Death Discs

In the late 1950s, the American pop industry stumbled upon a new and startling hit-making formula: the ‘Death Disc’.

Jody Reynolds started the ball rolling with his 1958 hit Endless Sleep, a song covered successfully in the UK by Marty Wilde. Suddenly, death discs were big business.

I looked at the sea, and it seemed to say
I took your baby from you away
I heard a voice crying in the deep
Come join me, baby in my endless sleep

Death discs sparked off the biggest pop controversy since Elvis and the rise of rock & roll. Endless Sleep and its successors were received as further signals of universal teenage degeneracy and condemned as ‘sick’ and ‘unhealthy’ by parents, teachers, politicians, preachers, journalists, psychiatrists and pundits everywhere.

Strictly speaking, death discs were not rock & roll. But they were its mutant offspring and quite inconceivable without it. Rock & roll effectively transformed the audience for popular music, making it more and more exclusively teenage.

The popularity of rock & roll and teenagers’ astonishing readiness and willingness to spend their money on it initially took the music industry establishment by surprise. They were used to catering for older and wealthier sections of the community, whose tastes more closely mirrored their own.

But by the late 1950s, they had adapted well to the new situation and were cheerfully churning out pop songs that attempted to connect with teenage interests, preoccupations and fantasies.

When it finally arrived, the teenage death disc was a new kind of song about death, located in a distinctively teenage universe – a clearly recognisable separate genre.

Endless Sleep, with its sub-Presley vocal and heavy sexual undertones, was very obviously a death disc, whereas The Kingston Trio‘s earlier, and equally controversial, Tom Dooley was merely a song about death.

The storyline of Tom Dooley (an old folk tale about a murderer about to be hanged) was entirely foreign to the teenage universe in which Endless Sleep and its true successors are set – pretty much the same place occupied and celebrated by Pat Boone and Fabian and Neil Sedaka and all the rest of the teenage crooners of the 1950s.

It was a universe peopled by teenagers facing great obstacles to their love. But the teenagers in death discs didn’t just break up after an argument over who’s been untrue or because they were too young to marry: they were split up finally and definitively by an implacable, external force – by sudden and terrible death.

Teen Angel

And though it’s a universe created for teenagers, it’s more truly childlike in its conception and essential appeal. The lost loved one usually becomes a Teen Angel, ascending to heaven on the wings of ethereal choirs, there to await the one he or she loves for eternity:

Now it’s too late to tell this boy how great he was
He’s waiting at the gates of Heaven for me

Twinkle, the English one-hit-wonder of 1964, described her own death disc Terry perfectly: “It was just a fairy tale”. Albeit a fairy tale banned by ITV’s famous pop show Ready Steady Go! as “sick, unsuitable and morbid”. Yet a fairy tale all the same.

Terry and Twinkle, Romeo and Juliet – death discs plundered universal mythology. The props (stock cars, trains, motorcycles) may have been up-to-date, but the tragedy was timeless.

The best death discs have the hard, bright clarity of comic books, and, no doubt, they appealed to very much the same audience.

Teen angel can you hear me?
Teen angel can you see me?
Are you somewhere up above?
And am I still the one you love?

The narrator in a death disc never complained or protested: Fate has triumphed, and all protest is redundant, if not actively sacrilegious. And yet, like all good fairy tales, death discs cast light upon barely conscious hopes and fears.

Ray Peterson’s US hit of 1960, Tell Laura I Love Her (covered in Britain by Ricky Valance) took up the theme of teenage social problems originally introduced by Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran. In the song, Tommy loved Laura and wanted to buy her a wedding ring. But he had no money so he entered a stock car race for big money prizes. And, of course, he crashed and died.

His famous dying words:

Tell Laura I love her, Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry, My love for her will never die

It’s a dated concept, but it was exactly right for its time. Teenagers in those days – or at least teenage girls (to whom death discs were primarily addressed) – expected to fall in love. Everything around them told them they should: records, movies, radio, TV, magazines.

So, on the one hand, teenagers were being bombarded with propaganda for love: it was the miracle-selling ingredient in all the teenage entertainment industries. But on the other hand, they were denied sexual expression of their love, both inside and outside marriage.

These conflicts enter the teenage fantasy of Tell Laura I Love Her, and force Tommy into his vain attempt to escape his teenage, social and economic powerlessness and get rich quick. And yet, there can be no happy ending. The conflicts involved in being a teenager are finally resolved only by death. Heroic death.

The death disc craze seemed to peter out in the early ’60s. In many ways, it was typical of the decadence of post-Presley pop, circa 1959-63: manufactured, soft-centred and exploitative.

The American critic Richard Goldstein hailed The Beatles as saving the world from “death songs, pretty boys and payola”. Yet the death disc clearly touched some vital nerve in the teenage audience. And even after The Fab Four had supposedly regenerated pop, death discs still gained sporadic success.

