The Rock-a-teens

The gentleman that ran Sound Exchange had a way of keeping a constant high quality inventory. The trick was that the prices of the records were so high that nobody ever bought them. I certainly never bought any LPs there. Well, no, that’s not true. I bought a Moby Grape LP. I think it was $20. Maybe a zero got left out by mistake.

Singles, though, where another thing. They had boxes and boxes of hard to find songs, dusty 45s in boxes. No prices. I learned the hard way, though, that these guys don’t suffer cheapskates gladly. How much are these, I said. And he’d price them one by one. Aghast, I said I need to find cheaper copies. And I’d bring more copies up to the counter. After a few times he lost patience with me. What kind of thing was this I was doing, trying to economize on collectors’ items. He and his wife, they double-teamed me. These are special, they’d have me know. We remember these, he said. Mm-hm. Picking up a single I’d placed there, The Rock-a-teens. We remember them.

In that case they are the only such people on the planet. Nobody remembers The Rock-a-teens. Not even The Rock-a-teens remember the Rock-a-teens. They have about 1 sentence in Wikipedia. They had one hit.

I bought it though, that single. The Rock-a-teens.

Man! The Rock-a-teens. Indeed.

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The Rock-a-teens:

• Woo Hoo – This is just pure rock and roll, the tune straight boogie woogie, identical more or less to Guitar Boogie Shuffle by The Virtues, with drum and strum interludes, disembodied voices singing the title over and over, and rhythm that won’t quit. If you can sit still to this then you’re dead. The group’s only hit, from the fall of 1959.