotels as "Paul Ramon" during an early 1960s tour, before the Beatles had settled on their name. Dee Dee liked the sound of it, and Johnny, Joey and Tommy adopted it too, casting the band as a family of brothers despite sharing no blood relation. Formed in 1974, the Ramones stripped rock and roll down to simple chords and speed, counted in by Dee Dee's trademark shout of one, two, three, four.
8The band name that came off the back of a sewing machine
On the tile: AC/DC1973Legend
Guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young needed a name for their new Australian band in 1973. By the family's account, their sister Margaret pointed out the letters AC/DC, for alternating current and direct current, on the adapter on the back of her sewing machine. The brothers took it: the initials suggested the raw energy and power-driven performances they were after. The lightning bolt that now splits the two halves of the logo came later, first showing up on a 1977 album sleeve. Margaret also suggested that Angus, still a teenager, perform in a schoolboy's uniform.
9The amp he sliced open to escape a clean guitar sound
On the tile: The Kinks1964
Clean guitar tone drove Dave Davies crazy. Amplifiers in the early 1960s all sounded the same to him, so the Kinks guitarist went after his little green Elpico amp, first with pins and then with a single-edged Gillette razor blade, cutting right around the speaker cone. He hit a chord and got a torn, buzzing roar. Run into a larger Vox AC30, that ruined speaker became the guitar sound on You Really Got Me in 1964, a record one musicologist calls the first hit built around power chords. Townshend, Beck and Page all took notice.
Bill Haley and His Comets cut Rock Around the Clock in April 1954 in the forty minutes left over from another song's session, and Decca released it as a B-side. It sold briefly, then stalled. The next year director Richard Brooks, who had heard it on his car radio, ran it under the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle, a drama about juvenile delinquency, and young audiences went wild while their elders were appalled at the film's violence. On July 9, 1955, it became the first rock and roll record to top Billboard's pop chart, where it stayed eight weeks.
2The only rock song NASA sent into interstellar space
On the tile: Johnny B Goode1977
When Carl Sagan's team chose ninety minutes of music for the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, meant to introduce Earth to whoever might someday find it, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode was the only rock and roll track selected. Folklorist Alan Lomax, one of the advisers, argued against it, calling rock music adolescent. Sagan replied that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet. Creative director Ann Druyan later said the song stood for motion, for getting somewhere you have never been with the odds against you. Both Voyager probes are now in interstellar space.
3The hoax that turned an album cover into a funeral
On the tile: Paul Is Dead1969Myth busted
On October 12, 1969, a caller told Detroit DJ Russ Gibb that playing the Beatles' Revolution 9 backward turned number nine into turn me on, dead man, and that Paul McCartney had secretly died. Two days later a University of Michigan student published a satirical review in the Michigan Daily piling on clues he had invented, and the rumor went national. Fans read the new Abbey Road cover as a funeral: John in white, Ringo in black as the undertaker, George in denim as the gravedigger, a barefoot Paul out of step as the corpse. McCartney, alive throughout, later titled a live album Paul Is Live.
Since the mid-1990s, fans have played Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon alongside the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz with the movie's sound off, starting the record at the MGM lion's roar, and claimed dozens of moments line up. David Gilmour blamed some guy with too much time on his hands. Roger Waters dismissed it outright, and Nick Mason called it absolute nonsense with nothing to do with Oz. Engineer Alan Parsons noted that the studio had no way to play a videotape, and that any record played against a muted film will seem to fit somewhere.
5The ballad accused of hiding a message in reverse
On the tile: Stairway1971-1982Myth busted
Beginning in 1981, Christian DJ Michael Mills told radio audiences that Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, released in 1971, hid satanic messages when played backward. On April 27, 1982, a California Assembly committee in Sacramento heard examples on a small cassette machine, weighing a bill from Assemblyman Phil Wyman that would have required warning labels on records with backward messages. The committee put off its vote to let the record industry testify. Robert Plant said the song was written with every best intention, and Led Zeppelin's label answered that its turntables played in only one direction: forward.
Bruce Springsteen wrote Born in the U.S.A. from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran who comes home to no work and no welcome. In his memoir he called it a protest song. The pounding chorus and the big flag on the album cover led many listeners to hear a celebration instead. Campaigning in Hammonton, New Jersey, in September 1984, President Ronald Reagan praised the message of hope in the songs of New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. Days later in Pittsburgh, Springsteen wondered aloud what the president's favorite album was, and guessed it was not Nebraska.
7The three-minute single that took months and a fortune
On the tile: Brian Wilson1966
Brian Wilson spent February to September 1966 building Good Vibrations out of dozens of short recorded fragments, moving between Hollywood studios to catch different sounds, among them an electro-theremin. He and his engineers fitted the best takes together like a puzzle, using more than 90 hours of tape. Estimates of the cost run into the tens of thousands of dollars, more than a typical pop album took, and the record picked up a nickname that stuck: pocket symphony. Released that October, it reached No. 1 in the United States and topped the charts in Britain.
