by Gary Giddins
Once again Bing and Al were unemployed, but this time with a difference. As a Spokane reporter wrote ten months after they left town for California, “all Spokane knew ‘Bing’ and close behind him followed the ever-faithful ‘Al.’” They were established as a team, and they had something to sell. The market in Spokane offered little promise, and they were itching to escape what Bing perceived as the smothering provincialism of the “cornfeds.” 56 Bing told Charles Thompson, his authorized biographer, that he was so restless, he applied unsuccessfully for a berth as an entertainer on China-bound ships. 57 If this is true — and it seems unlikely — he must have felt sufficiently confident to part with Al and sufficiently discouraged to follow the maritime path of his ancestors. Actually, Los Angeles was the obvious destination. Al’s sister lived there with her bootlegger husband. Everett Crosby was there, too, affiliated with a trucking company that carted hooch. With two siblings already situated, the newcomers were assured of temporary places to stay. Mildred had written Al that she was singing in a speakeasy and doing well. Al figured that she probably knew people who could get them started. He suggested the journey to Bing, who jumped at the idea: “Okay, let’s go.” 58
Bing secured his parents’ reluctant blessing. Kate had been hard on him for quitting law — her attitude was another reason to skip Spokane. But she and Harry were more equivocal than irate when Bing, who was twenty-two, announced his decision. Years later Harry said, “About the only thing I remember of those times was the day that Bing told us he and Al were going to leave home and go to California in their rickety, painted-up, joke-covered Ford. Mother and I hated to see him leave, but we didn’t want to stand in the way of any possible success for him. We thought that such a move might be the beginning for him. We knew he had talent. As it turned out, it was the beginning for him.” 59
Al’s father and stepmother were concerned because he was so young, but they held their tongues. Al had repeatedly proved himself nothing if not resourceful, and with Bing at his side he could at least count on a memorable adventure, whether or not the move actually led to anything. Al took the Model T to a mechanic for last-minute repairs, after confirming with Bing that he would pick him up the next morning, October 15. The idea of embarking on a road trip of some thousand miles in a machine as ramshackle as theirs did not seem especially perilous. The Tin Lizzy was, in Al’s words, “uncomplicated but dependable.” 60 It had three floor pedals (stop, low gear, and reverse), an accelerator on the steering wheel, and a crank and pullout choke out front. The tires were narrow tubes without tread. On the canvas covering the spare a slogan was painted: EIGHT MILLION MILES AND STILL ENTHUSIASTIC. 61 Bing and Al pooled about fifty dollars each, all they had from their Clemmer savings.
Al suffered a nervous, restless night, but he was up with the dawn that wintry Thursday morning. He had decided to postpone his goodbyes until he picked up Bing, since they had to pass the Rinker house on the way out of town anyway. He pulled up to Sharp Avenue at nine, only to learn from Kate that the habitual early riser was dead asleep. She told Al to go upstairs and wake him. He did, annoyed by Bing’s seeming nonchalance. Bing finally came downstairs with his suitcase, and he and Al carried his drums and golf clubs to the car. As they emerged from the house, a small crowd began to congregate and quickly grew as the two young men packed everything into the backseat.
One neighborhood girl recalled the scene: “It was early in the morning and all of us kids were around. Mrs. Crosby brought out a sack lunch for the boys and when the Ford wouldn’t start, Al and Bing borrowed a screwdriver from Mrs. Crosby’s sewing kit to fix it.” 62 After driving to retrieve Al’s suitcase and say good-bye to Mr. Rinker and his wife, they made one last stop at a service station at Boone and Division, where the attendant, an old friend, provided them with a free tank of gasoline. They continued down Division, then turned west toward Seattle, 200 miles away. In a short while, they were up to speed: thirty miles per hour and still enthusiastic.
8
VAUDEVILLE
Crosby and Rinker —Two Boys and a Piano —Singing Songs Their Own Way.
