Rock On Jimmy Dean

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Rock On Jimmy Dean

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Every year, during the last week of September, people from all across America--and countries as far away as Australia--invade the small Indiana town of Fairmount for three days of dancing, races, parades and contests, all in celebration of local hero James Dean. It was 53 years ago, on September 30, 1955, that Dean's Porsche Spyder smashed into a Ford sedan on California Route 46 and was demolished in an instant. Although the driver of the sedan was unhurt, Dean, whose neck was twisted and broken, had no chance. For just a few seconds, as Dean was lifted into the ambulance, a friend said he heard "a soft cry escaping from Jimmy--the little whispering cry of a boy wanting his mother or of a man facing God." And then there was silence. The troubled young man was dead at 24, and a cult was about to be born. Sadly, we barely got to know Jimmy Dean. He only made three movies. And prior to his death, he had been seen on-screen in only one film, East of Eden . But four days after the tragic accident, Warner Brothers released Rebel Without A Cause , a melodrama about juvenile delinquency with Dean in the title role. Young people identified with Dean's angst-ridden portrayal of Jim Stark, a middle-class kid frustrated by a domineering mother and a weak father. When Dean appeared onscreen in his trademark red jacket, he was like no one we had ever seen. Rebel was a box-office sensation, and it signaled the evolution of a new generational wave that was about to break over the country. At the premiere of Giant in 1956, when Dean first appeared on screen, one girl stood up in the audience and cried, "Come back, Jimmy, I love you. We're waiting for you!" There were tribute records and special television showings of Dean's early dramas. Photoplay readers voted him number one in the actor popularity poll--the first time a dead person had taken top honors. And a year after his death, an astonishing 8,000 fan letters were still being sent to him every week. The imaginary had become real. In James Dean, a generation of young people found their own personal sacrament, a god in their own inner image. In real life, James Dean was much like the character he played in Rebel --a psychologically troubled young man raised in a broken family. Known mostly for his attitude, Dean's life was marked by pain. Sullen and painfully vulnerable, he was tormented by an offensive world and his own internal desolation. "I try so hard," Dean once wrote to a friend, "to make people reject me. Why?" Dean smoldered as an actor with such heat that the plots of his movies seemed to melt into nothingness around him. Dean was tough but tender, brooding but clownish, and defiantly sloppy in his looks and behavior. He radiated anguish and impudence, not only in the movies but also in nearly every photograph taken of him off the set, candids as well as studio shots. Dean, however, did not originate the pose of the doomed misfit. His reputation of insolent angel was built on an image that was already a teen paradigm by the early 1950s. However, Dean epitomized the image as a timeless icon. In jeans and a white T-shirt, with his long hair fashioned into an audacious wave (but always unkempt) and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he personified youthful unruliness so absolutely that generations of angry teens (and older mavericks) around the world mimicked his style, sometimes even unknowingly. More so in death than in life, fans continue to stalk, scavenge and pay tribute to the memory of him. Since 1955, Dean's gravestone in Fairmount, Indiana, has had to be replaced many times because souvenir hunters take pieces for luck. On Highway 46, where the fatal automobile accident occurred, a multimillionaire real estate tycoon from Japan named Seita Onishi erected a chrome cenotaph in 1981, followed by two tablets, a bronze fallen sparrow and a 36-foot-tall limestone bust. James Dean expressed a changing state of mind that his audiences did not completely understand but intuitively embraced. Dean has been mimicked, consciously or not, by virtually every male teen idol, from Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan to Brad Pitt. In fact, Presley's projected persona was largely based on James Dean. According to Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel , Presley idolized Dean: "I was sitting in the cafeteria at MGM one day, and Elvis Presley came over. He knew I was a friend of Jimmy's and had directed Rebel , so he got down on his knees before me and began to recite whole passages of dialogue from the script. Elvis must have seen Rebel a dozen times by then and remembered every one of Jimmy's lines." It was no accident that Dean entered the American consciousness when he did. The country had just emerged from a devastating world war. The atomic bomb had rained death over Japan, and America was in the grip of anti-Communist hysteria. A revolution was occurring in the arts, music, literature and the sciences. America had fulfilled its long struggle for material progress from the Depression through World War II. The affluent society, however, produced a reactionary subculture that saw it as dehumanizing. Dean and his following were a foreshadowing of the generation crisis that would come to full bloom in the sixties. "Adolescents rejected the repressive conspiracy of conformity and denial on which the material utopia of their parents was built by living out their fantasies through movie stars and rock music," writes David Dalton in his insightful book, James Dean: The Mutant King . "Able to assert their independence for the first time, they created a new vision where language is song, work is play, fantasy is reality and the childhood wishes of violence, sensuality and freedom begin to seem possible." James Dean was a very good actor, but he has proven to be a much better icon. In death, he has become something he would not have been had he lived--a marred, stained-glass window saint, on whom the frustrations of anyone could be attached. "He became," as Donald Spoto writes in his book Rebel , "the patron of the disaffected, the excuse for many to hide behind a certain type of dark Peter Pan-ism. We will fly away, disappear forever, he seemed to say."

