Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Vital raw materials were now reserved for military purposes: petrol was rationed for artists and audiences alike, which had an immediate impact on live performances (although leading bands were allowed an extra ration because of their importance to national morale). Record-buyers were encouraged to bring back old discs to be melted down before they could buy new ones. Phonographs gradually vanished from the shops; so too did harmonicas, the finest specimens of which had previously been imported from Germany and Japan.

  It was at this parlous moment in American history, when the fate of its European allies seemed uncertain, and huge numbers of its young men were facing death overseas, that the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) chose to go on strike. Their leader was James Caesar Petrillo, a union boss worthy of a James Cagney film noir, who represented his members with ironclad conviction. His case was simple: American musicians were losing money to jukeboxes and radio. Unless they were paid royalties every time their work was broadcast or aired in a bar, they would withdraw their labour from the record companies. ‘After August 1st18 [1942],’ he announced, ‘we will make records for home consumption, but we won’t make them for jukeboxes. We will make them for the armed forces of the United States and its Allies, but not for commercial and sustaining radio programs.’ As it would be impossible to control where discs would be sent, this was in effect a total ban on any recording by union members; and only union members were allowed to make records. There was one exception: musicians could record V-Disks, which were then carried on USAAF planes to troops around the world.fn1 The New York Times complained that Petrillo’s ban was the equivalent of banning phone calls, because they put cabbies out of business: ‘The net result will be simply20 that the public will hear less music.’

  That was certainly not true at first. The US record companies took advantage of the advance notice that Petrillo had given them, and scheduled round-the-clock recording sessions for their top artists right up to the deadline. As a result, they were able to continue releasing material by the likes of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters for another year. With the public desperate for entertainment to distract them from the war, there was a brief boom in sales. Beyond that, the back catalogue could always be exploited. There was also a loophole: vocalists who did not play an instrument were not required to join the AFM, and could record with the backing of a vocal quartet or choir. There were elaborate schemes to bypass the ban by using instrumental tracks which had been pre-recorded outside the country; or by sending American musicians to work in British studios; or by teaching foreign artists how to sing in English using phonetic scripts; or (most effectively) by employing anonymous artists and musicians at backstreet studios to record new songs, which were then marketed as ‘imports’ from Mexico.

  The strike held for a full year before Decca Records caved in; and another before their two biggest competitors, Columbia and Victor, could no longer bear to see Decca prospering at their expense. The record companies survived the dispute in better shape than they might have expected, thanks to the public’s willingness to buy almost anything that was issued. Perhaps the biggest losers were the songwriters and publishers, who for several years were denied the opportunity to have their latest songs plugged on record.fn2

  For the American record-buying public, the strike was less worrying than the simple lack of discs in the stores. When 1943 dawned in Philadelphia, the city’s record shops were empty. By spring, the magazine American Music Lover noted that releases were ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel21’ and that new dance tunes were virtually extinct. Only in November 1944, when the AFM strike was settled, did record companies have access to raw materials, songs and artists, ready for a frenzy of recording as prolonged as that which had preceded the ban.fn3

  From the standpoint22 of appearance, [Frank Sinatra] could use a few extra pounds.

  Billboard magazine, July 1942

  To a mere male23, there is no sign of the alleged hypnotic power [of Sinatra], but only a rather pleasant and very softly modulated crooner.

  Gramophone magazine, June 1944

  Unlike those in Britain and Europe, the vast majority of American citizens could enjoy a wartime life of almost surreal calm. Bandleaders took the temperature of America, and found it lukewarm. A poll of college students discovered that ‘the harum-scarum jitterbugging24 is definitely a thing of the past’, with ‘smooth’ music much preferred. ‘Dance music lost most25 of its swing and sting during the past year’, reported Billboard magazine at the end of 1942. The conclusion: ‘The middle-aged [musicians] left are playing it sweet, which seems to please the middle-aged customers who are buying it.’ In Manhattan lounges, all the talk was of cocktail combos and speciality acts: Snub Mosley, ‘The Man with the Funny Little Horn’; Marshal Martz and his Three-Manual Electronic Organ, ‘the only one of its kind in the world’; Joe (RubberFace) Franks, ‘that Funny Man with that Funny Band’; not to forget ‘Liberace: Concert Pianist; Synchronisations with Recordings of Noted Pianists & World Famous Symphony Orchestras’, duetting with his classical record collection at the Park Lane in Buffalo, New York.

