Bobby was rebelling against not only his own image but against the musical times. Rock and roll had taken over the music business. A musical amalgam that comprised many strains of American music -- rhythm and blues, country and western, gospel, jazz, folk and swing -- its strong sexual overtones (in the black community, "rock and roll" was a common term for both dancing and sexual intercourse) had made it greatly appealing to white teenagers. Frank Sinatra was one of those who expressed his distaste for it (and, indirectly, at his chief rival, Elvis Presley) in 1957:
It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd, intact, plain dirty, lyrics . . . It manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.
But Sinatra was in the rearguard. In 1954, "Sh-Boom," a rock-and-roll song recorded by both a black group, The Chords, and a white one, The Crew Cuts, became the fifth best-selling song of the year and the first rock-and-roll hit. In 1955, 12 of the year's top 50 hits were rock-and-roll songs. Among them was Bill Haley and the Comets "Rock Around the Clock," which was featured in the film Blackboard Jungle. The record reached the top of the charts and sold 15 million copies by the late 1960s, becoming one of the best-selling single records of all time.
From 1956 to 1960, black artists such as Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Little Willie John, Fats Domino, and the Platters rose to fame and fortune. White singers, most notably Presley, borrowed black styles and utilized them to catapult themselves into the ranks of the new icons. And the white rock-and-roll singers, like Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and Pat Boone, were popular with their cover versions of black hits, sometimes more popular than the original artists were. Presley's blend of rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and country music led to 14 consecutive gold records from 1956 to 1968.
Record sales soared. With the success of rock and roll, annual revenues climbed from $219 million in 1953 to $277 million in 1955, reaching a staggering $600 million in 1960. By 1955, the ballad singers were already beginning to lose their hold on the public. The record companies, Tony Bennett says, "started going for this obsolescence idea. They didn't want records that would last, they didn't want lasting artists, they wanted lots of [consecutive] artists. So they started discarding people like me and Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein."
Within a few years, the impact of rhythm and blues had totally transformed American popular music, and Tin Pan Alley was displaced as the music center of the universe.
This was the high tide that Bobby was swimming against.
Bobby played a key role in creating the new album. "Now that he had 'Splish Splash,'" Hesh Wasser says, "I was there with him when it was a matter of him searching, trying to figure out where he was going to go, not knowing what would happen. After he and Dick Behrke gave up the apartment on West 71st Street, Bobby was living with his family again on Baruch Place. He couldn't survive without them. He needed to have medical care; if he was sick, he had to be under constant care, he had to be watched. So he was depending on them. It was Charlie who mainly took care of him. Bobby couldn't take the subways because he couldn't walk up the stairs; Charlie would drive into Manhattan and pick him up."
