Kenny Vance was a founding member of the seminal group Jay and the Americans and the music director for American Hot Wax, Animal House, and other iconic American films, as well as Saturday Night Live. Currently he tours with the Planotones, the doo-wop group he created for American Hot Wax and re-formed in 1992.

Naturally, they do the oldies circuit, but unlike the typical nostalgia act, Kenny Vance and the Planotones continue to record. BC's Jon Sobel reviewed their new CD recently.

Kenny Vance called into BC Radio Live the other day from the New Jersey Turnpike and gave us the benefit of his vast knowledge and thoughtful perspective on early rock and roll history and lore.

THE EARLY YEARS

BC: Was Jay and the Americans how you got your start in music?

KV: I was about eighteen then. It was the end of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building... people like Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Also Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard... before he started writing with Hal David. [The new CD has a version of the Bacharach-David classic "Anyone Who Had a Heart." -ed.]

So the songs you did then were really kind of the last gasp of the great Tin Pan Alley [songwriting] era.

Right. When I was about fifteen, I started a group called the Harbor Lights, and we came by subway [from Brooklyn] into Manhattan to the three famous buildings that you would go to and try to audition for the record companies. It was a time when if you had a hundred bucks you could conceivably make a record that would sell a million copies. Record labels like Columbia, Capitol, and RCA didn't really want to put this kind of music on their label. They had...artists like Patti Page, people that weren't rock.

Times have really changed.

As kids growing up in Brooklyn we would hear these songs that a guy named Alan Freed would play on the radio - he was credited with coining the term "rock and roll." And Alan Freed actually ran the first ever rock and roll show at the Paramount Theater [in Brooklyn] in 1956 with Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, the Heartbeats, the Penguins, the Doves, groups like that. As kids we all went to that, and of course we wanted to make our own record.

So we would go down into the subway, because you had a great echo chamber there, and if you had four guys it would sound like eight. We'd try to imitate songs that we heard on [Freed's] show. By the time I was fifteen we actually had made up a couple of songs of our own.