Customer Reviews

Bill Haley: The Daddy of Rock and Roll

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John Swenson's book tells the story of how rock great Bill Haley rose to fame, and fell from same, in the time it takes to heat a TV dinner. Haley and his Comets could have been rich for life, but excessive spending, gross mismanagement, and a failure to anticipate yearly fiscal requests by the IRS led to reduced or nonexistent profits. After receiving no paychecks for an early-1960s Mexican tour, the Comets understandably shot off into the night, leaving Haley Comet-less, though saxophonist Rudy Pompilli eventually returned, remaining with his friend for many years until dying from lung cancer. Haley died shortly after from excessive drinking--or was it a brain tumor? The book does not make this very clear.

At any rate, in spite of the sad details of Haley's life and career, "The Daddy of Rock and Roll" is an entertaining and rich account, though this reader would have appreciated more punctuation--or, in some instances, any at all (are commas an endangered species?). And the book's musical analyses are the norm for rock journalism, i.e. totally inaccurate. "Rock Around the Clock" is simplicity itself--a twelve-bar blues preceded by an eight-bar verse, yet the blow-by-blow description given here is wrong in nearly every detail. And the notion that Haley pioneered something completely original is hard to accept in the light of so many pre-Haley rhythm and blues sides in the same mode by Hal Singer, Big Jay McNeely, The Johnson Brothers, and many more.