Crazy man, crazy! We finally got to do a bit of rock ’n’ roll tourism on this tour. We pulled the van off the freeway long enough to see the former location of the legendary Twin Bar in Gloucester, New Jersey. This is where Bill Haley and the Saddlemen got their start, as a hillbilly act, as the house band in 1951. After two summers spent away in Wildwood, New Jersey, where Haley saw rhythm and blues bands like the Treniers and Steve Gibson’s Red Caps, they came back to the Twin Bar as a rock and roll band and renamed themselves Bill Haley and the Comets.
They call this place the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, and it’s hard to argue otherwise; Haley and the Comets were really the band that first identified as a rock ’n’ roll band—not country, not rhythm and blues, but a mixture of the two. Something brand new. Haley predated Elvis by several years, and their commercial success in 1953 and 1954 made rhythm and blues artists like Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry change their sound, cutting rocking, hard-driving records a year or two after Haley.
Considering everything that has transpired in the last seventy years (could Bill Haley ever have predicted the Beastie Boys, or Kraftwerk?), it’s hard to imagine this abandoned place (now gutted, in danger of falling down) transformed the world of music. I’m glad we got to see the legendary former Twin Bar before it goes back to the earth.
