One of the reasons I like Ted Gioia’s Substack is that even when I’m not overly interested in the topic of any particular post, I usually learn something:
I’ve tried to identify the turning point — the moment when the rules changed. By my measure it happened one night in 1958.
Let’s revisit that fateful day …
One Friday evening in 1958, record producer George Avakian sat down in front of his TV set, and watched an episode of the popular detective show 77 Sunset Strip. This chance incident would have surprising ramifications in the music business for decades to come.
A few minutes into the episode, the record producer decided that one of the actors on the show looked and talked like a rock star. His name was Edd Byrnes and he played a hipster character named Kookie.
Kookie parked cars at a Hollywood nightclub in the show, and acted very cool. He had the right look and said witty hipster-ish things. The TV audience loved him, especially younger viewers.
Check Kookie out and decide for yourself.
There was just one tiny problem. Byrnes wasn’t a musician.
But Avakian didn’t worry about this. “I was sure that kids would like his talk and his looks, especially a way he had of looking out of the corner of his eye,” he later recalled. “And — the real clincher for his popularity with kids — parents would loathe him.”
They didn’t have Auto-Tune back then, but studio engineers had a few tricks to fix vocal imperfections. They knew how to splice together different takes, or make slight alterations in tape speed.
But when Byrnes did an audition for the label, it was bad. It was scary bad. This promising rock star had no sense of pitch. He had no range. He couldn’t even stay in rhythm with his accompanist.
No technology could fix this mess.
Record producer Avakian was no fool. During an illustrious career, he worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, and Keith Jarrett, among others. He had collaborated with genius, and now he had someone on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Maybe this situation is commonplace nowadays, but back in 1958 the record business believed in something called musical talent. Avakian’s bold decision to ignore that variable marks a historic moment in our culture.
Anybody else would have walked away from this looming disaster. They would have feared not just commercial failure but a tainted reputation. You don’t want to be the exec to greenlight a recording by somebody with zero musical ability.
But in a moment of brilliant insight, Avakian decided that Kookie didn’t need to sing, he could just rap. Of course, rapping wasn’t even a concept back in those days. But it sorta existed without a name. Deejays at radio stations often introduced a song by speaking in a hip tone of voice over the intro to a song.
Kookie would do the same. He would speak or rap his part, while somebody else did the actual singing. Connie Stevens, another Hollywood talent with the right look — and a slightly better voice — could handle the actual vocals.