Fatal Drag Race

The Californian duo Jan and Dean hit big in 1964 with their Dead Man’s Curve, the story of a fatal drag race. “The last thing I remember doc/I started to swerve . . ”

Dead Man’s Curve was a fairly straightforward teen movie morality tale, gaining appeal from the evils it supposedly condemned. True love was nowhere in sight: just speed and necrophilia and the shadow of James Dean.

In the same tradition of highly polished and totally fabricated studio pop music came the New York girl group, The Shangri-Las.

Romeo and Juliet, speed and machinery, the pains of being a teenager – The Shangri-Las integrated all these obsessions into the one inarguable classic of the death disc genre, Leader Of The Pack: a #1 US hit in 1964, banned from English TV on its first release.

My folks were always putting him down
They said he came from the wrong side of town
They told me he was bad
But I knew he was sad. . .

The song’s narrator, ‘Betty’, recalls how she had to tell Jimmy, the motorcycle gang leader, that her father had forbidden them to see each other. Jimmy took the news hard . . .

He sort of smiled and kissed me goodbye
But the tears were beginning to show
As he drove away on that rainy night
I begged him to go slow
But whether he heard I’ll never know . . .
Look out! Look out! Look out!’ (sound effects of a bike crashing)

Very high melodrama, performed with passionate involvement. Shangri-La Mary Weiss summed it up: “We try to stay real close to our audience. Most kids have a hangup with their parents, and a lot of girls want to be the centre of attention, the way the girl in Leader Of The Pack is.”

Jimmy is a martyr to parental prejudice and blindness. And Betty is the living heroine of the tale, choking back her tears, the centre of attention. She’s lost Jimmy, but in a strange way, she’s won.

By losing him forever, she can love him forever, thereby shaming and defeating her interfering parents. And meanwhile, ennobled by her grief, she can maintain the admiration and respect of her friends. It’s a perfect fantasy.

While The Shangri-Las never did equal Leader Of The Pack, they made some interesting and imaginative extensions on the death disc theme.

In Give Us Your Blessings (a song previously recorded unsuccessfully by Ray Peterson), Mary and Jimmy are both very young but as much in love as two people can be, and “all they wanted was to be together/and share their love eternally”.

Mary’s parents refuse them permission to marry. Worse, they laugh at the children. Mary and Jimmy drive away and elope. The next day, they are found dead.

See what you did? This song screams out to the now grief-stricken parents.

Then, in Out In The Streets, The Shangri-Las successfully reversed Leader Of The Pack. This time, the boyfriend is accepted by the girl’s parents, cuts his hair, throws his boots away, and settles down in suburbia. He’s won the girl, but lost out to the system because “his heart is out in the streets”.

It’s a song of spiritual rather than physical death, implying that the latter would have been far more noble.

Most heartbreaking of all is I Can Never Go Home Anymore. This time, a daughter walks out on her mother to live her own life. She’s haunted by guilt, by loneliness, by the Yiddish lullabies her mother used to sing, but she has too much “girlish pride” to return home.

The final tragedy – she can never go home again because her mother has died of a broken heart.

She got so lonely in the end
the angels picked her for a friend

With these songs, The Shangri-Las and their songwriters presented a finely balanced picture of the middle-class teenage condition circa 1959-1965 – a condition of impossible tension.

You can’t leave home, and you can’t stay. If you marry Jimmy, he’ll be unhappy in suburbia, but if you break up with him, he’ll die. Problems, problems, problems.

Death is the only way out, yet no way out at all.

It’s a mistake to view these songs as naive. They were, in fact, highly sophisticated corn.

Death discs eventually died away, apparently made redundant by the arrival of the first fully-fledged teen Protest songs, and appeared quaint and irrelevant to the Love Generation.

Newspaper Campaign

Why were death discs so very controversial? Were they really ‘sick’? At this distance in time, it’s often difficult to imagine what all the fuss was about.

Why, for example, did the Sunday People choose to mount a campaign against the US #1 of 1964, Last Kiss, by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers? What was so offensive about a boy stealing a last kiss from his dying girlfriend in the wreckage of his father’s car?

She’s gone to Heaven
So I’ve got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world. . .

Offensively sentimental, no doubt – but sick? The campaign against death discs seemed to rest on the notion that death was a subject best kept away from the children – or at least, death as a cause for concern. Death in Westerns or war films was perfectly alright, but not death that upset anyone, and certainly not teenage death.

Death discs weren’t sick, but they were usually pretty sickly. They were cheap, mass-produced mimicries of emotions produced specifically for an emotionally vulnerable and immature audience.

Maybe death discs were the classic example of the young being cynically manipulated by calculating capitalists, or maybe they just brought a little drama into boring suburban lives – who can say, but at the time, they were not to be laughed at.