Chart position: #1 R&B
Category: R&B
Writer: Jackie Brenston
Label and number: Chess Records 1458, Chicago
Flipside: "Come Back Where You Belong"
When and where recorded: March 5, 1951, in Memphis, Tennessee
When released: April 1951
Why Important: It indirectly helped launch Sun Records, and the performance
itself, powered by a distorted electric guitar and a relentless boogie beat,
influenced countless records in the '50s.
Influenced by: Jimmy Liggins's "Cadillac Boogie" (1947)
Influenced: "Rocket 69" by Todd Rhodes (1952), "Buick 59" by the Medallions
(1954), "Good Golly, Miss Molly" by Little Richard (#10 Pop, 1958)
Important cover version: Bill Haley and the Saddlemen
The story behind the record: "You women have heard of jalopies, you've
heard the noise they make, well let me introduce you to my Rocket 88 . . . baby,
we'll ride in style." "Rocket 88" was a lot of firsts: the first hit recorded
at Sun Studio in Memphis, the first number one R&B record on the Chess label
out of Chicago, Ike Turner's first smash hit, and-to hear some folks tell it-the
first rock 'n' roll record, period. As was so often the case with groundbreaking
recordings, much of the magic of "Rocket 88" was accidental, from the busted
amplifier speaker cone that gave the band's guitar a wild, fuzzy sound, to the
reportedly last minute decision to record the song in the first place. As Ike
Turner expressed it, "Man, we were just puttin' something together to get some
gas to get back home!"
"Step into my rocket and don't be late, baby, we're pullin' out about half past eight." The real Rocket 88-the 1950 Hydra Matic Drive V-8 Oldsmobile 88, advertised as "the lowest priced car with 'rocket' engine"-was a chrome-sparkling symbol of the American postwar prosperity that even poor folks were getting a taste of at the time. World War II had created a civilian fascination with jet plane technology and futuristic designs, so auto makers insisted that tomorrow's engineering was within reach today in their 1950 models. GM billed the Olds 88 engine as "Futurmatic" and touted the sweeping contours of its "sleek Futuramic hood." Even a young black man in the segregated South could dream about driving a rocket, or as Brenston described it, "Movin' on out, oozin' and cruisin' along."
Jackie Brenston was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on either August 24, 1927 or August 15,1930, though the later date is probably correct because Brenston admitted that he lied about his age to get into the army in 1944. Clarksdale was a solid blues town: Robert Johnson supposedly traded his soul to the Devil on the outskirts, at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, back in the mid-'30s.
After the war, Brenston returned to Clarksdale and learned to play the alto saxophone from a local musician. "I had this $30 horn with a hole in it. I plugged the hole up with chewing gum," Brenston told writer Jim O'Neal in 1978. Before long he met up with a local pianist named Izear Luther "Ike" Turner. Turner, who had been born outside of town on October 15, 1931, moved effortlessly back and forth between Clarksdale and Memphis, where as a teenager he'd worked as a bellboy at the Hotel Peabody. "Ike was building a band. I couldn't play very good, but that guy took enough time to make everybody learn," Brenston said. The band, called the Kings of Rhythm, soon became a hot enough item that Riley "B. B." King, after hearing them play in Chambers, Mississippi, directed them to Sam Phillips's Memphis Recording Service, where King was recording at the time.
In early March 1951, the band drove up Highway 61 to the small, white-tiled Memphis studio at 706 Union Avenue. With selective hindsight Turner recalled the trip as being especially harrowing. "We got arrested three times going over there. Speeding one time. We had the bass on the top of the car, it blew off. We had a lot of trouble that day. It was raining. We got to Memphis late, we didn't record that day. They made us wait over."
Most recording engineers might have balked at recording them, because the guitarist, Willie Kizart, had dropped his amp and damaged the cone, which distorted any sound that came out of it. But Sam Phillips, who was always looking for something new, decided to go ahead with the session. "We had no way of getting it fixed," Phillips told Robert Palmer, "so we started playing around with the damn thing, stuffed a little paper in there and it sounded good. It sounded like a saxophone." Any other engineer would have sunk the amp's distortion low in the balance, or mix, but not Phillips. He over-amped the fuzzy guitar instead, in hopes that it would enhance the boogie riff that Kizart played along with Ike Turner's reckless piano and Raymond Hill's careening, tire-skidding tenor saxophone ("Blow the horn, Raymond!" Brenston tells him at one point, and he does).
