Shadow of a doubt tom petty chordfs9/24/2023 ![]() “My first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.” “He started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano,” his friend John Bucklen recalled. On April 5, 1957, the Shadow Blasters played at a variety show organized by their school’s student council-Bobby Zimmerman’s début. When Bobby was supposed to be sweeping the floor or stocking the shelves, he was trying out hand-splaying boogie-woogie chords on the piano instead. His father ran an appliance store in town and kept an old piano in the back. And what Zimmerman was hearing he wanted to make his own. It made me listen to life in a different way.”Īs he was rehearsing with the Shadow Blasters, the most thrilling song in the air was “Tutti Frutti,” sung by a flamboyant piano player from Macon, Georgia, who had once gone by Princess Lavonne and now performed as Little Richard. I could string all that together and make that a song. ![]() The wind blowing through trees, the songs of birds, footsteps, a hammer hitting a nail. “It made me listen for little things: the slamming of the door, the jingling of car keys. He was fascinated, as well, with the storytelling tricks and aural mysteries of radio dramas such as “The Fat Man” and “Inner Sanctum.” “It made me the listener that I am today,” he told an interviewer many decades later. & B., gospel, jazz, blues, and rock and roll. ![]() In his childhood and adolescence, he stayed up through the night, his head by the radio, absorbing everything being broadcast from nearby Duluth and from fifty-thousand-watt stations throughout the Midwest and the Deep South: R. 1 Billboard hit with “Heartbreak Hotel” Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra did, too, with “Lisbon Antigua.” But kids knew what spoke to them, and it wasn’t “Lisbon Antigua.” Robert Zimmerman, a pompadoured fifteen-year-old living in the Minnesota Iron Range town of Hibbing, was one of countless kids who went out and put together a rock-and-roll band. ![]() Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm had broken through five years earlier with a jump-blues hit called “Rocket 88”-a credible candidate for the ur-rock tune-but crooners and big-band acts lingered on the pop charts. In 1956, rock and roll was busy being born. ![]()
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