—billing, Paramount-Publix (1926) 1
It took two days to reach Seattle and another three weeks to make Los Angeles. In later years the often recounted trip was invariably dramatized as the archetypal tale of the Road to Hollywood: a plucky journey of two young men in a rickety outmoded contraption, puttering toward glory. But as they traveled, the recording industry was also taking leaps ahead that would revolutionize communications technology, preparing the way for Bing’s ascendancy. Great advancements were ushered in during the very weeks they were on the road. Indeed, the recording industry’s dramatic conversion from acoustical to electrical reproduction of music practically coincided with their departure from Spokane. That innovation, which dominated the industry for more than two decades (until the introduction of tape), would help bring Bing’s strengths into the spotlight, leading directly to the advancement of his true instrument, the microphone.
More than any other performer, Crosby would ride the tide of technology. He dominated records, radio, and movies throughout a career that would parallel the development of those media in ways ever more suitable to emphasize his talents. Boosted by technology in the beginning, Bing eventually became its advocate and master: In the mid-1940s, he single-handedly transformed radio from a live medium into a canned, or prerecorded, one. Later, the TV industry followed suit. It was through the growth and expansion of electronic media that Bing became so familiar, so prized, so beloved a presence in American life. But the technology never diminished his natural ability to connect with an audience. Near the end of his life, when Bing hit the road for an international tour, many of his older fans were astonished to realize that they had not seen him perform live in four decades.
The year 1925 proved a watershed in the brief and shaky history of the recording business, which, like so much of the communications technocracy, traced its origins to the Wizard of Menlo Park. In 1877 Thomas Edison built a machine that engraved sound on a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. He called it a phonograph — a neologism from the Greek for “sound writer.” But the invention was barely adequate for reproducing a speaking voice, let alone music, and Edison lost interest and turned his attention to the incandescent lamp, thereby missing — as Roland Gelatt, the industry’s influential historian, points out — an opportunity to record such contemporaries as Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt, not to mention Buddy Bolden, the first widely recognized jazz musician. Edison’s apparatus rested for nearly a decade, until Alexander Graham Bell financed and patented what he called the graphaphone, substituting waxed cardboard for tinfoil to achieve far greater clarity. The American Graphaphone Company saw the machine as primarily a Dictaphone, but it renewed the interest of Edison and others, and in 1890 the first commercial recordings were manufactured. They played two minutes, could not be reproduced, and were about as musical as a seance is conversational.
Tremendous improvements were made throughout the 1890s, including the innovation of flat discs and a lateral moving stylus, which its inventor, Emile Berliner, called a gramophone. 2 By 1902 the recently formed Victor Talking Machine Company dazzled consumers with mechanical reproductions of the voices of Caruso and Bert Williams. Yet over the next twenty-three years, the recording process remained essentially unchanged. It was acoustical and manual, and demanded of musicians and singers that they perform into mawlike horns mounted on walls. In 1906, the year Harry Crosby bought his family one of the first phonographs in Spokane, Victor recorded Caruso with an orchestra and manufactured the Victrola, a machine conceived as musical furniture for the home, not unlike a piano. At $200, the Victrola cost more than a used automobile. To be sure, phonographs that did not conceal their workings in mahogany consoles were readily available for less than thirty dollars, but Victor’s hot new model for the Park Avenue set reflected a class distinction in the industry’s competing systems. The well-to-do bought superior flat discs, while working-class p
eople like the Crosbys continued to buy cylinders until they were no longer manufactured. Cylinders averaged twenty-five to thirty-five cents; discs between one and seven dollars.
