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romancing pop itself. No matter what the facts were, Lymon’s voice told you that he was too innocent to conceal anything he didn’t believe in. This wasn’t a boy you would mistake for a girl, but neither was it a boy you’d mistake for a man. Soon there was Neil Sedaka, a Juilliard pianist who sang in a sugar-high tenor and wrote like a girl-group devotee right as the genre was getting started (“Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Oh! Carol,” inspired by Carole King).
    Lymon influenced ambitious future preteen singers like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson to simply be themselves as youngsters—preadolescents—unafraid NOT to be grown-ups (Jackson, of course, looms large in rock’s gender byways—more on him later). But unlike Jackson, Lymon wasn’t a freak show, a boy paraded around in front of adults as a novelty. Instead, his sincerity and longing epitomized the doo-wop aesthetic in its purest form. Doo-wop paralleled Presley’s ascent and, as an offshoot of R&B crooning for vocal groups, had its own parallel universe of male customs: high falsetto swooning, in homage and imitation of the female voice, let street-corner guys revel in effeminate qualities they were supposed to keep under wraps.
    Lymon ascended into pop myth as an ideal of male innocence whose soaring delivery caught all the eagerness and innocence teens invested in their pop. “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” was everything good in the sexual energy between male and female, the sincere emotional tone of the most flattering come-on, from a guy who didn’t yet have to imitate female sounds (falsetto) to pitch woo. (It’s less often, of course, that a woman deliberately sings like a man—Tina Turner being the big exception.) His career became a cautionary tale for all who followed: he made the tabloids with drug arrests throughout the sixties and died of a heroin overdose on the eve of another record release in 1968. His many failed comebacks, drug abuse, and early death only intensified the innocence of his debut.
    As Lymon opened up the possibilities for preteen stars, other Presley contemporaries darted off in various directions, toying with gender assumptions and flaunting the rebelliousness he had popularized. Little Willie John was older than Lymon, but still a five-feet-tall seventeen-year-old when he scored his first R&B hit, “All Around the World,” in 1955. The next year, his crossover hit “Fever” made explicit two new principles in the music for men: first, how vulnerable women made them feel. And second, how the expression of that vulnerability could help win women over, and strengthen a guy’s own personal sense of manhood. “Fever” made John so popular that he hit the road with the young James Brown as his opening act, and Brown revered him. (The Beatles knew John’s work well enough for Lennon to do “Leave My Kitten Alone” in 1965, one of the earliest unreleased collectibles and a standout track on Anthology. )
    On the surface, “Fever” was coy bump and grind. But Little Willie John’s deliveries poured scorched gravel into songs that turned his come-ons into threats. John’s “Fever” had finger snaps that goaded the anxious silences and guitar twangs that cinched knots in the singer’s stomach. John carried it with a sense of doom that foretold even worse than his prison death by heart attack less than ten years later. His fever was romantic, but it also surged with contempt and despair, the kind of desire that warned of how much grief many men kept in check. The record was all hook and repetition; its sense of danger thrillingly seductive.
    Peggy Lee’s 1958 cover of “Fever” was another example of the old guard co-opting R&B for itself, one step above Pat Boone singing “Tutti Frutti.” This was an answer record of a sort, but not the answer to