Tom Breihan - The Number Ones

T HIS STORY, LIKE MANY, STARTS WITH A TEENAGE GIRL . Sharon Sheeley came from Newport Beach, California, and did a little modeling as a kid, but she really wanted to write songs. When she was seventeen, Sheeley had an affair with twenty-year-old Don Everly, the older of the two Everly Brothers, and it didnt end well. (He was married.) So Sheeley channeled some of her heartbreak into writing a song called Poor Little Fool: Id played this game with other hearts, but I never thought Id see / The day that someone else would play loves foolish game with me. It was the first song shed ever written. Later, Sheeley claimed that Poor Little Fool started as an English-class assignment and that her teacher flunked her for it.

Ricky Nelson was a month younger than Sheeley. Nelson, one of the original teen idols, was probably the only fifties rock n roll icon whod been famous since before the birth of rock n roll. Rickys parents, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, were the stars of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet , a radio sitcom that started in 1944, when Ricky was four. (Ozzie, a former college football star at Rutgers, had been a soft-jazz bandleader, and hed created The Adventures after he and Harriet became regulars on Red Skeltons radio show.) Ricky was nine when he joined the shows cast. He was twelve when The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet made the leap to television. And he was seventeen when he became a rock n roll star.

Nelson recorded his first single, a cover of Fats Dominos Im Walkin, in 1957. Nelson sang his version of the song on Ozzie and Harriet , and it became a hit. More hits followed. Sharon Sheeley lived pretty close to the Nelson family home in Laguna Beach. One night, Sheeley drove into the Nelsons driveway and claimed that her car had broken down. When Ricky invited her inside, she told him that she had a song shed written for Elvis Presley but that she really wanted him to record it. (According to some versions of the story, she told Nelson that her godfather had written Poor Little Fool.)

Ricky Nelson didnt love Poor Little Fool at first, but he loved the idea of being offered a song that Elvis Presley wanted. He released Poor Little Fool as an album track on his self-titled 1958 LP, and when radio DJs started to play the song, Imperial Records, Nelsons label, released it as a single. Around the same time, the music-industry trade magazine Billboard combined its singles-sales and radio-play charts into one list, calling it the Hot 100. When Billboard ran its first Hot 100 list, Poor Little Fool happened to be the most popular song in the United States.

Poor Little Fool and the Hot 100 both arrived at a sort of changing-of-the-guard moment. A little more than two years earlier, a new hybrid sound called rock n roll had captured young Americas imagination. Bill Haley and the Comets had an international hit with (Were Gonna) Rock Around the Clock, an anarchic frenzy of a song that combined country twang with rhythm-and-blues (R&B) push, both played at out-of-control speed. Soon afterward, Elvis Presley showed up, looking and acting like sex incarnate.

A small army of fired-up hornballs followedJerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard. Black music and white music were combining into strange new shapes. The sound was wild and caveman simple and nakedly sexual, and it ripped a hole in the space-time continuum. An instant generation gap was created. But that excitement couldnt last.

Six months before Poor Little Fool became the Hot 100s first #1 hit, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson), and a pilot named Roger Peterson died in a plane crash. Three months before Poor Little Fool hit #1, Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and the resulting scandal derailed his career. Four months after Poor Little Fool hit #1, Chuck Berry would be arrested for transporting a minor across state lines; his career would never recover. (Berry would eventually land one #1 hit of his ownfourteen years later, with a genuinely awful novelty song about his penis.) And two years after Poor Little Fool, Elvis Presley, a man with plenty of #1 hits of his own, would join the army. (Presley would continue to make hits for a few years, but he would largely trade away sexed-up rock n roll excitement for respectable B-movie irrelevance.) The same year that Presley joined the army, rockabilly star Eddie Cochran, who was engaged to Sharon Sheeley at the time, died in a car crash. (Sheeley was riding in the car, too. She broke her pelvis but survived.) Those losses and career cataclysms added up, and the sudden, violent, explosive energy of that first rock n roll boom turned into something else.

Ricky Nelson was the new prototype of that something else. He was cute and friendly and approachable. Thanks to Ozzie and Harriet , he was familiar. With a song like Poor Little Fool, Nelson could portray himself as a sensitive, heartbroken kid. Nelsons peers werent Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry; they were clean-cut young rock n roll crooners like Paul Anka and Pat Boone. Those singers became the prototypes for a wave of good-looking white boys who sang cute songs about crushes and breakups: Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell. Like Ricky Nelson, many of those teen idols became familiar through the new medium of television; they cut their teeth on American Bandstand , the daily dance-party show that went national in 1957, hosted by the squeaky-clean former radio newscaster Dick Clark. With this new wave, rock n roll became pop music. And in a way, thats where the story of pop music, in its modern form, begins.

For a long time, Billboard magazine has chronicled pop music, modern and otherwise. Billboard goes back more than a century. When the magazine began publishing in 1894, it covered the advertising industry. At that time, advertising meant posters pasted up on walls, so thats why its called Billboard . Before the new century started, Billboard began to pay attention to the glamorous world of entertainment: fairs, circuses, burlesque, vaudeville. When phonographs came into being, and then jukeboxes, Billboard was there. Billboard published its first chart, covering sales of 78-RPM singles, in 1940. When Billboard published its first weekly Music Popularity Chart in July 1940, the #1 single in America was Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestras Ill Never Smile Again. The chart listing didnt mention that songs vocalist, a young singer named Frank Sinatra.