John Philip Sousa initially decried “the Menace of Mechanical Music,” predicting that “a marked deterioration in American music” would follow as generations of amateurs who had sung and played instruments would now presumably give way to indolent disciples of “canned music.” 3 The public disagreed and eagerly purchased everything that was offered, an indiscriminate potpourri of indifferently performed popular music, classics, opera, marches, ragtime, comedy. Records were sold in appliance shops that sold phonographs and in general or grocery stores. In March 1917 Victor announced its imminent release of “the very latest thing in the development of music” —jazz, as played by a spirited, hoked-up white band from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. “Livery Stable Blues” sold more than a million copies. As Europe reeled from the chaos of the Great War, Americans giddily enjoyed their new role on the world stage. The nation’s new confidence resonated in jazz and in a sumptuous dance music played by large orchestras that were at once erotic and genteel. Small independent record companies like Gennett (a subsidiary of Starr Piano) and Paramount (a subsidiary of Wisconsin Chair) put an end to the monopoly enjoyed by Victor and Columbia and generated a musical boom. Between the surging record sales and Prohibition — the government’s gift to jazz, guaranteeing work to numberless musicians in speakeasies throughout the land — America was spellbound by the new, raucous, undeniably homegrown music.
With an assist from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of swains and flappers, the era was inescapably called the Jazz Age, but it is important to remember that in those years jazz — construed as either an exciting or devilish dance music — had a more inclusive meaning than it later acquired. “Livery Stable Blues” was labeled “For Dancing,” and even legendary innovators like King Oliver and James P. Johnson played for dancing. Everything with a beat and bluesy tonality was regarded as jazz, from the behemoth orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Vincent Lopez to the rhythm songs and ballads of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.
Jazz and black music, not for the last time, rescued the record business in the dim deflationary year of 1920. More than 2 million phonographs had been turned out in 1919, a case of overproduction that brought Columbia to the brink of ruin; its stock sank from 65 to 15/8. The public had grown jaded. The Victrola of 1921 was not much different from that of 1906, nor was popular music, as represented by faceless singers like Billy Murray, the Irish American tenor who recorded hundreds of ditties during the century’s first three decades. Blandness in singers who specialized in making records (and had little reputation outside recording studios) was regarded as an asset by songpluggers and publishers who thought of them as little more than shills for sheet music, where the real money was. By contrast, concert performers who made records also helped sell songs, but they were primarily interested in selling themselves.
In 1920 a thirty-six-year-old vaudevillian with a loyal following in Harlem was invited to spell Sophie Tucker at a recording session. Her name was Mamie Smith, and backed by a white orchestra, she was the first African American woman to record the blues and score a major hit. The success of “Crazy Blues” opened doors for black performers, song publishers, and record-company executives. Mamie was not a true blues singer, but she set the table for many, like Bessie Smith (no relation), who were. By 1925 hundreds of blacks had recorded, and the wild, rambling diversity of American voices represented on discs enthralled listeners of Bing’s generation, white and black, who found their souls in the simmering footloose rhythms. Aside from the exposure it gave him to a wider range of vocalists and styles, the primitive acoustical technology did not serve Bing, a baritone in a world of tenors, who achieved the clearest articulation when singing into the mounted morning-glory horns that predated more sophisticated microphones.
Electronic recording had been discussed for two decades, but it could not be implemented without a condenser microphone and vacuum-tube amplifier. The need for wireless communication during World War I generated experiments that led to their invention, yet at the end of the war nothing was done to extend their usefulness. Although singers like Bing depended on megaphones to enrich and enlarge their voices, record companies saw no need to change their methods until declining sales signaled the need for improved products. On Armistice Day 1920, the Unknown Warrior burial service in Westminster Abbey was transmitted electronically over telephone lines to a recording machine in another building, an achievement that encouraged further tests. But still the record companies declined to explore the possibilities — until 1924, when prototypes were built for electrical systems that expanded frequency ranges in treble and bass, captured room ambience, and heightened dynamics. Even those improvements, developed by Bell Laboratories, were resisted by the established record companies, which thought the electrical process too much like their hated rival, radio. They capitulated within a few months.