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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" Rock On " is a song written by English singer David Essex . Originally recorded in 1973 and released as a single by Essex, it became an international hit. In 1989, American actor and singer Michael Damian recorded a cover version that went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song has been recorded many times, including a 2006 version by the English hard rock group Def Leppard .

The song, written and recorded by David Essex , was released in August 1973 in the UK, and reached its highest position of number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in September that year. [2] It spent 11 weeks in the UK charts. [3] In March 1974, Essex's version reached number one in Canada on the RPM national Top Singles chart [4] and was a top-ten hit (reaching number 5) on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart. It was Essex's only Billboard top 40 song. "Rock On" was the title track of Essex's 1973 debut studio album , and was also featured on the soundtrack album of the 1973 film That'll Be the Day (as well as being played over the closing credits of the film's U.S. release) [5] in which he had a starring role. The song is still frequently played on classic rock and oldies radio stations.

Essex later re-recorded the song in 1988 with an updated lyric. This version, which was remixed by Shep Pettibone , appeared on Essex's 1989 album Touching the Ghost . A single release of the updated version reached number 93 on the UK Singles Chart . The recording is featured in the movies Dick , The Devil's Rejects and Sunset Strip , as well as in episodes of The Sopranos and Cold Case .

The song features a slow-tempo vocal performance in C# minor, along with a minimalist, rhythm-driven instrumental accompaniment to Essex's vocal performance. The lyric pays homage to early rock-and-roll and its surrounding youth subculture, and notably to 1950s rebel James Dean (although the lyrics refer to him as "Jimmy Dean", which is the name of the country-western singer famous for Big Bad John ), but James Dean's name is spoken before the instrumental as well. This song makes reference to " Blue Suede Shoes " by Carl Perkins, and " Summertime Blues " by Eddie Cochran.

The distinctive stripped-back musical arrangement was devised by producer Jeff Wayne after hearing Essex's original vocal demo:

According to Wayne, only three session musicians played on the final backing track, and the most prominently featured was veteran session musician Herbie Flowers , whose double-tracked bass guitar was treated with a prominent "slapback" delay effect, creating a complex polyrhythmic backbeat:

Flowers himself noted that, as a reward for devising the double-tracked bass line, he was paid double his normal session fee, and thus received £24 instead of the usual £12. [6] He had earlier created a similar double-tracked bass line for Lou Reed 's " Walk on the Wild Side ", explaining in a BBC Radio 4 interview that it had also been done because he would be paid double.

"Rock On" was covered by soap opera star and singer Michael Damian in 1989, and featured in the teen film Dream a Little Dream , starring Corey Haim and Corey Feldman among others. Damian's version, which he also released from his independent album Where Do We Go From Here on the Cypress Records label, was a harder-edged interpretation that employed none of the vocal or instrumental distortion in the original 1973 David Essex version.

"Rock On" became Damian's first hit in eight years, since his 1981 cover of Eric Carmen 's song " She Did It ". His rendition became a gold record. It reached the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, thus outperforming Essex's original Billboard ranking. However, the song did get to number one for Essex in 1974 on the US Cashbox Top 100, in the same week it was at number 11 on the Billboard charts. In addition, Haim, Feldman, and Meredith Salenger all appeared in Damian's music video for the song. This version was ranked number 99 on VH1 's 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the 80s [16] (despite the fact that Damian actually had four Billboard -charting singles during the 1980s).

