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ready. But once he sang Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin,’” he became a sensation, and had to grow up as a musician in public. “Rock was the critical issue with which the young could define themselves and show that they were different from their parents,” Halberstam notes. “Now here was his father taking what was truly his and incorporating it into the show, giving it, in effect, an Ozzie and Harriet seal of approval … Because his father had pushed him so quickly and made him play on the show before he was ready, he was a joke to real musicians—whose approval he desperately sought.” Here was another father-son conflict writ large in the American psyche: the father whose narcissism overwhelmed even his notoriously bland taste. Ricky Nelson became that much more of a rock ’n’ roller because of the way he wrote songs as deathless as “Lonesome Town” in spite of this demeaning situation.
    It’s always been a measure of Hollywood unease with the rock sensibility that it never picked up on its frank sexual energy until the late 1960s, with Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1968). Jack Nicholson, the first big star whose persona extended what Brando, Clift, and Dean set in motion, didn’t break through until Easy Rider (1969). There were certainly no male characters analogous to Elvis Presley on television, unless you stretch things to count Eddie Haskell, the conniving smart aleck on Leave It to Beaver (who was played for comedy), or Rod Serling, so suave in the face of the Twilight Zone paranormal. Brando, Clift, and Dean had new ideas about how men could behave on screen, but Presley was the gate crasher for a brigade of like-minded performers on the rock circuit, and soon, in the rest of popular culture.
    Rock music’s grand themes surround the quest for identity: how it felt to be an adolescent walking in John Wayne’s enormous shadow. Once Elvis Presley shook free from old postures, a colorful parade of rock figures—from Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry to Bo Diddley and Little Richard—offered teenagers tempting and adventurous new attitudes about postwar adolescence. Rock characters cast new prototypes for their listeners in search of post-Victorian ways of being sexually candid adults.
    John Wayne’s sensibility was so broad that there wasn’t the rich variety of male role models available then the way there came to be—in simple terms, you were either a romantic lead or a newfangled tough guy/rebel; your allegiance was either with Wayne or with Presley, with Eisenhower or with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones; your sidekick was either Dean Martin alongside Wayne in Rio Lobo or Sal Mineo alongside Dean in Rebel Without a Cause ; you preferred either Tin Pan Alley craft like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra or new songwriting sharks like Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, Smiley Lewis, Lieber and Stoller, and Buddy Holly. The argument in Barry Levinson’s film Diner, set in 1959, posed this question as a decisive matter of taste: Who’s the greatest singer of all, Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis? Mickey Rourke trumps the others by saying simply: “Elvis.”
    The ripple effect from Presley’s impact leads to increasing gender conundrums throughout 1950s pop music. Frankie Lymon’s curious appeal transcended gender—not just as a youngster, but as a young man whose very emotional makeup seemed feminine and childlike, not yet burdened by the adult male ego. With his hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” in early 1956, Lymon scored a top-ten hit at the age of thirteen (fronting the Teenagers). The sound of his voice, especially when it flipped up into an effortless falsetto, was a phenomenon: it was a boy singing a man’s song, which was half its appeal. But it was also a boy suffused in the conventions of doo-wop, eager to participate in the larger pop world he imagined for himself. So in a way he was