The band kicked off the session by recording two songs with Ike Turner singing and Brenston playing alto sax. Then Jackie laid down his horn and sang two songs, "Come Back Where You Belong" and "Rocket 88." Sam Phillips remembered that the band hadn't rehearsed "Rocket 88" and he wasn't sure whether to record it that day or not, but when he heard them toying with the song he insisted on running it down. That's his story, and Turner agrees with the spirit of it: "We worked up that song the night before, we were staying in Memphis overnight. We called it 'Rocket 88"cause we had seen one that day; this guy that helped us when we had trouble on the highway, he was driving one." More likely the song was something that Brenston and the band had already worked up as a head arrangement and performed at the Kings of Rhythm's shows, and since standard recording sessions in those days consisted of four songs, it's unlikely that this working band would have made the long drive to Memphis with less than the usual complement of tunes, fully rehearsed and ready to go. At the end of the session Phillips paid the musicians $20 apiece, according to Turner.
Though Brenston claimed authorship of "Rocket 88," the song was really an updated version of a record by guitarist Jimmy Liggins called "Cadillac Boogie," a 1947 paean to the glories of the Cadillac 8-plush seat cushions, streamlined styling, V 8 engine-which in turn may have been a radical rewiring of Robert Johnson's 1936 recording, "Terraplane Blues." Brenston had changed Liggins's words around and updated the machine-"V-8 motor and this modern design, light convertible top, and the girls don't mind"-but the melody and boogie beat were about the same. And yet different. Liggins's performance was in the West Coast jump blues style of musicians who, except for Liggins's squealing saxophone player, were still lamenting the passing of the big band days. Brenston was playing with young cats raised in the Mississippi Delta on down-home blues.
Sun Records was still a glint, or a sunspot, in Sam Phillips's eye. He was just barely paying the bills in 1951 by leasing or selling master tapes of blues artists to Modem Records in Los Angeles. But Modern had lured a couple of his prized artists away from him, especially B. B. King, and created bad feelings. So he sent the four tracks that Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm had laid down that day to the Chess brothers in Chicago, who released the two Brenston sides in April. Ike Turner was ready to kill somebody when he saw the early copies of the record hot off the stampers, for even though the band was his, Chess Records had changed the name on the label of "Rocket 88" to Jackie Brenston with His Delta Cats. Turner's name was nowhere in sight. To make matters worse for Ike, when Chess got around afterward to releasing his two songs from the session, the disk sank like a real Rocket 88 in deep water.
In June, "Rocket 88" shot to number one on the R&B charts, stayed there for five straight weeks, sold enough copies to make it the second biggest R&B hit of the year (behind the Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man") and made Jackie Brenston a star. It was the worst thing that could've happened to him. "I was a greenhorn. I had a hit record and no sense," Brenston said many years later. "I had never been on the road with nobody, had never seen what professionals do."
Ike Turner's resentment created a fissure between the two men and ultimately broke up the original band.
Picking up new musicians on the road, including a young Memphis pianist named Phineas Newborn, Jr.,
Brenston was able to tour the country on the strength of "Rocket 88" for two years and drive in style and
splendor because General Motors gave him a brand new Olds 88 as their way of saying thanks for the free
advertising.
But his follow-up record, "My Real Gone Rocket," and subsequent releases went nowhere. He got into legal wrangles and made bad deals. He drank too much. (His third release, aptly, was called "Juiced.") He blew every dime he made. Later, when the glory of "Rocket 88" had depreciated to the point where he couldn't even trade it in for a battered jalopy, Brenston found himself in the humiliating position of rejoining Ike Turner as an employee, getting minimum scale for his sax duties. Turner had by then switched over to the guitar and married his lead singer, Anna Mae Bullock, whom he had renamed Tina Turner. Brenston happened to be there in 1960 when Ike got his first hit, "A Fool in Love." Ike had finally got his payback for having "Rocket 88" taken from him.
Part of the immediate fallout of Brenston's 1951 success was that an independent record producer in Pennsylvania decided to convince his young hillbilly artist, Bill Haley, to deviate from his corn pone repertoire long enough to cut a cover version of "Rocket 88." Haley's record was not a hit, but it sold so well locally that it set Haley's future course of recording R&B music for the white market.
When Jackie Brenston suffered a heart attack in 1979, he was a wino with a claim to his own Memphis street corner. He did not drive in style to the local V.A. hospital, where he died on December 15.
In 1958, Little Richard took Ike Turner's piano intro from "Rocket 88" and transferred it almost note for note into one of his biggest hits, "Good Golly, Miss Molly."
"'Rocket 88' was the record that really started it off for me as far as broadening the base of music and opening up wider markets for our local music. I had great artists that I was working with like B. B. King, Roscoe Gordon and Howlin' Wolf, but 'Rocket 88' was the one that opened up the possibilities for us."-Sam Phillips
"In 'Rocket 88,' mania can be heard overtaking musicality-the inevitable, irrevocable birth cry of rock 'n' roll-the summation of years of groping, the foreshadowing storm of all to come."-Nick Tosches, author of The Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll