Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Some of those caught up in the hysteria of swing were dubious about its merits. Artie Shaw had emerged with a Swing String Ensemble in 1935, which as its name suggested daringly pitched his brass instruments against strings. Shaw himself played a clarinet as fluent as Goodman’s, and as hot, as his 1936 hit ‘There’s Frost on the Moon’ demonstrated. His stylistic range was incomparable: within two months in 1938 he recorded an exquisite version of ‘Begin the Beguine’, which has often been proposed as one of the finest American records of the century, and the eerie, lyrical ‘Nightmare’, as evocative a mood piece as anything in Duke Ellington’s catalogue.

  Shaw’s problems were that he was a perfectionist (eight failed marriages, two of them to Hollywood stars Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, speak for themselves); he wanted to stretch and preferably snap fetters and boundaries, as when he recruited Billie Holiday for his band in 1938, until he was forced to respect the unofficial racial segregation of the day; and he hated to be pigeonholed. In 1940, he gave controversial interviews (‘I’d think twice before advising24 anyone to follow in my footsteps … popular music in America is 10% art and 90% business’), complained that the band business was a ‘racket’, dissolved his orchestra and retreated in a sulk to Mexico. A few weeks later, he was back.

  His temper snapped again in 1945 when he was quoted as saying that jazz was ‘a dying duck25’, that radio was terrible and fan magazines idiotic. For good measure, the fans themselves didn’t know how to behave when they watched a ‘star’ perform, screaming hysterically for reasons that had nothing to do with music. Then, in 1949, he announced that he was fed up with jazz, swing, the audience (‘morons’) and anything to do with dance bands, and wanted to play ‘long-hair’ – period slang for classical music, orchestral conductors supposedly being so bohemian that they sometimes let their hair touch their collars.

  He turned up that spring at Bop City in New York, and proceeded to play a selection of ‘long-hair’ pieces by composers such as Prokofiev, Debussy and Ravel. The jazz magazine Metronome reported the fans in the cheap seats screaming out ‘Let’s jump!26’ and ‘Give us a break.’ Shaw was a man ‘way out of his depth27, attempting to bamboozle a whole section of the populace into believing they were hearing good music. [It was] the worst musical fiasco staged in this country within the last twenty years.’ Within a couple of months, he was promising to perform anything that the ‘morons’ wanted to hear. ‘It’s necessary to give an audience28 some familiar points of reference before you can expect it go along on new things’, he admitted humbly. But then he rolled out the Ravel again, the dancing stopped, and one fan at Boston’s Symphony Ballroom called out across the hall: ‘Artie, you stink.’ In 1954, he laid down his clarinet and never performed in public again, although he lived for another half-century.

  Shaw might have been impossible to live with and to manage, but his skill as a musician was as sizeable as his insight into the business of fame. He peppered his autobiography, The Trouble With Cinderella, with sardonic references to ‘succe$$’. To swing aficionado Fred Hall, he gave a memorable apologia, in which he captured the dilemma of being an artist in a commercial industry: ‘What happens is you make29 300 arrangements and you arrive at one, say “Begin the Beguine”, and you like it; it’s good enough, you like the tune, you like the arrangement, it worked and the audience liked it, so everybody’s happy. But all of a sudden, you try to go past that. And you can’t go past it. In a sense it’s as though the audience is insisting you put on a straitjacket: “Don’t grow anymore.” It would be like putting a pregnant woman in something where she couldn’t grow. I happen to have a need to continue to grow. This is a curse I have, an overwhelming compulsion to keep developing. Well, if someone says to you, “You can’t develop; we want that, over and over”, you can go crazy.’

  No such fears afflicted Glenn Miller, who – despite Benny Goodman’s stature – has passed into the collective memory as the king of the swing era and the big bands. His mysterious death in 1944 (or presumed death, to be exact) cemented his legend. His friend and biographer George T. Simon wrote that Miller ‘was honest enough to recognise30 and admit his limits as a jazz trombonist’, and certainly his reputation amongst jazz aficionados is tarnished, to say the least. Simon remembered that Miller ‘definitely decided31 that he wasn’t going anywhere by trying to outswing the Goodmans and the Shaws and the Dorseys. A basically sweet band with a unique identifiable sound, but which still could play the swing the kids wanted, would, he was convinced, stand a much better chance.’

  His gimmick, the sound that made his band instantly recognisable, was the way he used a clarinet as lead instrument, doubled an octave below by a saxophone, while the remaining saxes contributed their own three-part close harmony. It was heard via coast-to-coast radio hook-ups in the summer of 1939 from the Glen Island Casino outside New York, a popular rendezvous for wealthy college kids who relished the acoustics of the ballroom, and the vista of Long Island. Miller adopted ‘Moonlight Serenade’ as his theme, before his band swung gently but firmly for the remainder of the evening.

  While other bands yearned for complexity to show off their technique, Miller favoured the simplicity of ‘Little Brown Jug’ or his most famous number, ‘In the Mood’. The latter was a hybrid, its hallmark riff borrowed from Wingy Manone’s 1930 side ‘Tar Paper Stomp’ (and reappearing at half-speed the following year in Fletcher Henderson’s ‘Hot and Anxious’). Composer Joe Garland retrieved the motif and presented an embellished version to Artie Shaw, who turned it down because it was too long for a single 78 rpm record. Miller solved that problem by cutting and simplifying, until all that was left was the riff, played loud, played soft, then softer, and finally with orgasmic volume and release. He performed similar magic with Erskine Hawkins’s ‘Tuxedo Junction’, before achieving the biggest sales of any American record since Gene Austin’s ‘My Blue Heaven’ with his million-selling 1941 hit, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’,fn1 for which he was presented with the first ever gold record award. Predictably, Artie Shaw was not enamoured of the Miller sound: ‘That band was like the beginning32 of the end. It was a mechanised version of what they called jazz music. I still can’t stand to listen to it.’ But no fewer than twenty-three of Miller’s records topped the American best-sellers listings between 1939 and 1943, occupying the No. 1 position for 105 weeks in total – chart domination never matched before or since.

  When the historians of 203733 come to write of this chromium-plated, streamlined age, they’ll have to devote a lot of space to dance music. It can’t be ignored. We children of this radio era dance to it, eat to it, bath to it, drink to it, listen to it, sing, whistle and hum to it, even talk with it as a background.

  Radio Pictorial magazine, January 1937

  Decca’s studios in New York34 City were a long, rectangular room. At the far end was a large picture of an Indian maiden, standing up and holding her hand in the air, as if signalling that she had a question. In the ‘dialogue balloon’, she’s asking, ‘Where’s the melody?’ … At Decca, you played and sang the melody, and never mind a whole lot of improvising, or you didn’t record for Decca again.

  Maxine Andrews of the Andrews Sisters

  His first sight of Chick Webb’s swing band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem drove the British jazz writer Leonard Hibbs into a frenzy of excitement. ‘Dancing, for the boys and girls35 in Harlem, is the very essence of living’, he wrote on his return. ‘Unlike the average dancer in this country, who walks the foxtrot to almost every number, these happy people improvise their dancing and translate their happiness into inspired rhythmic movement … By dance, I mean really move in rhythm with the music, sway with the rise and fall of the music. Relax and swing. Let yourself go!’

  Many did not care to plunge into ‘that little world of red-hot rhythm’. Anyone who was too old, or didn’t dance, or preferred a wider palette, resented the dominance of the swing bands. For all their airplay, and despite Glenn Miller’s success, their sales did not always
match their publicity, and only aficionados relished the hotter and more liberated forms of jazz music. In future, Variety magazine suggested at the end of the 1930s, ‘records will have to let the fans36 know what they are playing and keep within recognition distance of the melody as originally conceived’.

  That was the manifesto in Britain, where swing (beyond the inevitable Glenn Miller releases) was slow to take off – so slow, in fact, that it was only after the Second World War that bands such as Ted Heath’s could build flourishing careers. For aficionados of the British bands, this was a golden age, free of the excesses of swing, as the historian Peter Cliffe explained: ‘The more established British37 bandleaders continued to delight their followers in ballrooms, hotels, nightclubs and restaurants, at the theatre and, for the majority as the Depression tightened its grip, over the air and on gramophone records. There were no startling musical events, and few sensational hits; just a cavalcade of pleasant songs, stylishly arranged and melodiously performed.’fn2 The word ‘pleasant’ would damn this era for posterity. Yet for those who wished for nothing more than to be entertainingly diverted from a world hell-bent on a second global conflagration, the dependability of the British dance bands was a virtue rather than a sin. As Edgar Jackson explained, ‘The dance record-buying public39 can be divided into two classes – those who buy for the performer and those who buy for the tune. The former are mainly fans who like clever and very up-to-date rhythmic stuff; the latter are more interested in instrumental melody which they can recognise easily, learn, and hum in their baths.’