The first electrical recordings were released in the spring of 1925. Many critics and musicians complained about distorted sound that lacked the acoustic method’s purity. But modifications were made over the course of the year. Endorsements by Toscanini and Stokowski, as well as Sousa, who had long since become an enthusiastic and well-paid endorser of records, helped convert the skeptics. The Victor Talking Machine Company grandly designated November 2, 1925, Victor Day, to crown the blizzard of publicity ballyhoo that preceded the launch of its electric Orthophonic Victrola. Within days Victor was swamped with orders exceeding $20 million.
As noted, another innovation also helped pave Bing’s way. One of the most significant corollaries of electric recording was the perfection of the microphone. In 1924 President Coolidge’s address to Congress was miked for broadcast, but beyond radio and electrical records, microphones were rarely used in live performances. According to an old theatrical shibboleth, an entertainer who could not project to the balcony’s last row was not ready for the big time; Jolson exemplified the leather-lunged belter of songs. With the arrival of the microphone — and instant exit of the preposterous megaphone — a new and more intimate kind of singing for larger audiences was made possible. Technology changed music. Ironically, mechanics led to a more human and honest transaction between singers and their listeners.
Radio, which now rivaled the phonograph as the preferred mode of home entertainment, was on the verge of the first consolidation of stations. Plans were under way to create a network of local transmitters linked by telephone wires. A year later, in November 1926, the National Broadcasting Company would make its debut, followed the next year by that of the Columbia Broadcasting System. By the time Bing was ready for radio, radio was waiting for the voice made to order to showcase the closeness it could provide. Motion pictures, too, were remade by the new technology. Twenty-four hours before Victor Day, with relatively little publicity, Harry Warner — on behalf of the fledgling motion picture company Warner Bros. — bought control of Vitagraph and its research into sound on film. Talkies would engender not only the movie musical but a subtler and more intimate style of acting. Bing’s naturalness would fit in perfectly.
Victor Day found Bing and Al on the last lap of their mud-splattered journey to Hollywood, contending with an increasingly wheezy engine and patched-up, withered tires. In later years they disagreed about many details of their epic three-and-a-half-week road trip, but they differed little on the salient points: they sang nonstop while driving, worked when possible at parties and roadside joints, and saved board money with an old show-business dodge — renting a single room and sneaking the second man in after dark. Their stay in Seattle, early on, was auspicious. They boarded there with a friend of Bing’s from Gonzaga, Doug Dykeman, who took them to the Hotel Butler to meet Vic Meyers, one of the best-known orchestra leaders in the state of Washington. (Later he was better known as the state’s lieutenant governor, elected to his surprise with help from a fa
cetious campaign conducted by Larry Crosby, in which Meyers donned a white sheet à la Gandhi and promised to install hostesses on streetcars; after his victory, he reneged.) 4
Jackie Souders led the Hotel Butler’s band that weekend, and Meyers asked him to give the boys a chance. 5 Meyers and Souders were each well established in Washington. Bing and Al had heard their records broadcast in Spokane. Souders’s recordings from that time were representative of white jazz in the provinces, with a passable rhythm section (de rigueur banjo and slap bass), clumsy instrumental soloists, and nasal tenors with small, fey voices. The fact that the singers are more outmoded than the soloists and arrangements is in large measure a consequence of Crosby’s impact. Soon he would put most of those singers out of work. Astute bandleaders in 1925 could not have failed to recognize his lucid individuality. Souders agreed to let them show their stuff.
Al took his place at the piano, and Bing stood by him with a cymbal in hand. They sang in unison on the hot rhythm numbers and featured Bing on a couple of Irving Berlin ballads. The college students, who regularly packed the place on weekends, responded enthusiastically. Next to Bing’s full-bodied emoting, the singing of Souders’s regular vocalist, Walton McKinney, must have sounded drearily anemic. Both Souders and Meyers made competitive offers to the duo to stick around and work with their bands. Bing and Al discussed the bids that evening, but they were flush with their first triumph outside Spokane and resolved to soldier on to Los Angeles.