Sam Butera Wild Cat

Rock & roll exploded in the '50s onto a cultural landscape that was so uptight and repressed as to be unrecognizable today, even to those who lived through it. Everything – from the clothes young people wore to the music they listened to to the money they spent – was a hard-fought statement, because no youth group before those '50s teenagers ever had that kind of freedom and did something with it. Pop music was bland, bland, bland (just like it is now) and the bigger and badder and bolder rock & roll became, the more of a threat it was to the status-quo squares who banned it every chance they got. You couldn't listen to it, you couldn't dance to it at your school, concerts in public places were banned, and artists were often jailed for performing it in public.