  Beyond the metropolis, there was a craze for cowboys and anything that reeked of the country. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were selling a hillbilly dance concoction (retrospectively dubbed western swing) which combined polka, folk, boogie-woogie, blues and unashamed Texas honky-tonk country. Honky-tonk provided the soundtrack of adult courtship across the Southern states, its songs filled with adultery, lust and alcohol – themes also to be found, in very different geographical surroundings, in the ranchera of Mexico (its closest cousin), rebetika of Greece, the canciones of Mexico, the fados of Portugal or the tangos of Argentina. You could dance to this music, fuelled by its electric lead guitar or amplified pedal steel, or cry to it; its scenarios were scarred by adultery, disappointment and self-delusion. Like the classic blues of Bessie Smith, honky-tonk expressed the actual or imagined fears of its audience: hence the appeal of a song such as Ted Daffan’s ‘Born To Lose’, one of the biggest hits of the war in any musical genre. ‘There are indications26 that a flood of country-type tunes may be recorded by name maestri in the pop fields’, Billboard announced in April 1942, as acts such as Bing Crosby raced to tackle ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’. Twenty stars from the Grand Ole Opry radio show were squeezed on to a row of buses, and sent across America to play at military bases, hospitals and airfields. Even Manhattan fell for cowboy chic, when singing westerners such as Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers headlined a giant rodeo show at Madison Square Garden.

  Children would have relished the rope-twirling and lassoing, but even in Texas honky-tonk was not intended to win adolescent hearts. With most of the swing bands broken up or opting to sugar-coat their style, the freshly discovered teenage market required its own diversions. For girls, it arrived in the frail, scar-necked frame of 26-year-old Frank Sinatra. Harry James’s band was one of the country’s finest, and Sinatra just one of his vocal troupe, the Music Makers. But from his first show, young girls started screaming at him, and a cult developed, to the chagrin of male audience members. ‘The minute Sinatra started27 singing,’ said reporter James Bacon, ‘every girl left her partner on the dance floor and crowded around the microphone on the bandstand. He was so skinny the microphone almost obscured him.’

  In 1940, Sinatra was poached by the even more powerful Tommy Dorsey band, whose leader recalled: ‘I used to stand there28 on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos. You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when the kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinee idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. And yet what he did to women was something awful.’ You can get a taste of it on the 1940 Dorsey/Sinatra hit ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, as Sinatra slides out of the chorale and into the audience’s ear, just as he’d insinuated his way into their dreams. In spring 1942, he cut his first solo disc, ‘Night and Day’, which Billboard promised would be ‘a cinch to ma
ke the girls, especially, give up all their nickels’. Once again, he conjured up a mood that teetered on the border of sleep and wake, whispering and cooing with an apparently guileless sensuality.

  Dorsey and Sinatra broke box-office records at the Paramount in New York, and then Sinatra told his leader that he wanted to go solo. ‘I hope you fall on your ass29’, Dorsey replied. For a few painful weeks, it seemed Dorsey might get his wish. Then in December 1942, back at the Paramount in fourth-billing behind comedians and the Goodman band, the phenomenon the press dubbed ‘Swoonatra’ began. Biographer James Kaplan retold the story through the eyes of publicist George Evans: ‘The place was absolutely packed30 with hysterical teenage girls … The air in the great auditorium was vibrating, both with earsplitting screams … and with the heat and musk of female lust … The publicist’s ears picked out one sound above the din: a low moan, emanating from a lanky, black-haired girl … It was a sound he had heard before – only in very different, much more private circumstances.’

  This was the Sinatra secret: evoking desires that the youngest of his fans might not have even realised they possessed; and hypnotising them into behaving in ways that they would have been too shy to mimic in private, even with their husbands or boyfriends. Realising that this was the stuff of financial dreams, George Evans set out to ensure that it would not be a solitary outburst of hysteria. He hired girls to attend each Paramount show: if nobody else was screaming, it was their job to trigger the surge of emotion. Meanwhile, he tutored Sinatra in how to elicit that response. This did not entail crude theatrics or overt sexuality, which would have killed his career in the early 1940s, but delicate hand movements, such as the way he clutched the microphone like a baby reaching for its mother’s breast. Evans dubbed Sinatra ‘The Voice’ and the nickname stuck, just as his voice sometimes caught in his throat accidentally as the moment swept him away. Sinatra was soon trained to perform that trick on demand. With subtle variations on his natural style, and without cheapening his act or his music, he became, par excellence, the teenage singing idol of the century. He wasn’t the first young man to elicit screams when he sang (Rudy Vallee probably deserves that honour), and was far from the last; but everyone in his wake did so in the knowledge that Sinatra was a pioneer. ‘The scenes at the Paramount31, and later at broadcasting studios,’ wrote Arnold Shaw, ‘were the nearest thing to mass hypnosis the country had seen until then, with girls moaning ecstatically, shrieking uncontrollably, waving personal underthings at him, and just crying his name in sheer rapture.’

