Gonna Back Up Baby—Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps
#365Songs: May 10
The 50’s were a watershed decade, as that was when “rock and roll” became a thing.
There are, of course, myriad arguments about when it started, how it started, and who it was started by. It’s a tale rife with corruption, racism, exploitation, and payola, and the majority of its enterprise architects were little more than con men and grifters.
It’s equally a story of flamboyance, artistry, and boundary-breaking change. Its heroes were more than mortals — they were gods who held the key to a new kind of freedom. Bodies were unlocked, and people began to dance, shout, and get into it.
It would take less than 2 decades for rock and roll’s socio-sexual frenzy to reach its apotheosis with the free love/free drugs free-for-all that was Woodstock.
But in its nascent stages, it was all about encoding. You couldn’t actually say, let’s get loaded and screw. So instead, rock and rollers sung about a “whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on,” and wanting to do “the stroll” for youngsters who were “ready teddy,” and ready to “rave on.”
Drums moved a little further to the front of the sound, and the beat became a little more critical. Guitars got a little louder, and guitarists played them with a little more style and innuendo.
All that said, without the vocals, the whole sound was still pretty close to the blues on one side, and hillbilly music on the other.
The wildness came from the singers. Elvis with his curled lip and grinding torso. Jerry Lee Lewis with his flinging hair, piano playing leg, and bugged out eyes. Little Richard with … well, everything.
And their voices. Slurring, hiccuping, moaning, groaning, crying, wailing. Wringing everything they could out of simple country and blues-based melodies to convey a devastating sense of sex, style, and rebellion.
Listening to it all now, it sounds almost comically tame. When I play early rock and roll for my teenage daughter, she laughs and can’t believe what I’m playing her counts as “rock and roll.”
And she’s got a point. “Rock Around The Clock,” “That’ll Be The Day,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Yakety Yak,” and “La Bamba” don’t exactly sound dangerous.
And then there was Gene Vincent.
By the time he first recorded, he was already a high school dropout, a military veteran, and permanently disabled from a motorcycle accident.
The lyric he’d make his name with was so encoded as to seem almost nonsensical. And maybe it was. But if it didn’t mean anything literally, it meant everything suggestively.
“Be-Bop-A-Lula” is — at least arguably — early rock and roll’s greatest single accomplishment.
And it wasn’t just because of Vincent. In his band (the Blue Caps) was a young Virginia guitar picker by the name of Cliff Gallup who would — over the course of 35 recorded songs with Vincent — deliver a clinic in early rock and roll guitar playing that, in my estimation, remains unmatched. Better than Scotty Moore. Better than Chuck Berry. Better than Carl Perkins.
Listen to “Race With The Devil,” “Woman Love,” “Blue Jean Baby,” or “Crazy Legs” as just a starter pack. Gallup is absolutely brilliant.
Still, it’s understandable why “Be-Bop-A-Lula” was such an early standout.
Between Vincent’s incomprehensibly deranged and echo-laden crooning and Gallup’s fat and tremolo’y guitar lines, “Be-Bop-A-Lula” positively drips with vibe. It’s a sound that would be chased in ensuing decades by everyone from obvious disciples The Stray Cats, Chris Isaak, and Paul McCartney to acts as diverse as Morissey, Ian Dury, X, and The Cramps.
When he performed live, Vincent could be literally frightening; particularly in later years. Limping and grimacing in pain, sweating in his leathers under the hot lights, squinting and blinking as pomade and sweat ran into his eyes, Vincent sung as if his life depended on it.
In a way, it did.
He’d escaped death once, on that motorcycle, coming out of it with a leg that probably should have been amputated. He escaped it again in 1960 in a car crash that nearly killed him. He was lucky. Eddie Cochran wasn’t. Cochran died the next day.
The 60’s were a rough decade all around for Vincent. The hits dried up, his record deals got smaller and smaller, and his floundering attempts at reinvention — often foisted upon him by shady label owners — went from bad to worse. He developed a reputation for threatening to shoot people in the studio. Through it all, he kept limping, kept hurting, kept grinding it out.
When the clock finally ran out on his musical options, it ran out on his life as well. His last performance was in Liverpool on October 4, 1971. On October 12, he died. He was only 36 years old.
Gene Vincent gave what he had, lasted only so long, and then left us behind.
What he gave us, is some of the greatest early rock and roll ever recorded, and most certainly one of the greatest — if not THE greatest — early rock and roll song of them all. But there was more to Gene Vincent than just “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and Cliff Gallup had a whole lot to do with that. When the two of the got cookin’ together, they were unstoppable.
You can hear it all on perfect overdrive on the criminally overlooked “Gonna Back Up Baby.” The song is a rock and roll psalm, and Gallup’s first solo is literally a rock and roll guitar dictionary’s worth of licks. Vincent shouts, “Hang on, rock, Blue Cats, let’s go now!’ and Gallup bursts off the line and never looks back.
I’m generally not too big on wishing I could go back in time, but if there’s one band I truly would have loved to see live, it’s Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps.
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