  BBC bandleader Jack Payne might have complained that ‘Dancing is under a temporary40 cloud … it has undoubtedly lost something of its fascination.’ But innovation was at hand: in the 1930s, Britain was swept by a passion for the cinema organ, and there was a constant supply of records by performers such as Reginald Dixon, the Wurlitzer organist at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, who even dared to tackle the jazz anthem ‘Tiger Rag’. Dance bands could not encompass so costly an instrument, but they found a viable substitute: the accordion (piano-accordion, to give its proper title; squeeze-box to its admirers; accordeon, in deference to the Continentals, in 1930s magazines). Its sound was both gently exotic – evoking visions of gypsies in colourful headscarves, or the bal musette bars of Paris – and reliably restrained. Besides the Street Singer and his ‘ghosted’ accordion, acts such as Billy Reid’s London Piano-Accordeon Band and Carlos Santanna’s Accordeon Band began to supplant conventional dance outfits. Many observers reckoned that a line-up of three or four accordions in front of a rhythm section could provide more depth and variety than the yawningly familiar horns and reeds. A magazine entitled the Accordion Times enjoyed wide circulation, only perishing in the late 1940s when it was relaunched as the (later New) Musical Express. By the end of the 1930s, movie stars were boasting that they had mastered the instrument, as it boosted their romantic appeal – not least because of its links to Paris, the city of lovers, where the accordion was a regular feature of hit records until the mid-1950s.

  Anyone for whom the accordion was not diverting enough could always amuse themselves with the electrified guitar (a real novelty, this) of Len Fillis on his instrumental ‘Dipsomania’; the controversial music hall song, ‘The Pig Got Up and Slowly Walked Away’, which was banned from BBC airplay for reasons that nobody could quite fathom; or even a recording of the circus from London’s Olympia, spotlighting a group of sea lions performing ‘God Save the King’ on trumpets.

  Amidst these diversions, there was a determined effort to recreate a more innocent age. The mid-1930s saw a revival of classic music-hall songs, which – as bandleaders faced with a pugilistic audience discovered – could calm shattered nerves. The BBC gave airtime to Les Allen and Kitty Masters, whose act involved impressions of showbiz figures, and old-time ballads – ‘the sort of numbers41’, Radio Pictorial explained, ‘that make the elder members of the audience feel furtively for each other’s hands, and cause the younger members of the audience to experience a strange, peaceful thrill which is uncommon in this blasé age’. Bringing all his showbiz experience to bear, Les Allen declared confidently that ‘Audiences resent “bounce” in an act42’, in which case swing was certainly beyond the pale.

  For adults who wanted a more subtle form of nostalgia, Britain in the 1930s was a haven for that elusive style known as ‘light music’: more sophisticated than the written-to-order Tin Pan Alley song, more accessible than serious, ‘long-hair’ compositions, more sedate than jazz. Its historian, Geoffrey Self, averred that it ‘should divert rather than disturb43; entertain rather than disquiet’. But light music was more than what the French called musique-papier (wallpaper music): it had its own method of stirring the emotions. The novelist J. B. Priestley caught its appeal: ‘Because, unlike serious music44, light music lacks musical content, it acts as a series of vials, often charmingly shaped and coloured, for the distillations of memory. The first few bars of it remove the stopper; we find ourselves reliving, not remembering, but magically recapturing, some exact moments of our past.’ At its most vivid – in the work of Eric Coates, or later Ronald Binge (who wrote BBC radio’s beautiful close-down theme, ‘Sailing By’) – light music could evoke at first hearing an imaginary nostalgia, in which sadness and joy were carefully balanced; a gorgeous comfort leavened with loss, as wistful as the fleeting memories of a dream. Coates was the light-music master of the age, whose work endured via radio themes such as ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ (Desert Island Discs) and ‘Knightsbridge’ from his London Suite (In Town Tonight). The latter was so popular in the 1930s that it was taken up by dance bands, to the horror of a Daily Mirror reviewer: ‘In my view the melody is too good to be “murdered”; it is real music45, not a foxtrot.’