8The banned single that broke through on live television
On the tile: Jerry Lee1957
Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On in February 1957, and when it came out that April most radio stations refused to play it. Everything changed on July 28, 1957, when Lewis performed it on NBC's The Steve Allen Show, hammering the keys in front of a prime-time audience until the piano stool went stumbling across the floor. He was a national star overnight. The single went on to reach No. 1 on both the country and rhythm and blues charts, and No. 3 on the pop chart.
Bob Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower as a spare, acoustic song for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Within weeks Jimi Hendrix was in the studio rebuilding it as a swirling electric epic, released in 1968 on Electric Ladyland, and it became one of his signature recordings. Dylan has played it Hendrix's way ever since, from his first live performances of it onward. In the booklet of his 1985 retrospective Biograph he wrote that he had liked Hendrix's record and had done it that way since Hendrix died, and that singing it always feels like a tribute to him.
1The hips America's television only heard, not saw
On the tile: Waist-Up ElvisJanuary 1957
By the time Elvis Presley made his third and final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on January 6, 1957, he had become controversial enough that CBS censors demanded he be shot from the waist up. Viewers at home got a chest-and-shoulders Elvis while the studio audience screamed at whatever was happening below the frame, and television carried the sound without the picture. Sullivan closed the night by telling the country that Presley was "a real decent, fine boy," and that no big name had ever been a pleasanter guest on his show.
2The Sunday night that introduced a British invasion
On the tile: BeatlemaniaFebruary 1964
When the Beatles landed at New York's Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964, some 3,000 screaming fans were waiting, and the welcome came close to a riot. Two nights later an estimated 73 million people watched the band play The Ed Sullivan Show, instantly the most-watched television event of its time. The broadcast is widely credited with launching Beatlemania across the country and opening the door for the wave of British rock acts that crossed the Atlantic over the next several years.
3The plugged-in set nobody can agree on the reaction to
On the tile: Dylan Plugs InJuly 1965Legend
On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and a backing band, opening with Maggie's Farm. Part of the audience booed, and for decades the story was told as folk purists punishing their hero for betraying acoustic tradition. Witnesses and historians still disagree on the cause. Festival organizer Pete Seeger blamed the sound, saying it was so distorted nobody could make out a word Dylan sang, while others point to the electric set's abrupt end after just three songs.
4The festival that never reached the town in its name
On the tile: Yasgur's FarmAugust 1969
The Woodstock festival of August 1969 never took place in Woodstock, New York. Organizers were turned away by the town of Wallkill about a month before the gates were due to open, and dairy farmer Max Yasgur rescued them, renting them his 600-acre farm in Bethel, some 50 miles from the town the festival is named for. Neighbors were not charmed; one sign read, "Don't buy Yasgur's milk. He loves the hippies." Organizers expected 50,000 people. More than 400,000 came, cementing the name of a place most of them had never heard of.
Early on February 3, 1959, a chartered plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson crashed in an Iowa field minutes after taking off from Mason City, killing all three and pilot Roger Peterson. The musicians had been crossing the Midwest on the Winter Dance Party tour, and Holly chartered the flight to escape another night on an unheated bus. Valens had won his seat on a coin flip. The phrase now attached to it did not exist yet. Don McLean coined it twelve years later in his 1971 song American Pie.
Hoping to close out 1969 with a free California concert, the Rolling Stones settled on the Altamont Speedway only two days before the show, and Hells Angels worked the stage as informal security in exchange for $500 worth of beer. The arrangement broke down badly in front of a crowd of about 300,000. Fights broke out near the stage as the day went on, and during the Stones' set a young concertgoer, Meredith Hunter, was fatally stabbed. Many historians mark the day as a grim bookend to the decade's optimism.
7The benefit show one drummer played twice in a day
On the tile: Live AidJuly 1985
On July 13, 1985, Live Aid staged simultaneous benefit concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia for African famine relief, raising more than $100 million and reaching more than a billion viewers in 110 countries. Phil Collins played his own set in London that afternoon, then took a helicopter, the Concorde and another helicopter to Philadelphia to play a second set and drum behind a Led Zeppelin reunion, the only artist to appear at both shows. Queen's Wembley set was later voted rock's greatest live performance in an industry poll.
8The under-the-table fees that ended a famous career
On the tile: Payola1959-1960
By the late 1950s, record labels routinely paid radio disc jockeys under the table to play certain songs, a practice that came to be called payola. When Congress investigated in November 1959, 335 disc jockeys admitted taking more than $263,000 in "consulting fees." Alan Freed refused on principle to sign a statement saying he had never accepted payola, was fired by WABC, and was later charged with commercial bribery, ending his broadcasting career. Dick Clark, who had divested his music-business holdings at ABC's direction before he testified, cooperated with investigators and kept his career.
At the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend of the Who argued backstage over the running order. Both men finished their sets by wrecking their guitars, and neither wanted to follow the other. John Phillips suggested they settle it with a coin toss. Townshend won, so the Who went on first and smashed their gear. Left to top that, Hendrix closed his own set during Wild Thing by laying his guitar on the stage, dousing it in lighter fluid and setting it alight.