English hard rock band Def Leppard began playing the song on their 2005 tour in support of their compilation album Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection along with a cover of Badfinger 's " No Matter What " which appeared on the album. [24] The band released a studio recording of the song as a digital single in May 2006 preceding the release of their album Yeah! , which features cover versions of 1970s rock hits. [23] The single spent 18 weeks on the US Hard Rock chart, peaking at No. 18 in June 2006. [25] The song has since become a staple in Def Leppard's setlists, often following a Rick Savage 's bass solo. [26] "We took that one to pieces and rewrote it…" observed Joe Elliott . "American radio still plays 'Rock On' every day, sandwiched between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Zeppelin ." [27] The radio remix version of the song also appeared on Def Leppard's 2018 compilation album The Story So Far – The Best Of . [28]


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Next Tuesday James Dean will have been dead for 50 years but his fame survives, writes Philippa Hawker.
JAMES Byron Dean, movie star. The briefest of brilliant careers. Three feature films made in 18 months. In 1955, his marvellous year, he became famous and he died. He has led a posthumous life of half a century - twice as long as he lived.
His face, his slouch, his attitude, his neediness and his glamour make him iconically familiar to generations who might never have seen him on screen.
James Dean. Bobby Sox Idol. First American Teenager. Rebel Male. Little Boy Lost. Shooting Star. The Boy Who Created Rock'n'Roll. Even if every print of his films suddenly disappeared overnight, it's hard to believe that his image would not endure. It seems impossible to take an unflattering photograph of him, posed or unposed.
At his most apparently uncomfortable - squiring a starlet to a premiere, with a look on his face that suggests he would rather be anywhere else - he draws the gaze to himself, insists that his emotion is what counts. He has upstaged his smiling co-star, even in these petty moments of studio conformity.
His photographs sometimes seem like performances: the solitary loner, walking across Times Square in the rain, shoulders hunched, a cigarette in his mouth. That famous crucifixion pose from Giant , where he is carrying a shotgun across his shoulders, and Elizabeth Taylor crouches at his feet, Mary Magdalene to his Jesus - a publicity still, not a scene from the film. The series shot by Dennis Stock for Life magazine, taking Jimmy back to his Indiana farmboy origins.
Roy Schatt's "torn sweater" headshots.
In his movies, a couple of his characters embody and build on familiar cinematic types: the bad boy (in Rebel Without a Cause) and the cowboy (in Giant ). In Rebel, he starts out looking like a conformist but the film abruptly changes gear when he goes out at night in jeans, boots, a white T-shirt, a red windbreaker.
Director Nicholas Ray began filming Rebel Without a Cause in black and white, before the studio decided to switch to colour. It's impossible, now, to imagine it otherwise: and it's worth wondering if the film could have had the same impact without that talismanic red jacket.
But there is more, so much more, than the static image.
While Dean is eminently photographable, frozen by the camera as an ageless pin-up, the careless slouch of the body often contrasting with the beautiful contours of his face, on screen, he's never still. Frantic with activity, the busiest, most restless of performers.
Always moving, always doing something, some bit of business, some trick or tic of activity. There are strategies of refusal, disconcerting angles of approach: he's often twisting away from the camera, from the person he's talking to, looking down, glancing away, avoiding the gaze of the camera, the eyes of his fellow actors. On screen, he's almost compulsively expressive. "The face of James Dean," wrote critic Edgar Morin, "is an everchanging landscape in which can be discerned the contradictions, uncertainties and enthusiasms of the adolescent soul."
Dean can be restless but he can be languid, too: in our first view of him in Rebel, he's lying on the ground, drunk, and we see him later in similar kinds of positions, somewhere between collapse and repose, or as if modelling for a Pieta: he sways, his legs have given way under him, he's drained of energy, or he has let himself go. That yielding, yearning image of passivity is as compelling as his most active, volatile, sceneseizing moments.
A different kind of male expressiveness was already being seen on screen, from Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando - assertive, discomfiting, ambiguous, androgynous. Yet although Dean is a celebrated alumnus of the Actors'
Spreadnaround
Cumming In Her Shoes
Suck My Lick My