  Two years later, the Paramount played host to the ‘Columbus Day Riot’ – a school holiday coinciding with Sinatra’s return to the theatre that had made him famous. Girls queued all night for the morning show, and then wouldn’t leave their seats, ensuring that thousands of thwarted fans were marooned outside. When someone (paid by a newspaper, he admitted later) pelted Sinatra with eggs, the fans attempted to lynch the culprit, screaming out, ‘Catch him! Kill him! Cut him up like a rug!’ They were 12–16 years old, mostly, on the cusp of innocence and sexual knowledge, and in Sinatra they found – well, a father figure, according to one journalist, or a child needing to be mothered, so psychologists said. But as one teenage fan recalled thirty years after her infatuation: ‘Whatever he stirred32 beneath our barely budding breasts, it wasn’t motherly. And the boys knew that, and that was why none of them liked him.’ She remembered how ‘We loved to swoon33 … we would gather behind locked bedroom doors, in rooms where rosebud wallpaper was plastered over with pictures of The Voice, to practice swooning. We would take off our saddle shoes, put on his record, and stand around groaning for a while. Then the song would end and we would all fall down on the floor.’ The fans were not victims but willing accomplices in this loss of inhibition.

  Girls, it was universally agreed, wanted romantic ballads, and Sinatra and his peers did their best to satisfy them. But what of teenage boys, too old for model planes and too young for the forces? There was a growing fear that while their elder brothers were offering their lives, those left behind were slipping out of control. The Pittsburgh Press newspaper complained about ‘the behavior of children34 – and some not so young – in theatres, laughing and hooting during quiet, serious movie sequences and shouting and jitterbugging, under the influence of popular music or similar stimulants’. The near-riot during the 1942 swing festival in Washington, DC added racial overtones to the disquiet. In Cleveland, there were reports that ‘juvenile hoodlums35’ were ruining dances and concerts. ‘They take particular delight in heckling big-name bands … with their stentorian wise-cracking, catcalls and whistles … Once these entertainment gangsters leave their seats, having had their fill of bratful play, their annoying tactics do not end. Marring walls, tearing up washroom fixtures and other acts of vandalism follow. Ushers and managers are threatened with bodily injury. Patrons in lobbies are insulted.’ In Detroit, meanwhile, the ‘angle appears to be36 that the youths, earning top money as young defence plant workers when they would normally be in school in other times, are spending their spare time and earnings in riotous show-off stuff’.

  Beyond the testosterone-fuelled antics, there was a looming sense that these teenagers constituted a movement, with its own uniform: a riotous counterpoint to the equally fearsome discipline of Germany’s Hitler Youth. It comprised, as historian Luis Alvarez recounted, a ‘signature broad-brimmed hat37, drape pants that ballooned out at the knee and were closely tapered at the ankle, oversized jacket and, on occasion, gold or silver watch chain hanging from the pocket. Young women also crafted their own zoot style by wearing short skirts, heavy make-up and the same fingertip-length coats as their male counterparts.’

  This garb was known as a ‘zoot suit’ – a phrase, like the French zazous, borrowed from the jive slang of Cab Calloway. To the authorities, it signified violence and nonconformism; a break in America’s seamless resistance to the fascism of Germany and the fanatical militarism of Japan. (Communist countries soon had their equivalents: the stiliagi, or style-chasers, in Russia; the jampecek, or dudes, in Hungary; and the bikiniarze, who took their name from Bikini Atoll, in Poland.) There was an attempt to brand all of those who wore the zoot suit as being black or Latino, although it was just as popular with working-class white youths and (on the West Coast) those of Asian origin.fn4 And the music that the zoot-suited rebels championed was jazz, swing and the style still described by the industry as ‘race’ or ‘sepia’ music, but which would soon become known as rhythm and blues.

  A decade before Norman Mailer identified ‘The White Negro’ – a white hipster who adopts black style as a statement of defiance and alienation – the prototype of the species existed on America’s coasts and in its major inland cities. Nightlife was still effectively segregated in wartime, but at jazz clubs such as the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, increasing numbers of zoot-clad white teens were sharing the dance floor with their black counterparts – and without the violence that pessimists might have anticipated. The Savoy was soon shut down by New York police, officially because the dubious morals of the ballroom’s female clientele were infecting innocent sailors with venereal disease; but it is more likely that the city’s intervention was prompted by the alarming sight of black and white kids dancing together.

  Life at war was less segregated by race than at home, and many white soldiers discovered that their black buddies were enjoying music that packed the same visceral punch as swing, but with more swagger and less noise. Contemporary white music, for example, had nothing as sly, saucy and gently swinging as the music of Fats Waller, or the jive-talking Slim & Slam. Boogie-woogie piano was at the heart of black music in the early 1940s, and it quickly fed into white pop, enabling the Andrews Sisters (‘Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar’) and Will Bradley (‘Down the Road Apiece’) to exploit its rolling momentum, though they failed to match the ease of the originals.

  ‘Negro band leaders have held38 their own through the years because they presented a brand of music whites could n
ot easily duplicate’, opined Billboard in January 1943. The magazine had recently launched a weekly ‘Harlem Hit Parade’, listing the ten best-selling records in a small selection of stores in this predominantly African-American district of New York. The early charts featured a medley of styles: boogie-woogie, gospel, the placid harmonies of the Four Ink Spots, some swing (black and white), even a Paul Whiteman dance-band ballad which reached a black audience because of its poised vocal by Billie Holiday. Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ also figured, to prove that sentimentality knew no racial boundaries.fn5