One of a Kind Joyeful Finds Friday, Rock Around the Clock

Wow, what a find I have this week! My good friend Michael Rush has published a memoir about the birth of Rock “N” Roll. This book, “Still Rockin’ Around the Clock” is written by his friend, Marshall Lytle, the lively and often-imitated bass player who was an original member of Bill Haley & The Comets. At the age of 76, Marshall is one of the last surviving stars of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s earliest days and still performs regularly throughout the United States and Europe. Marshall’s highly entertaining and informative memoir contains never-before-heard anecdotes about Elvis, DJ Alan Freed and many others, including, of course, the often erratic and always colorful Bill Haley himself. Of particular interest to long-time Rock ‘n’ Roll fans, the book details the inside story of recording Rock Around The Clock, widely known as “The National Anthem of Rock ‘n’ Roll” – a song which to this day is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest selling single by any group in history (with estimates ranging anywhere from 25 million to 80 million copies).
Take a look and listen at Bill Haley\'s Original Comets

“One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK… ”

Nearly everyone alive knows the opening line to Rock Around the Clock, a tune so popular that not only was it the first Rock ‘n’ Roll song to hit the top of the charts, and the first ever to be used as a movie soundtrack (1955’s Blackboard Jungle with Glenn Ford and a young Sidney Poitier), but to this very day the Guinness Book of World Records lists it as the biggest-selling single by any group in history – 80 million copies by some estimates!

And yet amazingly little is known about Bill Haley & His Comets, the indisputable “First Band of Rock ‘n’ Roll” whose sensational hit paved the way for Elvis, the Beatles, and everyone and everything that came after. Really now, what do you know about Bill Haley & His Comets? (Chances are you may not even know that they came from – that’s right – Chester, Pennsylvania!)

That is all about to change.

Enter Marshall Lytle. His name may not sound familiar to you, but you know him very well. That catchy “clickity-clack” rhythm you hear all through Rock Around The Clock? That’s Marshall Lytle. Only he is not playing the drums – he is slapping a bass. Lytle was the original bass player for Bill Haley & His Comets, and the instrument he used on that recording now hangs proudly in Orlando Florida’s Hard Rock Café. But as for Lytle himself, the clock is still rockin’ after more than 50 fun-filled years and, it seems, the party is just getting started.

The happy-go-lucky Lytle, now in his mid-seventies, still performs year-round with other famous old-time rockers before enthusiastic packed houses on both sides of the Atlantic. No doubt all of them have had their adventures, but at the very moment Rock ‘n’ Roll was born it was Lytle who was present in the delivery room. There is a fascinating story to be told here, and – more than anyone else alive today – Lytle is just the man to tell it. Lytle’s new memoir Still Rockin’ Around the Clock is a rare first-hand, behind-the-scenes account of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s earliest days, coupled with sometimes-amusing, sometimes-heartbreaking, but always loving recollections of Lytle’s own life in and out of music through the years.
“Still Rockin’ Around the Clock” is available through Amazon.com.

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