  There were few such defenders for the vast proportion of songs emerging from the publishers’ factories in New York and London. ‘It was quite apparent46 that too many popular songs were being published’, a historian noted from the lofty perspective of 1948. ‘Even the bally-hoo of radio’s Hit Parade could not hide the poverty and shabbiness of much of the material ground out by Tin Pan Alley.’ It was dominated by unrealistic portrayals of young love, using scenarios and rhymes that had long since lost their flavour. ‘We have heard all these words47 in a thousand different disguises, coupled with the most trashy and slobbery sentimentality,’ Radio Pictorial complained in 1937, ‘and sung by crooners until a kind of nausea has been reached.’

  Such material kept the wheels of the music industry turning briskly, however, especially when stoked by such networked radio shows as America’s Make Believe Ballroom (showcasing dance bands) and Your Hit Parade. The latter began in 1935, and soon adopted a familiar countdown format leading up to the announcement of the week’s most popular song. Its playlist was, in theory, determined by checking which twelve or fifteen songs had been broadcast most often across the land in the previous seven days, but the format was wide open to corruption and what became known as ‘payola’ – the payment of bribes to hosts or producers in return for airplay. It was no longer enough for a publisher to command a stable of talented writers: their skills were secondary to those of the ‘pluggers’, whose job it was to create hits, by legal means or foul. So dubious did the business of determining America’s favourite songs become that Variety magazine suspended its ‘best-sellers’ listing in 1938, fearful that many of the ‘sales’ it was reporting existed only on paper. None of this prevented the title of Your Hit Parade from becoming a catchphrase, or the show from providing early exposure for Frank Sinatra and Doris Day.

  Sceptics were convinced that radio would eventually run out of songs, because it quickly sapped even the most popular tunes of their freshness. ‘Our songs don’t live anymore48’, said Irving Berlin who, as America’s leading songwriter of the century, was entitled to be concerned. ‘They fail to become part of us. In the old days Al Jolson sang the same song for years until it meant something – when records were played until they cracked. Today, Paul
Whiteman plays a hit song once or twice or a Hollywood hero sings them once in the films, and the radio runs them ragged for a couple of weeks – then they’re dead.’

  Novelty was everything in this market, surprise and wit a bonus. The unexpected hit of 1936 was ‘The Music Goes Round & Round’ – meta-pop, if you like, which spent three minutes discussing how a tune travelled from trumpet mouthpiece to horn. ‘The Broken Record’ extended this postmodern approach, mimicking a needle stuck on a disc: some versions, such as Wingy Manone’s, ended with the offending item flying out of the window; others, like Guy Lombardo’s, found the band slowing gradually to a halt like an exhausted gramophone. There were idiosyncrasies of timing to conjure with, such as the bar-long pauses that must have terrified any radio announcer playing Tommy Dorsey’s ‘Posin’; exotic instrumentation, as on Raymond Scott’s ‘Twilight in Turkey’ from 1937; or language, on Slim & Slam’s guide to Harlem jive talk, ‘The Flat Foot Floogee’; even good old-fashioned innuendo, either gentle (‘Sweet Violets’ by the Sweet Violet Boys) or more blatant (Tampa Red’s 1936 blues, ‘Let’s Get Drunk & Truck’, accepted somehow as nothing more risqué than an invitation to dance).

  Perhaps the most surprising trend of the late 1930s was triggered by a song written for a Yiddish musical comedy in 1933. Five years later, ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ became an international hit for the Andrews Sisters, another trio in the Boswells’ mould. It encouraged a boom in ‘international’ songs, borrowed from America’s immigrant communities. There was already a market for ethnic music amongst the first generation of settlers, their children preferring to assimilate themselves into America’s mainstream. Now the two strands became one stream, as a host of diverse Central and Eastern European traditions and dance rhythms were awarded the catch-all description of ‘polka’. The catalyst was Will Glahé’s ‘Beer Barrel Polka’, accordion to the fore, which was rapidly seized upon by the Andrews Sisters. Its popularity was attributed not to radio, which had done its best to ignore the craze, but ‘coin-operated phonographs’ – or jukeboxes – which allowed consumers to programme their own entertainment.