little stars

About the Book

In truth, there are no little stars. Some just shone brighter and longer than others. But they all were up there in the endless galaxy of singers and musicians whose grasp for the dream equaled their reach, if only for a passing moment. They were roman candles that lighted up the night skies full of larger, longer-lasting stars, but their music helped show us the way through the ‘50s and ‘60s, too. The afterglow is still there even now if you keep looking long enough.

They are only called little stars in this book because one of the earliest of the rock ‘n’ roll classics by a non-black, non-Southern-roots act was “Little Star,” sung by a New York City doo-wop group that never made the Billboard charts a second time. The Elegants and their contemporaries provided the inspiration for countless others to chase the American Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream until they caught it by its tail and, on reflection, inspired the title for Jerry Miller’s book.

The stories of a dozen or so of those music dreamers, the ones who were awakened much earlier than they had scheduled their wake-up calls, are at the heart of the book. So, in their way, are the millions who followed their paths across the sky with homemade telescopes.

Inside this book’s pages, you won’t need your telescope. It focuses right in on these selected dreamers and where their dreams took them, followed by the often hard realities of where their meteors crash-landed at the end of their sudden descents back to earth.

From the Introduction, where you meet the author on his way to the outskirts of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream, to the final chapter, where the loyal followers of the dreamers gather to soak up the nostalgia they can only find at post-natal concerts by lingering stars like Gary Lewis or the Four Tops. In between, you get to go backstage, literally and figuratively, into the lives and the visions of the one-time stars who streaked across your lives if you were living them in America thirty or forty years ago.

You will be dropping in on them at various points during the past fifteen years or so, at places where their fates are still finding their ways home. At the close of each of your stops, the author updates the individual sagas to the year 2000, for better or worse, in redemption or death or something in between.

The first stop on this journey through the aftermath of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream is at Doo-Wop Heaven, where you hear first-hand how the dream lives forever in the minds of unbreakable stars like Vito Picone of the Elegants, Nick Santos of the Capris, Jimmy Beaumont of the Skyliners, Charlie Thomas of the Drifters, as well as two long-time managers of our so-called “little stars,” Joe Rock and Arnie Kay, who not only have helped shape the constant comebacks of the dreams but have informed views on how and why the old music has outlived its actuarial probabilities in America.

From Doo-Wop Heaven it is on to long, nostalgic stops to visit one-time R ´n´ R luminaries Bobby Helms, The McCoys, Carl Dobkins Jr., Joe Dowell, the Lemon Pipers, Question Mark (of the Mysterians), Jinx Dawson (of Coven), and The Rivieras before heading back to the concerts where the Dream ages but stays alive.

Though some of the personal lives turned nightmarish and even deadly, the dream and music continue to play in the background of their stories like secret voices. Put your ear to the book and listen closely. You can hear them still.

About the Author

Born in eastern Indiana, Jerry Miller has been a newspaper and magazine journalist for more than forty years, as well as teaching journalism at Ball State University and Franklin College in Indiana for twenty of those years. His previous books were Fast Company: The Men and Machines of American Auto Racing (1972) and little stars: Wishing Upon the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream (2001). He retired as professor emeritus from the Pulliam School of Journalism, Franklin College, in 2004. He continues to write articles for newspapers and magazines and has begun work on a fourth non-fiction book.